(Image courtesy of the Oklahoma City Zoo)
The Sam Noble Museum at the University of Oklahoma has teamed up with the Oklahoma City Zoo and Botanical Garden to protect Horned lizards, also known as horny toads. Once a common sight across much of the state, this species has become increasingly rare as its habitat has been lost.
Samuel Eliades, a third-year ecology and evolutionary biology Ph.D. student at the University of Oklahoma and researcher at the Sam Noble Museum, is leading a National Science Foundation-funded study to improve the species’ survival rates.
“Horny toads in Oklahoma are in the midst of a silent extinction,” Eliades said. “This was a species so common that – until they started vanishing – no one bothered to study them. We are still playing catch-up to try to understand this complex and interesting lizard.”
Eliades has been assisting in Texas Horned lizard tracking and population monitoring at Tinker Air Force Base for two years. He has received $40,000 in funding support from the National Science Foundation INTERN program to study the species with the assistance of his adviser and museum curator Cameron Siler. Eliades’ research at the Zoo’s Lizard Lab will be overseen by Rebecca Snyder, OKC Zoo curator of conservation and science, and Brad Lock, OKC Zoo curator of herpetology.
The goal of the research is to both raise and release the lizards back into the wild with a greater chance of survival, and to study their gut bacteria to better understand how being raised in human care influences the animals and can better prepare them for survival in the wild.
Article Published: Wednesday, November 20, 2019