Being a member of the Peace Corps has its rewards. Getting to co-author a scientific paper isn’t usually part of the deal.
But Grant Adams will always have a little something extra to remember his travels: the discovery of a lizard previously unknown to science. Euspondylus paxcorpus was formally described in a recent paper in Zootaxa, but its story began in 2011.
Adams, who had recently graduated from Denison University with a degree in biology, was just hoping to find some scientific task to keep his résumé up to date. He sent an email to a mailing list for ecologists, offering to collect data for them during his two-year stint in the Andes.
“My thing was plants,” Adams said. But no botanists were biting. Instead, he heard back from Tiffany Doan, a biologist from the University of Central Florida.
And Doan wanted reptiles.
“I had no interest in lizards or snakes at all, but it sounded like something fun I could do,” Adams said. All Doan asked was that he keep an eye out for any creepy crawlers and send her pictures. If anything looked unfamiliar, she’d sound the alarm and they could start collecting them for further study.
Before long, they had their lizard: a species Doan had never seen before. In the Andes, they were so ubiquitous that Adams found several of them while out farming potatoes with his host family – all of whom were more than familiar with the creatures. But it became obvious that the lizard had never been formally described.
But there was a problem.
By the time Adams and Doan were able to get permits to collect the lizards – a necessary step to having them classified as a whole new species – Adams only had one week left in the town. On the one hand, he was excited to get to his new post, where he’d be assisting researchers at the Peruvian Marine Institute. On the other, he had an obligation to help catalogue one strange little lizard.
“I was still finishing up some projects, so I didn’t have a lot of time,” Adams said. “So I enlisted my community to help me collect the things. I put out some posters and asked my students, and in a week I had a whole bunch of them.”
Adams set about euthanizing and preserving the lizards to send them off to Doan and researchers at local universities.
In the community where Adams was living, the brown lizards were nothing special. People mostly knew them as an ingredient in a folk remedy.
“They’ll splay the lizard and tie it to the injured area to help heal it,” Adams said. “Actually, during the project, my host sister got hurt, and my host mother wanted one of my lizards to help her heal.”
Doan’s studies formalized the lizard in the literature, and pointed out one potentially important feature: Although the lizards have complex spots and coloring variations in life, they lose all of those variations once they’re preserved, turning a uniform dark brown. If someone had simply put a lizard into storage for later study, it could have led to an incorrect description of the species. But because Adams was there to document the living lizards, science can record the reptiles in living color.
These days, Adams is at the University of Southern Mississippi. His run-in with Euspondylus paxcorpus may not have awakened a love of herpetology in him, but his Peace Corps assignment doing marine research proved to be a better fit – he now studies marine biology.
“It’s going to be one of those lifelong stories, discovering a species,” Adams said. “I’ll always carry that with me.”
And, he added: As a young scientist, it’s always great to get your name on a publication.
