Pictures from (field) Work in St Lucia

[miffikins]

Originally Posted by tick

Nice little green lizard

I know I look like I want to eat it, but I don't. Honest. Notice my humidified hair!

Originally Posted by Andy

excellent stuff bet its brilliant working out there. How'd you go about getting work there?

Its a volunteer post with Durrell, basically I pay my rent for the first 6 months and work for free. Crap in a way but I'd rather be living here doing this than working behind a bar! I think one of the girls is leaving soon so there will be another post coming up...

[Buriram]

As regards your DNA sampling, can you expand ie purpose and methods?

Some questions I am interested in about St. Lucia:

1. Are there facilities for DNA sequencing in St. Lucia or do they send articles for profiling outside of the country?

2. Is PCR (polymerase chain reaction) as popular in amplifying DNA samples (and therefore I am hinting at non-invasive DNA sampling techniques in the field)?

3. Is the purpose of the DNA samples for identification or wider and more far reaching purposes ie establishing decent founder populations with large allelic frequency and thus heterozygosity?

4. Are there many complete genomes logged for taxa on St. Lucia?

Thank you for now.

[miffikins]

Originally Posted by Buriram

As regards your DNA sampling, can you expand ie purpose and methods?

Some questions I am interested in about St. Lucia:

1. Are there facilities for DNA sequencing in St. Lucia or do they send articles for profiling outside of the country? I think my boss sends the samples out, but I'm not exactly sure as we havn't done much work on this project, most of our time is working on a St Lucia parrot survey at the moment.

2. Is PCR (polymerase chain reaction) as popular in amplifying DNA samples (and therefore I am hinting at non-invasive DNA sampling techniques in the field)? I would assume so but I couldn't answer for definate, I am literally the monkey - I get the data/samples from the field and its passed on to my boss and then to people back in Jersey, I can however find out for you. The way they get the DNA sample from each whiptail is by taking off the bottom 2-3mm of the tail, which seems pretty invasive to me, but when you bare in mind that nearly all the males have regen tails then I guess its not too bad.

3. Is the purpose of the DNA samples for identification or wider and more far reaching purposes ie establishing decent founder populations with large allelic frequency and thus heterozygosity? I think at first it was used to discern whether there was significant genetic difference between the Maria Major and Maria Minor populations, which there is (some of the morphological differences are very pronounced). Each lizard is assigned a number so we know which DNA is from which animals so they will know further down the line, which individuals have had the highest breeding success. The other week we took males from both islands and translocated them to a new island, but to be honest the Maria Minor males are a fair bit smaller so I doubt their genes will be common in resulting populations. So I think the next step will be translocating Maria Minor females, but as that population is pretty small only one of 2 animals can be taken.

4. Are there many complete genomes logged for taxa on St. Lucia? I'm going to go with no. If there are any genomes logged it will be that of the parrot and definatly not the iguana. Again, I can find out this info when my boss gets back from Antigua where hes working with the Antiguan Racer. I tend to find that, especially with invertebrates, very little is known. It wouldn't surprise me if most of the inverts hadn't even been identified.

I've only been out here 6 weeks so I don't have too much info yet, but there is a document on the Durrell website about this work. I will try and get you better answers for these questions when my boss is back

Cheers

[JAM3S]

wow i bet you love it out there! it makes good reading keep it up.