Alejandro Arteaga, a herpetologist in Ecuador sent out out the following email. If you have the resources for helping Alejandro I encourage you to do so.
Today, I want to reveal a project I have been advancing in secret. During the past five years, my team and I have been studying an enigmatic group of Andean saurians known as the lightbulb lizards of Ecuador.
What is special about these “lightbulbs.”
Lightbulb lizards (genus Riama) stand out as one of the world’s rarest and least studied lizard groups. Their elusive nature and burrowing tendencies have left a void of knowledge regarding their natural history, reproductive habits, and the extent of their species diversity.
Try this: ask anyone if they have seen a lightbulb lizard. The answer is almost always “no.” Even most herpetologists have no clue of their existence.
There is a good reason for this.
Typically, lightbulb lizards exhibit endemism not only to a single country but often to a specific Andean valley. Given the vast unexplored regions along the Andean mountain range, the total count of lightbulb lizard species is probably severely underestimated.
To test this hypothesis, my team and I embarked on a mission to find isolated populations of lightbulb lizards.
Exploring the most remote Andean canyons, we uncovered lighbtbulb lizards that had never been photographed. Some were so bizarre… they had to be new species!
Today, after five years of fieldwork, long nights at the museum, and preliminary genetic results, we are close to proving that some of the lighbtulbs found are indeed undiscovered new species in need of urgent conservation.
But we need your support to complete the last three steps of the mission:
- Complete the last remaining expeditions in Ecuador by December 2023.
- Generate DNA sequence data for the last “mystery” populations.
- Cover the fees to publish the research.
There is one last secret I would like to share with you.
One of the new lightbulbs will be named after a special member of this mailing list in recognition of his innumerable contributions to our expeditions into the cloud forest night.
Thanks for allowing our team to discover more new species.
