No Bull: W Fence Lizards Flee When They See Red - via Herp Digest

Scientific American Evolution Blog by Christopher Intagliata , August 9, 2017 

Western fence lizards are more spooked by red and gray shirts than they are by blue ones—perhaps because the males have blue bellies themselves. 

You wouldn't think studying lizards is a particularly dangerous profession. Until, that is, sheriffs approach you with their guns drawn. "We get the cops called on us sometimes.”

Bree Putman, a behavioral ecologist at U.C.L.A. and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. Her colleague at the museum, Greg Pauly, really did end up on the wrong side of a gun once, and here's why:

"A lot of times we're doing work at night in people's neighborhoods and we're using flashlights to look for geckos on the sides of people's houses. And so sometimes people will think we're criminals or burglars or something.”

The museum's solution was neon orange shirts with the museum logo. "And we call these shirts the ‘don't shoot me’ shirts." But the bright orange left Putman with a concern: that the color would spook the very animals they were trying to study.

So she devised an experiment. "I basically designed a study to show to the museum staff that these shirts were not going to be good for research, and that's what I found.”

In her trials, Putman wore tank tops of various colors—red, gray, light blue, dark blue—and then attempted to approach and capture western fence lizards in public and private parkland in L.A. And she found that when wearing dark blue, she could get twice as close to the lizards, compared to when she wore red. And she was about twice as likely to catch a lizard too, while wearing dark or light blue, compared to red or gray. The study appears in the journal PLOS ONE. [Breanna J. Putman et al., Fear no colors? Observer clothing color influences lizard escape behavior]

Putman thinks that the lizards may be more tolerant of blue hues, because they most closely resemble the blue patches males have on their bellies—a sexual signal. Other studies have shown that birds with orange and red plumage are similarly less creeped out by orange and red shirts. She's not ready to issue a dress code to hikers just yet, but: You know for a scientist or biologist working with wild animals, you want to make sure either that you're wearing the same outfit every time you're going to do animal behavior. Or you want to randomize what you wear.”

As for those museum shirts, "I actually wear the orange shirt. I don't wear a blue shirt." Because studying wildlife in urban areas, you never know when you might encounter that other species: gun-toting Homo sapiens.

The color of people's clothing affects lizard escape behavior

Lizards with blue patches tolerate closer approaches when people wear dark blue T-shirts

Date: August 9, 2017

Source: PLOS

Summary: The color of T-shirts people wear affects escape behavior in western fence lizards, according to a new study.

continued

Impact of the experimental removal of lizards on Lyme disease risk. (Via HerpDigest)

Impact of the experimental removal of lizards on Lyme disease risk.
A Swei, RS Ostfeld, RS Lane, and CJ Briggs
Proc R Soc B, February 16, 2011; .
Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, , 3060 Valley Life Sciences Building, Berkeley, CA 94720-3140, USA.

The distribution of vector meals in the host community is an important element of understanding and predicting vector-borne disease risk. Lizards (such as the western fence lizard; Sceloporus occidentalis) play a unique role in Lyme disease ecology in the far-western United States. Lizards rather than mammals serve as the blood meal hosts for a large fraction of larval and nymphal western black-legged ticks (Ixodes pacificus-the vector for Lyme disease in that region) but are not competent reservoirs for the pathogen, Borrelia burgdorferi. Prior studies have suggested that the net effect of lizards is to reduce risk of human exposure to Lyme disease, a hypothesis that we tested experimentally. Following experimental removal of lizards, we documented incomplete host switching by larval ticks (5.19%) from lizards to other hosts. Larval tick burdens increased on woodrats, a competent reservoir, but not on deer mice, a less competent pathogen reservoir. However, most larvae fail!
ed to find an alternate host. This resulted in significantly lower densities of nymphal ticks the following year. Unexpectedly, the removal of reservoir-incompetent lizards did not cause an increase in nymphal tick infection prevalence. The net result of lizard removal was a decrease in the density of infected nymphal ticks, and therefore a decreased risk to humans of Lyme disease. Our results indicate that an incompetent reservoir for a pathogen may, in fact, increase disease risk through the maintenance of higher vector density and therefore, higher density of infected vectors.

Tick Population Plummets in Absence of Lizard Hosts (Via Herp Digest)

Tick Population Plummets in Absence of Lizard Hosts

By: Sarah Yang, UC Berkeley Media Relations, 2/22/11


A Western fence lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis) can often be found with dozens of ticks attached to it. However, they have a unique influence on the ecology of Lyme disease. The lizard's immune system clears the Lyme disease bacteria from ticks after the ticks feed on the lizard.

The Western fence lizard's reputation for helping to reduce the threat of Lyme disease is in jeopardy. A new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that areas where the lizard had been removed saw a subsequent drop in the population of the ticks that transmit Lyme disease.
"Our expectation going into this study was that removing the lizards would increase the risk of Lyme disease, so we were surprised by these findings," said study lead author Andrea Swei, who conducted the study while she was a Ph.D. student in integrative biology at UC Berkeley. "Our experiment found that the net result of lizard removal was a decrease in the density of infected ticks, and therefore decreased Lyme disease risk to humans."

The study, to be published online Tuesday, Feb. 15, in the journal Proceedings of The Royal Society B, illustrates the complex role the Western fence lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis) plays in the abundance of disease-spreading ticks.

Lyme disease - characterized by fever, headache, fatigue and a bullseye rash - is spread through the bite of ticks infected with spirochete bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi. In the Western region of the United States, the Western black legged tick (Ixodes pacificus) is the primary vector for Lyme disease bacteria.

In 1998, a pioneering study led by UC Berkeley entomologist Robert Lane found that a protein in the Western fence lizard's blood killed Borrelia bacteria, and as a result, Lyme-infected ticks that feed on the lizard's blood are cleansed of the disease-causing pathogen. Moreover, research has found that up to 90 percent of the juvenile ticks in this species feed on the Western fence lizard, which is prevalent throughout California and neighboring states.

The lizard is thus often credited for the relatively low incidence of Lyme disease in the Western United States. The new UC Berkeley-led study put that assumption to the test experimentally.

"When you have an animal like the Western fence lizard that supports such a huge population of ticks, you can't assume that all those juvenile ticks will go to another host if the lizard population drops," said Lane, UC Berkeley Professor of the Graduate School and co-author of this study.

For their field test, the researchers selected 14 plots, each measuring 10,000 square meters and spread out over two sites in Marin County, Calif. Half the plots were located at China Camp State Park, and the other half were at the Marin Municipal Water District Sky Oaks headquarters. The researchers had already been extensively surveying tick density in those plots over the course of two years, so they had detailed data on tick and vertebrate populations before this experimental field trial.

From March to April 2008, before tick season went into full swing, the researchers captured and removed 447 lizards from six plots - three at each site - and left the remaining plots unaltered as controls. The lizards that had been captured were marked before being relocated so the researchers could determine whether any wandered back into their old haunts.

After the lizards were removed, the researchers spent the following month trapping other mammals known to harbor ticks - particularly woodrats (Neotoma fuscipes) and deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) - to determine whether they bore an uptick in ticks as a result of the lizards' absence. The researchers also checked for differences between control and experimental plots in the abundance of host-seeking ticks by systematically dragging a large white flannel cloth over the ground.

The researchers found that in plots where the lizards had been removed, ticks turned to the female woodrat as their next favorite host. On average, each female woodrat got an extra five ticks for company when the lizards disappeared.

However, the researchers found that 95 percent of the ticks that no longer had lizard blood to feast on failed to latch on to another host.

"One of the goals of our study is to tease apart the role these lizards play in Lyme disease ecology," said Swei, who is now a post-doctoral associate at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York. "It was assumed that these lizards played an important role in reducing Lyme disease risk. Our study shows that it's more complicated than that."

Notwithstanding the results in this new study, Lane pointed out that the Western fence lizard are key to keeping infection rates down among adult ticks. "This study focused only on the risk from juvenile ticks, specifically those in the nymphal stage," he said. "The earlier finding that adult ticks have lower infection rates because they feed predominantly on the Western fence lizard at the nymphal stage still holds."

"In attempting to decrease infectious disease risk, we need to remember the law of unexpected consequences," said Sam Scheiner, program director in the National Science Foundation Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research through the joint NSF-NIH (National Institutes of Health) Ecology of Infectious Diseases Program. "This study demonstrates the complexity of infectious diseases."

Other authors on this study are Cheryl Briggs, a professor at UC Santa Barbara's Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology; and Richard Ostfeld, a senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies.