S. Blair Hedges had to navigate Haiti’s mountainous terrain to conduct research for his latest project, flying across the region in the face of security concerns and logistical obstacles. Nevertheless, he successfully collected specimens of 35 never-before-documented lizard species during the journey.
“Working in Haiti was really difficult because of the security, things like that,” said Hedges, director of the Center for Biodiversity at Temple’s College of Science and Technology. “And so I used the helicopter on multiple occasions and to go from mountain top to mountain top, where scientists had never been and collect these lizards.”
Hedges, along with Molly Schools, a 2023 CST Ph.D. graduate, published their groundbreaking discoveries in December 2024 in Zootaxa, a science journal for zoological taxonomists. Throughout Schools’ five-year Ph.D. program, they evaluated 958 preserved specimens, dating back nearly 200 years to determine whether the newly discovered species were absolute.
While the article touted the discovery of 35 unique species, it also carried a stark message: without intervention, the lizards may soon face extinction.
As the lizards’ home in Haitian woods experiences deforestation, the race against time makes it all the more complex for Hedges to collect samples. Original forests will be lost in the coming decades if no one intervenes, along with the species living there, Hedges said.
“The point is, you want to know what’s there before it’s gone,” Hedges said. “You can’t really protect things unless you know they exist.”
A lifelong reptile passion became a career in environmentalism for Schools, whose parents were involved in wildlife careers and encouraged her to explore those interests. After graduating from Michigan State University with a bachelor’s degree in zoology, Schools came to Temple in 2018 when she learned Hedges had an opening for a doctoral student in his lab.
Schools’ research sent her across the country, and eventually to the Atlantic Ocean to learn more about the specimens being collected. Although the COVID-19 pandemic prevented her from joining Hedges in Haiti, she traveled to New York City and London to visit museum collections.
The museums exposed Schools to various archives and artifacts that further advanced her reptilia understanding, she said.
“[Museums are] showing you like a tenth or a fifth of what they actually have in their collections,” Schools said. “So it was really cool to kind of go behind the scenes and see how much is actually there, and meet these people that are like, ‘Do you want to see this giant lizard that we have?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, of course I do.’ And they’ll have just Komodo dragons in jars.”
When Hedges and Schools weren’t traveling to collect specimens or viewing museum artifacts, they worked together inside the lab, examining the lizards’ morphology and genealogy to learn whether they were working with new species.
“So I might have two lizards in front of me, and I’ll be like, ‘Oh, wow, that one has way longer fingers.’ And then I would measure that and say, ‘Yep, it definitely has longer fingers.’” Hedges said. “So we’re seeing that genetically, it’s saying it’s a new species, and now we have morphology also backing up the idea that it’s a new species.”
It wasn’t always easy for Hedges and Schools to tell whether two species were different, even though genetic testing showed they were. Schools often had to compare two lizards for hours on end to find minute differences undetectable to the untrained eye.
To protect the newly discovered species from extinction, Hedges made a proactive decision to address the issue at its source — in the mountains of Haiti. He began a non-governmental organization with the CEO of an airline company located in Haiti’s capital city of Port-au-Prince, which has been overrun with criminal activity since its president was assassinated in 2021.
Despite political unrest, Hedges is dedicated to maintaining their conservation efforts. They hired guards to protect the park from people attempting to cut trees for resources, along with receiving national funding from various foundations to buy the mountain and name it as a national park. Since then, they managed to plant over 100,000 seedlings hoping to regrow the original forest and prevent the lizard species’ extinction.
Hedges’ future students share his passion and commitment to protecting the environment. Emmy Spadaro, a senior ecology, evolution and biodiversity major will take Schools’ position as Hedges’ Ph.D student next fall to continue her undergraduate studies focusing on geckolets, another group of Caribbean lizards.
Spadaro fears for Haiti’s ecosystem if deforestation continues and the lizard population becomes extinct. By knowing what species exist, research can better understand their ecological impact and predict potential outcomes if they were to become extinct, Spadaro said.
“We know it’ll be bad because the food web is so interconnected,” Spadaro said. “Ecosystems in general are just really interconnected that you can’t fully predict what’s going to happen because you don’t know exactly what relationships it has.”
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