People: Gregory Lewbart, Kenneth Lohmann, Maximilian Hirschfeld, Juan Pablo Muñoz-Pérez, Daniela Alcarón, Diane Deresienski, William Moore Drive, Ronald K. Passingham, Gregory Scott, Eli Cohen, and Olivia Petritz
The marine iguana, Amblyrhynchus cristatus, is an iconic lizard endemic to the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador, but surprisingly little information exists on baseline health parameters for this species. The goal of this project is to relate health status, including body condition, blood chemistry, hematology, gastrointestinal and external parasite abundance, disease prevalence, and foraging behavior to marine iguana survival rates and femoral gland activity considering the extreme climatic variability of Galapagos.
Our specific objectives are to
- Compare marine iguana health status (body condition, blood chemistry, and hematology) during the warm weather of the El Niño event with the 2014/2015 baseline and 2019 climate conditions,
- Relate health status data and the occurrence of internal and external parasites and disease prevalence to survival rates,
- Establish survival rates by age class,
- Relate foraging behavior and energy expenditure to possible El Niño warm weather and survival rates,
- Measure femoral gland activity in pheromone secretion during the reproductive and non-reproductive season,
- Establish which are the main feeding organisms of marine iguanas during the El Niño event and if there is a relationship between the organisms consumed and the death of individual marine iguanas,
- Determine if there is a relationship between light reflected from the body surface of iguanas and reproductive behavior in different regions of the archipelago, and
- Study the relationship between environmental conditions, health status and skeletal structure of marine iguanas