How can lizards adapt to a changing climate?

A common wall lizard at a sun bath (Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann/Unsplash) - Researchers at the University of Toronto and Ohio Wesleyan University are collaborating in a quest to find out how lizards can adapt to the world's changing climate. Sophie Berkowitz and Simone Collier , undergraduate students at Trinity College and Victoria College in the Faculty of Arts & Science, are using computational tools to analyze lizard movement and body temperature under the supervision of Vianey Leos Barajas , an assistant professor in the department of statistical sciences and the School of the Environment. They're working closely with ecologists at Wesleyan, Assistant Professor Eric Gangloff and undergraduate students Ciara Pettit and Sierra Spears, who cared for the lizards and provided the primary data of lizard movement and temperature. The team's research focuses on analyzing movements of lizards when placed in an arena with a "thermal gradient," meaning an observation area where one end is warmer than the other. The sand-filled arena is one metre long and has a lamp as a heat source. Using open-source object-recognition software, statistical and environmental science student Berkowitz extracted movement data from hours of lizard footage to prepare a dataset for statistical analysis. A key challenge was tracking the movement of the lizard when it crawled into the sand or attempted to crawl up the side of the observation arena, out of view of the camera, Berkowitz says.