WOG (White-Green-Orange) returns!

WOG: thin and home

White-Orange-Green, known simply as WOG, was first trapped and beaded in March 2013. A bold animal, she used refugia in the Big Tree area of the research station. WOG will park herself ~1.5 meters from a human, observing them as they observe her. She's an instructive and enriching element of my work.

WOG was part of the group selected to help calibrate the Encounternet tags. She wore #9, providing physical proximity data from 5 February 2016 to 24 February 2016 when I observed her walk across the Big Tree lawn, head down the hill, traverse the road, and disappear. She wasn't interacting with other tagged animals; we couldn't get any radio signal from her tag at all.

Truthfully, we felt all the while that she'd gone off to lay her eggs, as every other female in our group has also left and returned or is still out. (We are locating Yellow-Yellow-Orange on a daily basis as she does trail digs at various nests.) On 4 March 2016 WOG was sighted on the sidewalk right above one of her usual refugia -- thinner, having obviously laid her eggs -- and her Encounternet tag was gone.

We don't have much hope of finding her tag -- if undergound, we won't get a decent signal and it will eventually run out of power. Further, the nests are conglomerations of branches from a main opening, used by multiple animals at the same time, open and closed even on a daily basis and female after female may use the same spot. In other words, a needle in a haystack! 

Yes, how incredible is it that year after year, WOG has likely performed the same fascinating behavior -- leaving her daily home range with known refugia, travelling several hundred meters to a nesting site, only to come home to the same place. And she is not the only female we are observing completing this process -- White-White-Brown and Yellow-Brown-White have done the same thing and we hope Pale Blue-Black-Red and Red-Pale Blue-Pale Blue will soon head back home.

Iguana nest with tail drags

Where have all the 'guanas gone? Long time passing.....

Solar Encounternet tag.

Once upon a time, a calibration study commenced. A small group of interacting Ctenosaura similis were chosen to sport solar tags that received and transmitted signals when animals encountered each other.

Thin Yellow-Brown-White after laying her eggs.

The scientists hoped they would wear the tags for about 6 weeks, after which they would be removed. In the beginning, all was well. But slowly, females in the study disappeared. Their radio signal strength indicators weakened and simply seemed to stop working.

Troubleshooting was impossible with no signal. Suddenly, female iguanas with no beads and no solar tags began nesting everywhere -- along the old airstrip, along the slope of the football field, in a dirt mound, in open areas of tilled soil.

Soon, a missing tagged iguana re-appeared, thinner, but behaving normally. Then the second missing iguana came home, also skinny. Between these two events, two other females left the study. By now it was obvious to the scientists that iguanas were laying eggs a bit earlier than reported in the literature.

Study males decamped from their breeding territory and seemed uninterested in pursuing copulations. Younger and smaller iguanas appeared, in crevices and on walls, potentially joining their larger adult counterparts. The social system was in flux.

Lighter brown soil of iguana nesting area.

C. similis head appearing out of nesting burrow.

Green iguanas, Spiny-Tailed Iguanas -- everyone was laying eggs, moving, closing down this chapter and readying for the new one.