Its a Skink She Said
As an expert in your field, sometimes you just have to let people be wrong. Let me give you an example.
Last month I was in New Mexico with some of my fellow AAAS If/Then Ambassadors (check us out!) and we were visiting Bandelier National Monument. I knew we were a bit early for lizard season but I still had my hopes up that we’d see a few.
I’m walking up the trail, taking in the standing masonry walls, when someone calls out to me, “Hey Earyn, there’s a lizard!” I backtrack and observe a spiny lizard basking on a rock.
You’ll find spiny lizards throughout the country, and they are a very diverse genus. I wasn’t exactly sure which species it was, but I knew it was a spiny lizard. (It was a plateau fence lizard)
A woman, who was not a part of our group, very proudly proclaimed it was a skink.
The other herpetologist in the group and I said no, it’s actually a spiny lizard. You can tell because it has keeled scales, hence the name spiny lizard, because these scales protrude like spines, vs smooth scales, which a skink would have.
Most skinks do not bask in the sun on a rock out in the open. They spend their time underground or moving through the grass and leaf litter.
The woman continued to grumble to her friends, “It’s a skink.”
All we could do was laugh. Not everyone wants to hear the information you have to give. Sometimes people want to believe their own stories or you just aren’t the right communicator for them. It’s important for every science communicator to know who their audience is and if that audience is receptive.
Unfortunately, I didn’t see any skinks in New Mexico but I did see this western skink in L.A.
We found it under a coverboard, a tool scientists use to sample herps. Animals like skinks like to hide under rocks and other debris and coverboards mimic these hides. Skinks are attracted to the coverboards. Every so often, researchers will go look under the coverboards in hopes of seeing their target species.
Can you #FindThatLizard?
Let me know in the comments with #FoundThatLizard!
