Audiolocalization in Guatemalan beaded lizards

Today’s research story begins fairly unscientifically. It all started with a serendipitous conversation between me, an Ambassador Animal Keeper, and Dr. Joe. Mendelson, the Director of Research here at Zoo Atlanta, about a Guatemalan beaded lizard named Bogi.  

Bogi is one of Zoo Atlanta’s newest ambassador animals. He came to the Ambassador Animals Department without any trained behaviors. Because ambassador animals need to be handled regularly, training is a top priority, so I began with one of our most basic trained behaviors— targeting. I presented a target made from a red rubber toy on the end of a stick and taught him to come to the target and touch it with his nose. Targeting is a great starting behavior because you can use it to train other behaviors, such as getting in and out of a kennel, getting on a station, or moving from point A to point B. By happenstance, I mentioned this behavior to Dr. Joe during an unrelated meeting. Dr. Joe was surprised because he had done some cognition studies with the same species of lizard, and they didn’t appear to learn much of anything. But he saw some videos of the training sessions, came to watch a few in person, and there was no denying that Bogi was target trained. So why was Bogi able to learn this behavior whereas other Guatemalan beaded lizards had struggled to learn very basic tasks?  

During the next training session, I paid closer attention to what Bogi and I were doing, and that’s when I realized something interesting. I was tapping the target pole on the ground. I wasn’t doing this for any particular reason, or even on purpose. It was my own idiosyncrasy as a trainer that I had developed. Was the tapping sound the reason Bogi was having success? It would make sense that an animal that spends a lot of time underground would be sensitive to sound and vibrations. There were anecdotes of herpetologists observing other species of beaded lizards responding to sounds in their environments. So, Dr. Joe and I found ourselves asking the questions, “Do Guatemalan beaded lizards use sound to navigate their environments? Is this why previous cognitive trials based on visual and/or scent cues have been less successful?” 

So now we are attempting to answer that question here at Zoo Atlanta. We developed a sound-based target that has no visual component. It is a hidden speaker that can be placed underneath the substrate in the lizards’ habitats and emits a tone in their range of hearing. I spent some time training five of the Guatemalan beaded lizards that reside in our Herpetology Department to target to the sound. Now we are beginning trials to see if they can find the sound target even when it is randomly placed throughout their habitat.  

This is exciting because not only will the results inform how we approach future cognition studies with the species, but it also provides insight into the least-studied and critically endangered species of beaded lizards. We’ve all heard the old adage that you can’t judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. Maybe we’ve been judging a lizard by its ability to interact with its environment without fully understanding how they do so.  

Roxanne B. 
Ambassador Animals Team