A bathroom lizard in Colombia. But which lizard? Learning about Alopoglossus

‘I’ve just found this in the bathroom’ is not an unusual cry in tropical wildlife lodges. This time my wife was clutching her hands together as she joined me outside. ‘Running around the floor—it took a bit of catching’ as she opened her fingers. It was a small lizard, an interesting lizard with its array of tough-looking scales arranged in rows and columns. It did not object to sitting unrestrained in the hand and after a couple of quick iPhone photographs it was persuaded to scuttle into the undergrowth.

We were staying at the lodge popular with wildlife groups visiting the Otún Quimbaya reserve. Hotel Kumanday (4°45’33.162”N; 75°36’45.858”W, altitude 1,670 metres) is on the edge of the village of La Florida. La Florida is on the Rio Otún which flows westward from the peaks of the Cordillera Central into the valley of the Rio Cauca. The Cauca flows northwards between the Cordillera Occidental and the Cordillera Central to join the Magdalena before flowing into the Caribbean.

Back home a search indicated it was a shade lizard, genus Alopoglossus. By searching for images of those species that occur in Colombia and notwithstanding the problem that photographs of animals shown online may not have been correctly identified, we seemed able to narrow the search down to two species that occur in the Cauca drainage. Then, using the descriptions of the two species in original papers and the morphological differences between them, we concluded that this one was Alopoglossus stenolepis, originally described from further south and on the eastern slope of the Cordillera Occidental. The lizard from La Florida fits the description of A. stenolepis rather than A. vallensis in that the dorsal scales are not pointed front and back thus creating a zig-zag line where two rows meet, and the snout is curved in lateral view and not straight.

If this is indeed Alopoglossus stenolepis then it is one that was first described by George Albert Boulenger at the Natural History Museum in London in 1908 from a specimen collected by Mervyn George Palmer (1882-1954). Palmer was a collector for the Museum in Colombia, Ecuador and Nicaragua between 1904 and 1910.

The question is: did we get the ID right?

The taxonomy and phylogeny of those lizards currently included in the genus Alopoglossus has changed a great deal and has proved controversial. Currently, the thirty-odd species are the only ones included in their own family, Alopoglossidae. Many species were formerly included in the genus Ptychoglossus. I will not dwell on higher classification other than point out that these small lizards are often called microteids since the whole teid clan (for want of a better word) ranges from these small lizards to tegus, the size of the smaller monitors of the Old World.

Alopoglossus lizards are oviparous and occur from Costa Rica through northern South America, both east and west of the Andes and across Amazonia. They are diurnal inhabitants of the forest floor where they forage in the leaf litter. They have been found in human dwellings but how did this one come to be running around under a wash-basin and lavatory bowl?

Hotel Kumanday, La Florida

Harris DM. 1994. Review of the teiid lizard genus Ptychoglossus. Herpetological Monographs 8, 226-275. 

Which descendant of Richard Owen, great anatomist, royal favourite and wrong’un, worked at the University of Hong Kong in 1957-60?

Richard Owen

Richard Owen (1804-1892) the brilliant comparative anatomist but odious man was a celebrity of the Victorian era. But more than that, having given talks on natural history to Queen Victoria’s children, he became a royal favourite to the extent that he was given the lease on a grace-and-favour basis of a house, Sheen Lodge in Richmond Park. He lived there until his death, the house passing from to his son’s widow and then to her daughter, Olive Caroline Owen (1874-1959) who lived at the house with her mother and her own family. She married Francis Frederick Ommanney in 1897. It was her son, the great-great-grandson of Richard Owen who provides the link with the University of Hong Kong since he, Francis Downes Ommanney (1903-1980) was Reader in Zoology and Director of the Fisheries Research Unit in 1957-1960.

Francis Downes Ommanney

Francis Downes Ommanney, universally known as ‘Dick’, was already well-known author on his arrival in Hong Kong having produced a number of autobiographical accounts of his early life and travels. His early life at Sheen Lodge was covered in The House in the Park (1944). The family could not stay there because reading between the lines the grace-and-favour lease given to Richard Owen was one, common at the time, for three generations with the Sheen Lodge (later so badly damaged in an air raid in 1944 that it had to be demolished) having to be returned to the Crown after the death of Dick Ommanney’s grandmother in 1920.

Dick Ommanney’s legacy in Hong Kong was his last autobiographical travelogue, Fragrant Harbour (1962), which described Hong Kong and his life there. It was required reading for newcomers to the university like us later in the 1960s. To those in the know the offer to lend the book came with a caveat; we were advised to take part of the story with a pinch of salt. The publishers had advised the inclusion of a romantic episode and that the attachment to a bar girl, best summed as an academic in the World of Suzie Wong, was fictitious but with a grain of truth. Fictitious in that Ommanney was in his own circles known for his homosexuality but based on a possible friendship with the bargirls of Wanchai since some university staff along with some of their wives were known to frequent—on a drinks and people-watching basis—the bars and to talk at length with the momma-san.

Sheen Lodge, Richmond Park

Because Ommanney was an established and well-thought-of writer his life and works are covered on a number of websites. In short, after a spell as an office boy in the City of London, he graduated in zoology from what is now Imperial College, London in 1926. Then, for three years, he was Lecturer in Zoology at Queen Mary College, London. The next 10 years saw him on the staff of the Discovery Expedition, working both in London on the collections, at whaling stations in South Georgia and Durban and on the Royal Research Ship Discovery Il. For his service in Antarctica he was awarded the Polar Medal in Bronze in 1942. Ommanney Bay on the north coast of Coronation Island in the South Orkneys was named after him in 1933.

The first year of the Second World War saw him as an inspector on board a whale factory ship. But he soon joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and on 17 June 1940 was a temporary (i.e. war-time) Lieutenant, RNVR. In October 1943 he qualified for meteorological work. He served in the Mediterranean and in the North Atlantic. His book, Flat Top, describes life on board an escort carrier on an arctic convoy to Murmansk. Editing work for the British Council was followed by two years with the Mauritius-Seychelles Fisheries Survey and then six years in Zanzibar and Singapore with the Colonial Research Services. During this time he was also a member of The Royal Navy Volunteer Supplementary Reserve. Then, at the age of 54, came Hong Kong.

Ommanney had a flat
in this block of 12
3 University Drive

Ommanney was allocated university accommodation in a small block of flats in what was then known as the University Compound. Five years later we lived in the same block. Built in the early 1950s to a design by a Swedish architect Ommanney did not like his flat since the design was too noisy for him as his amah and her friends and relations came and left through the only door which opened directly into the living room. He also thought the block ugly. We disagreed—the flats had two wide balconies which looked over the harbour, Kowloon and the mountains beyond—and if that block which was demolished in the 1970s was thought to be ugly by some university residents, as he wrote, you should see what replaced it.

Ommanney’s service in Hong Kong ended after one ‘tour’ (then of two years seven months followed by five months of home (i.e. UK) leave. The Fisheries Research Unit was an administrative anomaly. It had been established in its post-war form in 1952* and housed in the Northcote Science Building within the Department of Zoology. It comprised a head—who, like Ommanney, held a university post—and research officers paid by the Hong Kong government. The head gave a few lectures a year to senior undergraduates who needed four years to complete an honours degree but it had a budget and requirements that far exceeded that of its host department. In UK, fisheries research was and still is done by scientific civil servants, probably because the decisions on fishing quotas are highly political and do not necessarily follow the scientific advice. In 1960 the fisheries research unit was transferred to the Hong Kong government and entirely to its premises in Aberdeen.

In Fragrant Harbour, Ommanney described how he was informed of this change and of how he was informed he was to have no part in the unit’s future.

My research unit was a non-teaching department of the University, which felt towards it rather like a hen sitting on a duck's egg. In 196o the Government acquired a new ship, larger and more powerful, and trebled the financial grant to the research unit. The University then felt that it had hatched out a duckling. It had under its wing a non-teaching department which was costing more than all the science faculty departments together. The Government decided to remove this incubus from the University and absorb it into its own body. I and all my staff would then become civil servants. But my days in Hong Kong were already numbered, for the cloud now filled my sky. The telephone rang in my office one day. The Vice-Chancellor wished to see me.

He occupies a pleasant spacious room in the main building and from its windows you can see the blue stretch of the harbour filled with ships and ferries shuttling to and fro, the two crowded cities facing each other across it and the peak of Tai Mo Shan against the sky. The Vice-Chancellor is an Australian, an ex-soldier and a man of letters. He is not one to beat about the bush.

“I don't know whether I have good news for you or bad,” he said. "The Government don't want to take you on. Unfortunately, your age…”

Ommanney was 57 in 1960 and the retirement age for expat civil servants was then 55.

Dick Ommanney’s replacement as Director of Fisheries Research was Derek Bromhall (1929-2021) who was already the senior research officer in the unit and another interesting and energetic character who hit the headlines in two entirely different biological threads of his future career. But more of him for another article.

Fragrant Harbour was the list of his autobiographical travelogues. After Hong Kong Ommanney lived in a house ‘Ashleigh’ in the hamlet of Weekmoor near Milverton in Somerset. There he wrote a number of popular books including The Fishes in the Life Nature Library series, Life Nature Library Young Readers: The Fishes, Lost Leviathan, Animal Life in the Antarctic, A Draught of Fishes. Collecting Sea Shells. 

Another book, Frogs, Toads and Newts, written for children, won an award in 1974 as the best informative book for young people. Interviewed at home for the Bristol Evening Post of 24 October 1974, he said:

I was persuaded to write this book for children by my very old friend Dr. Gwynne Vevers, assistant director of science and head of the aquarium at London Zoo.

Francis Downes Ommanney, remembered as a private and shy man—and very different in nature compared to his great-great grandfather—died aged 77 on 30 June 1980 in a care home in Surrey. He was buried in Arbroath, Scotland, on 11 July joining his mother who had died there in 1959.

*G A C Herklots as Reader in Biology (and head of department) had established fisheries research in the 1930s along with S.Y Lin. The field station at Aberdeen was destroyed along with all the library, papers, specimens and records while other material in the then new Northcote Science Building had also been destroyed. In 1946 he wrote a letter to Nature requesting replacement copies from anybody who could help.

The White Dragontail. A butterfly in Hong Kong

AJP saw about a dozen of these butterflies around a big bush in Tai Po Kau last week. They are White Dragontails (Lamproptera curius), a species which occurs throughout south-east Asia. They have short wings and buzz around like wasps.

Python eats pig. But how does the python cope with all the calcium in the pig’s bones? A new study discovers an entirely new mechanism and a new type of intestinal cell

During the 1990s the Burmese Python (Python bivittatus) hit the headlines because of research done by Stephen Secor and Jared Diamond in Los Angeles. Secor was a postdoc in Diamond’s lab. Jared Diamond is of course the polymath who had three simultaneous careers: as a physiologist (in which capacity we have twice given invited papers at the same conference*); as an ornithologist and ecologist working in New Guinea; and as a student of the history of the human environment as exemplified by his book, Guns Germs, and Steel which earned him the Pulitzer Prize.

Burmese Python
Photographed at Bardiya National Park, Nepal
by Shadow Ayush
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

This highly productive research line became possible because of advances made in the previous twenty years, largely by amateur herpetologists, in breeding snakes in captivity. This is one example of the upside of the commercial breeding of this species to be set against the awful practice of propagating colour varieties and the establishment of the Burmese Python as an invasive species in Florida.

Ambush predatory snakes like pythons spend long periods without food. Between their infrequent meals they shut down and reduce in size their digestive systems. But when food is caught, constricted and swallowed whole there is a burst of activity. The gut, liver etc grow rapidly while other organs like the heart are also involved in the rapid shift to digestion. Cardiac output—the volume of blood pumped per minute—increases to a greater extent than during exercise. This pioneering research has been continued by Stephen Secor, latterly at the University of Alabama, along with a number of collaborators.

When a snake ingests a whole animal, it gets the entire skeleton as well the nutrients contained in the other tissues. In other words it has to deal with very large amounts of calcium and phosphorus. 

Although calcium plays a key part in providing strength to such structures as birds’ eggs, bone, and mollusc shells the process of biocalcification has long been of great interest simply because formation of these high-calcium structures and secretions, like milk, have to take place against a background of a low concentration of calcium in blood and a very much lower concentration inside cells. The concentrations are closely regulated and an excess in either compartment can be deadly even though large quantities of calcium have to pass through the cell involved in building the calcium-rich structures.

The latest discovery is described in a paper in Journal of Experimental Biology by Jehan-Hervé Lignot of the University of Montpelier, Robert Pope, an electron microscopist who also worked in France, and Stephen Secor. They found specialised cells in the intestinal epithelium that are involved in the production of calcium and phosphorus particles. The particles are released back into the gut and expelled as part of the faeces. In fasting snakes, the cells had no particles. Similarly, the cells of snakes fed meat bone-free sausages had no particles. However, when a calcium supplement was added the the bone-free sausages particles were present, as of course they were in snakes fed whole mice and rats.

Are the specialised cells in some way trapping excess calcium before it reaches the blood circulation? Or are they an excretory route activated by an excess calcium in blood? Clearly though, they are involved in removing calcium at times of excess input.

This is one of the photomicrographs from the paper
by Lignot et al 2025.
B. Alizarin red staining of a histological section
of the proximal intestine. Arrow indicates a particle
stained with Alizarine Red S. Scale bar: 100µm

The authors have also found the particles in other snakes and in the Gila Monster. However, there have been no reports of such cells in the intestines of other vertebrates that ingest vertebrate prey whole. The question then of course is anybody looked, especially at times of really excessive calcium intake such that which could be obtained by supplemental feeding of calcium. They concluded:

It would be of great value to monitor a large-scale analysis within vertebrates that eat the entirety of their bony prey in order to identify how broadly distributed this cell type could be within the animal kingdom. Is it an ancestral cell type that remained within some snakes and lizards, or a modified enterocyte that could be highly plastic in nature? The presence of this cell type in fasting snakes with typically an empty crypt cell suggests that this is a specific cell type.

Amen to that.

*The first was exactly 55 years ago on the day I was drafting this article last week

Lignot J-H, Pope RK, Secor SM. 2025. Diet-dependent production of calcium- and phosphorus-rich‘spheroids’ along the intestine of Burmese pythons: identification of a new cell type? Journal of Experimental Biology 228, jeb249620. doi:10.1242/jeb.249620

Mexico 2025: A Potoo or Two

Returning in the dark from a boat trip along the Rio La Tovara near San Blas on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, there were lots of snags—dead or dying trees without a top—and most held a Northern Potoo (Nyctibius jamaicensis). Instead of sitting motionless on the trunk as they do all day these birds were awake on on the lookout for large flying insects.

What I had not realised is that these birds sit with their very large eyes pointed upwards. They were clearly looking for large insects flying above them thus mounting their ambush from below rather than from above.

The Northern Potoo occurs from Mexico to Costa Rica in Central America, together with some Caribbean islands including, as the specific name implies, Jamaica.

Their entire lives are spent on branches or in the air. A single egg is laid on a bare broken branch and the young is cared for there by both parents.

Humpback Whales: the full behavioural works off Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

What sort of whale watching were we in for we wondered when we landed at Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. We went out into Banderas Bay on two consecutive mornings and found out. It was not the usual sightings of whales ploughing through the sea and then diving ‘tail-up’. This was the full works, especially on the second morning. The Humpbacks (Megaptera novaeangliae) are in the bay from December until March. That population moves north to feed in the Pacific between Russia and North America.

Female Humpbacks and their newly-born young stay in the shallow water at the north end of the bay. Males hang about waiting for the females, with young in tow, to move out of the shallows when coming into their first oestrus post partum. A female may have a pretty permanent male ‘escort’ who may or may not strike it lucky if he can outdo the band of pursuing, barging males.

We saw the males do the full range of their behavioural repertoire from slapping the surface of the water with their fins or tail, flapping water sideways with their tail and breaching. Our breaching count went up rapidly from one (out of the blue before breakfast while anchored off Pitcairn island near the site of the remains of HMS Bounty in 2010) to what must have been more than ten.

There are all sorts of explanations for male Humpbacks breach, from display to shifting skin parasites. My impression—which may be entirely wrong—is that we were witnessing a gigantic aquatic lek within hearing and sight of the females, including those in the shallow water. In other words, my splash is noisier and thus bigger than his so I am the best hope for you to pass on your genes this time round. Oh, and look at how strong my fins are.

We saw one male emerge from the water and snapping its mouth shut as if feeding (see the video below). There have been occasions when the humpbacks have been seen feeding on shoals of small fish in Banderas Bay but in general they live, and the females lactate, using only stored fat and protein. 

We moved to quieter water in highly recommended the Ecotours boat Prince of Whales for the hydrophone to pick up the song of the males. You can hear some of that and see the whales in the video below. After seeing the males flopping back into the water after virtually the whole body had risen out of it, and imagining the effect it would have had on bone and muscle, there was the suggestion from the gentlemen on board that is was no wonder whales wail.

After whales, dolphins, birds nesting on islands in the bay it was off to lunch and birdwatching in the afternoon.

A band of White-nosed Coatis in Mexico

Shortly after crossing the 470 metre long suspension bridge at El Jorullo a few miles inland from Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific Coast of Mexico a small café on the forest track comes into view. Standing outside for a few minutes to see if the noisy Military Macaws would come into view, a group of White-nosed Coatis (Nasua narica) appeared, obviously wondering if we were going to have something to eat and give into their entreaties for a few scraps from the table. Having just had lunch we weren’t but they tried their luck for a while before disappearing back into the forest of Canopy River Park. Members of the Carnivora they may be but these, like other members of the procyonid family, like raccoons, are very much omnivorous.

Except in the breeding season, the bands are said to comprise only females and juveniles, the make leading a solitary existence. They are diurnal.

White-nosed coatis are very much a species of Central America, occurring from parts of Arizona and New Mexico in the north to the very tip of Colombia in the south.