Marcus Elliot

There is a locked door in the A-level of Gosnell Hall (GOS,08). Beyond it a stairway leads further downwards. Dr. Larry Buckley, a professor in the School of Life Sciences, unlocks the door, and together we descended even lower, to the sub-basement. There is a concrete hallway sparsely decorated with murals, ending in a small, well-heated room. The smell is strange, but not unbearably foul. The room is lighted with ultraviolet (UV) lamps — an important accommodation for the health of the creatures that dwelled there: iguanas.

There are four iguanas down in the GOS subbasement, and each has its own personality. The smaller ones like to bite if you try to hold them, so Buckley hands me a tamer one. They are not nearly as large as the green iguanas sold in pet stores, but they are much darker. They are all spiny-tailed iguanas, named for the small bumps on their ribbed tails. Some of them are older than me, but still very quick. They had not warmed up yet that morning, so the little ones mostly just hid.

These iguanas are Buckley’s passion. He has been with RIT since 1998 and has been actively researching the biology of spinytailed iguanas for over a decade, catching his subjects in the wild. He uses his research as a means of animal conservation. As with many native animals, their habitat is always decreasing. According to the Iguana Specialist Group’s (ISG) website, iguanas are important seed dispersers for many native plants, so their survival is crucial.

Buckley caught three of the iguanas in different regions of Mexico, and one in Panama. They all have different dwellings in the wild: One lives in trees, one in holes in the ground and another in cacti. None of them could survive the harsh cold of Rochester, so they stay tucked away in small tanks in a warm room, each with their own UV lamp and heated rock.

Regulating the temperature of Buckley’s sub-basement room is more than a comfort for the iguanas; it is vital for their well-being. “Temperature, for them, is a dimmer switch on their life,” says Buckley. “If their temperature goes down, every single physiological response — bacteria to digestion to sight to hearing — everything goes down.”

While Buckley’s iguanas were not harmed during a week and a half of 45 degree weather during a major power outage in 2003, such sustained cold temperatures could seriously damage their health. That being said, keeping the lizards as warm as possible for as long as possible would not be good either. “At night you have to turn the lights out,” explains Buckley. “If you kept them warm all the time, it would be like drinking ‘5-Hour Energy’ all the time every day.”

Buckley deliberately minimizes his interactions with the iguanas so they do not domesticate. He visits the room a few days a week to replace the iguanas’ collard greens and water. Occasionally he also collects tissue samples retrieved from toenail clippings, which he uses for DNA sequencing. He uses the information extracted from the DNA to contribute to the knowledge of iguana evolution, their biology and conservation methods.

Buckley finds it interesting that the genetic material of each species differs from the others by about 10 percent. We share more genes in common with chimpanzees than one species of spiny-tailed iguana shares with another. Geneticists take this to mean that the spiny-tailed genus of iguana evolved 15 to 30 million years ago. In other words, the iguanas are very old, genetically speaking.

Some students are working with Buckley on iguana DNA sequencing, including third year biology major Moriah Buckley Jamison. She is working on amplifying a sample of DNA from an iguana outside of Buckley’s collection. Amplifying a specific gene in DNA involves replicating that specific gene many times, to make the sequencing more effective. Buckley believes the sample is degraded, which means it is not amplifying well. As a result, Buckley and Buckley Jamison will rework future strategies for success.

When asked if Buckley Jamison got to play with the lizards too, Buckley responds, “The students don’t go down in the basement much. I don’t make them clean cages or anything.”

“I appreciate that,” Buckley Jamison quips. Buckley laughs heartily.

The education component of Buckley’s iguana research extends far beyond the lab. He has, on a few occasions, taken one of his tamer iguanas to grade schools. He has also taken several trips to Mexico, where iguanas are as common as “squirrels or white-tailed deer,” to educate the people there on how to take care of the lizards. However, Buckley is amazed that the Mexican people know their iguana species so well already. He wants the people there to continue using iguanas for food and other needs, but with a mindset that these animals should not be over-hunted. He hopes to ultimately help to achieve conservation of the species.

Some of his trips yield even rarer victories for iguana conservation. “I found a new species of iguana in Honduras about 12 years ago, described it and named it,” says Buckley. He called the creature Ctenosaura melanosterna, which means “black-chested spiny-tailed iguana.” Despite the similarity in name, this is not the species of iguana he studies at RIT. Buckley also reports that he may have discovered even more species that remain unclassified.

Buckley remains active in iguana conservation as a member of the ISG, a network that advises the International Union for the Conservation of Nature on how to set the conservation statuses of various iguana species. Spiny-tailed iguanas are just one of many genus of iguana which the ISG is focused on conserving.

As time passes and Buckley describes his love of field research — in fact if not for funding, he would be in the field all the time — I could feel the iguana’s body temperature rising in my warm hands. I return the iguana to Buckley, imaging the voyage this iguana must have undergone: from a wild lizard bathing on the side of the road in the hot Mexican sun, to here in the GOS sub-basement. And with Buckley’s influence, what was once the former human gross anatomy lab is now a haven for the spinytailed iguanas.