You never know what you might find under a rock.
Bayworld reptile specialist Dr Werner Conradie knows more than most but even he was amazed when he recently discovered two legless lizard species completely new to science and solved a vexed old herpetological wrangle.
It was not as simple as that, however, and his search started eight years ago and covered several thousand kilometres as he combed legless lizard hotspots from the Eastern Cape to Mpumalanga.
Conradie had been hiking in the Compassberg mountains outside Nieu Bethesda on a freezing May day in 2010 when the story began, he recalled yesterday.
“I spotted this little guy on a rock and took him back to Port Elizabeth to show to Bill [Branch, then senior Bayworld herpetologist].”
But even Branch as one of the leading reptile specialists in the country did not have a ready identification.It looked like the short-headed legless lizard specimens that had been found years before in Hogsback and in two other disconnected populations in Mpumalanga, but there was an ongoing argument on whether these specimens were a single species or not. Clarity was scarce.
The key would be to find more specimens, Conradie realised, so he undertook several subsequent expeditions to other mountain ranges around Graaff-Reinet and Cradock. But he turned up nothing.
Then he decided to explore the two other sites in Mpumalanga where the museum specimens had been found – and soon hit the jackpot.
“I found several more specimens, first at Wakkerstroom and then on Long Tom Pass, near Sabie.”
Nondescript brown in colour with flattened hexagonal markings, his two new legless lizards looked just like the museum specimens.
How then to explain the large gap between the different populations?
The truth emerged after he ran them through a genetics test.
“They were not even related to each other. And then after the genetics test I did scale counts and measurements and I was able to confirm they were morphologically different as well.
“So I was finally able to separate and properly name not only my specimens but also the three different kinds they had in the museums.”
All three species live under rocks in mountain grassland, feeding on termites and being preyed on by skaapstekers and other snakes as well as egrets, buzzards and meerkats.
Now properly identified, the whitethroated legless lizard from Long Tom Pass, the Wakkerstroom legless lizard from Wakkerstroom and the short-headed legless lizard from Hogsback and Compassberg could now be better protected, he said.
“If a species is widespread, no alarm bells will go off, for example, when development is planned in their habitat.
“But if we know there are subspecies – and one of them is very rare – the picture changes completely.
“So good conservation is based on good taxonomy.
“In this case we still don’t know why the Wakkerstroom and white-throated legless lizards are so range-restricted.
“So the investigation continues.”