Natural Perspectives

Vic Leipzig and Lou Murray

Bolsa Chica’s silvery legless lizards are beautiful silver, yellow and

black striped lizards that are pencil-thin and six- to seven-inches long.

They look like little snakes with smiles. So why aren’t they snakes?

Well, lizards have eyelids and snakes don’t. Snakes have scutes, which

are broad modified scales on their bellies, and lizards don’t. The

silvery legless lizard has eyelids and no scutes or legs, so that makes

it a legless lizard.

These reptiles live in coastal sand dunes where they dine on black

widow spiders and insects. Because they live underground and feed mainly

at night, they are rarely seen. Naturally, as coastal sand dunes have

been turned into sterile beaches and covered with parking lots, highways,

and homes, the silvery legless lizard population has declined.

Some time ago, Hearthside Homes (or the Koll Company or Signal

Landmark or whatever they were calling themselves in those days) hired

some biologists to write an Environmental Impact Report detailing what

impact the proposed development project would have on all the rare and

endangered animals at Bolsa Chica.

Silvery legless lizards were being considered for endangered status,

so the biologists had to look for them. They searched in the standard

way. They put a board down on the sand, came back the next day, and

looked for legless lizards under the board. They didn’t find any. So they

wrote in their report that there weren’t any silvery legless lizards at

Bolsa Chica. They were wrong.

We had not only seen legless lizards at Bolsa Chica, we had eight- by

10-inch glossy color photographs of them. Ha! So we made them rewrite

their report considering the impact the project would have on this

threatened lizard population.

Unfortunately, no one knows how many legless lizards are at Bolsa

Chica because it has been impossible to do studies, called mark and

recapture, to determine the size of the population. Here’s how mark and

recapture works. A few animals are marked and then released back into the

environment and allowed to mix in. A bunch of animals are captured later

and the biologists see what percentage is marked. They can use this

number to figure out the total population size.

Here’s the problem with doing mark and recapture with legless lizards.

Biologists can’t use ear tags like they do for bears because lizards have

no ears. They can’t clip toes like they do with other lizards because

legless lizards have no toes. They can’t clip scutes like they do with

snakes because lizards have no scutes. Marking the animals with marking

pens didn’t work because the ink rubbed off. So the biologists simply

guessed at the size of the population. They speculated that there were so

few legless lizards at the Bolsa Chica that they would eventually die

out.

Hold on. Not so fast. Enter space-age technology in the form of

passive integrated transponder tags. These tags consist of a microchip, a

capacitor and a miniature antenna, all enclosed in a glass case no bigger

than a grain of wild rice. The microchip is like the magnetic strip on a

credit card or drivers license. It can be encoded with all sorts of

information about an individual animal and can be located with a mobile

tracking unit.

A graduate student named Linda Kuhnz decided to use these tags to

track silvery legless lizards at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories near

Monterey. What she discovered will revolutionize legless lizard biology.

The labs up there were badly damaged in an earthquake in 1989 and had

to be rebuilt. The construction site had a few legless lizards, which had

to be captured prior to construction. The best evidence at the time,

based on looking under boards, suggested that they would find 170 legless

lizards on the four-acre site.

The biologists put up a barrier to keep other lizards from slithering

into the site from outside, then used rakes to collect all the legless

lizards inside the barrier. They were stunned to find over 3,500 lizards,

about 20 times more than they had anticipated. They held the lizards for

a year, during which time the lizards ate a lot of insects and

reproduced. The biologists released more lizards into the restored dunes

than they captured.

But before they released them, Kuhnz injected tiny tags into some of

them so she could track them and learn more about their biology. One of

the things she found was that these lizards live about four to five

inches under the ground. They prefer somewhat moist, loose sand with lots

of decayed leaves from native dune shrubs. They don’t like living under

ice plant. Kuhnz concluded that using boards on the sand is a completely

ineffective means of either determining the presence or assessing the

numbers of legless lizards.

Biologists have been grossly underestimating the numbers of legless

lizards. What this means for the Bolsa Chica and other dune areas along

Pacific Coast Highway such as the Huntington Wetlands is that there are

probably far more legless lizards here than we’re aware of. Someone

should use passive integrated transponder tags to get a more accurate

count of these lizards. Fortunately, little of the restoration of the

Bolsa Chica wetlands will involve sand dunes. But before bulldozers move

in for any California Department of Transportation projects in the sand

along Pacific Coast Highway, the legless lizards should be found and

relocated into restored sand dunes.

* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and

environmentalists. They can be reached at o7 [email protected] .