Q&A Blog | Reptile Awareness Day

Peter Uetz

Crawl into this Reptile Awareness Day Q&A blog with Dr. Peter Uetz, a biologist and associate professor for the Center for the Study of Biological Complexity at Virginia Commonwealth University! Learn all about Dr. Uetz’s remarkable work as a biologist and conservationist, delving into his expertise in herpetology research. Dr. Uetz’s involvement in various projects to study and protect these magnificent animals has had a profound impact on advancing our understanding and conservation efforts!

Q&A Blog

Published October 21, 2023

Can you discuss a particularly challenging field experience you have had during your research? How did it influence your approach to your studies?

A few years ago I was on a field trip in Sumatra, Indonesia, at night. I had caught a vine snake and put it in a bag in my backpack. On my way back to the lodge it started to pour like crazy and I could not get back the same way I came because I had come down some slope which was totally slippery and unpassable. When I tried to find a way back I literally got lost in the jungle, and I couldn’t even use the GPS as there were hardly any landmarks or trails I could use. Eventually I made it out of the jungle and I knew I had to walk across a field which had various creeks or irrigation channels, and sure enough, I managed to slip and fell into one of them. Eventually I made it back to the lodge where my wife was waiting for me. After taking off my clothes (which were completely soaked), I wanted to show her the (mildly venomous) snake and sure enough, it was gone! I had no idea if it was in our room or somewhere else. We never found it … but my wife freaked out about having a venomous snake somewhere in the room … Overall, an interesting, but not exactly pleasant experience. Has it influenced my approach to my studies? Maybe … the lesson is that you should probably not go into the jungle on your own ☺

What inspired you to create ‘The Reptile Database,’ and what were the initial challenges you faced in creating such a comprehensive resource?” 

When I was a graduate student in the mid-1990, the internet was in its infancy. There were hardly any online databases. There was not even a complete list of reptile species, certainly none that was available online! I was lucky, as I happened to be at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, which had just established a web database for DNA sequences. I asked the guy who ran it if we could use the same infrastructure to build a species database for reptiles, and he said “sure, just give me a floppy disk with the data and I’ll put it online” (people still used floppy disks at the time!). And that’s what he did. It was the birth of the Reptile database, sometime in 1995.
 
The challenge was to get that list of species, and then get it into a computer-readable format. I got a bunch of books and papers to compile the initial list, and the first release, I think it was in late 1994, was simply an html page with a list of species. Only a year later we converted that to a searchable database. It took 30 years of data collection to get where we are today.
Dr. Uetz with a couple of students at a field trip near Adelaide, South Australia, after catching a skink (he believes)

Throughout your career in herpetology, what has been the most remarkable discovery or encounter you have had in the field? Could you describe that experience and its significance to you?

I am not a field biologist, so I don’t have that many field experiences. A few years ago I discovered a new gecko species without knowing it (shortly after that experience with the snake above). I wasn’t able to identify it, so a year or two later I sent pictures to an expert and asked him what it was. He told me that it was a new species and he had also discovered it some time later. I think it’s still not published but it’s supposed to come out soon! This episode tells you that you can still discover new species, even if you don’t spend all your time in the jungle ☺

 

The database currently focuses primarily on taxonomic data. Are there plans to expand the scope to include ecological, behavioral, or conservation status information? If so, how do you plan to integrate this new data?

We currently focus on completing all species descriptions. That’s the basis for everything else. If you cannot identify a species in the field, you cannot study its ecology or behavior either. We work with IUCN who focus on conservation issues. With regards to ecology, we work with Shai Meiri’s team in Israel and others to study macro-ecological patterns, so we leave these things mostly to other experts. Behavior is tricky, because it’s difficult to collect in a database. How do you collect standardized data about courtship behavior? And then you would need it for thousands of species to really make sense out of it, e.g. in an evolutionary context (but people are working on it …).
 
Dr. Uetz with Paul Freed, their photo editor, taking a DNA sample from a gecko in Nepal

What has been the most challenging aspect of maintaining and updating ‘The Reptile Database,’ and how do you and your team address these challenges?

The biggest problem is that scientific publishing is based on a 17th century model: you publish papers and books, even if people do that now in the form of pdfs. Organizing that information in databases is a second thought. There is a whole cottage industry in “biocuration” which focuses on getting the information out of papers into databases. This is a non-trivial problem. In some areas of science there are good solutions, such as for DNA sequences or protein structures which are directly submitted to databases, even if there are papers describing those sequences or structures. There are thousands of papers published every year just on reptiles, and we capture about 2000 of them, which is maybe half or less of all published papers. That’s the main challenge.

Dr. Uetz with skinks in Queensland and New South Wales, Australia

Looking to the future, what are your long-term visions and goals for reptile conservation? How do you plan to address the challenges that may arise down the road?

The main problem for conservation is human overpopulation and overconsumption. An estimated 70% of arable land is already used by humans. That creates intense pressure on nature and biodiversity. We need to reduce the size of the human population and its environmental footprint, that is, fewer people and less consumption. I have a strict 1-child policy, I don’t have a car, and I don’t eat meat. These are all things people can do. Obviously, we also have to dramatically increase protected areas. The other challenge is climate change, because that exacerbates human land use: if human land-grabbing reduces the population of a species to a fraction of its original size and then you add climate change, you will push thousands, possibly millions of species towards extinction. A recent study showed that half of all animal populations have been shrinking. This is very scary.

For those aspiring to contribute to herpetology or conservation efforts, what guidance or advice would you offer based on your own experiences?

There are many ways to contribute, even as an amateur herpetologist. I know people who do herpetology as a hobby and have discovered dozens of new species. You can do that in any job that gives you sufficient spare time. There are not many jobs for professional herpetologists, but you can get into the field indirectly, e.g. if you study genetics or molecular biology. There are many fascinating questions, such as temperature-dependent sex determination in reptiles, which are not very well studied.

Conservation is a different thing. You could approach this from an academic point of view by doing research, but it may be more effective if you go into politics or some NGO. If you really want to contribute to conservation, start a company, make a ton of money, and then put that money to good use. Elon Musk could use his billions to buy most of the Amazon and just protect it. Instead, he wants to colonize Mars, a dead cold planet without oxygen. That’s idiotic.