Milwaukee Public Museum

Ashley Gramza

What Made Me Want to Study: Catching snakes and other animals around the farms and forests of Northwest Ohio really got me interested in wildlife. I had many lizards and snakes for pets. Many times reptiles have bad reputations or people are scared of them, and I feel like it's my duty to show people how cool and interesting reptiles really are, and that they are nothing to be afraid of.

Agroforestry systems like those in Costa Rica can support significant levels of biodiversity. However, not all agricultural systems preserve biodiversity to the same extent. Research has shown that ecosystem complexity affects animal communities, although most research has focused on mammal, plant, insect, bird and amphibian, but not reptilian biodiversity.

In this project, I will investigate the difference in reptile abundance in productive cacao, productive banana and abandoned agricultural land. I hypothesize that I will find biodiversity differences in each area due to their different ecosystems.

My project has been off to a great start. To begin I've been simply walking around my study sites looking for reptile species. Jeffrey McCoy, from the Universidad Nacional, has been great in helping me identify reptiles of the area. With his help, I've found a total of 17 species, only 5 of which have been snakes.

This initially seemed strange to me, along with something else: of the species of snakes I'd found, there has been only one snake of each type, whereas I'd found multiple individuals of each type of lizards. After investigating a little more, I've learned that most people in the community routinely kill snakes thinking that all or most of the snakes are venomous and harmful to people. Even the people who claim to only kill venomous species often mistake the non-venomous species with venomous ones.

As a researcher, the killing of your subjects is very disheartening, especially when the subjects are being killed simply due to hatred and misinformation. The killing of snakes really affects my research. Since I am trying to measure reptile biodiversity, the fact they are being killed changes things immensely.

Other than this minor setback along with minor changes in project methodology, the project is off to a great start and I look forward to seeing the data that the project yields!

I spoke with many community members and about their feelings and beliefs about snakes living around them. I am currently developing an outreach program to teach community members about the snakes in their region so that snakes and people can live together better. I will conduct the outreach program in early January.