The Americans take what they want from Haiti--even near-extinct lizards.

• Author: Chery, Dady
• Position: Biodevastation

More frog species live in Haiti than anywhere else in the Caribbean. This broad speciation partly resulted from the isolation of animal populations by the mountainous landscape. Many species of the small lizard anole also make Haiti their home. These animals have attracted the attention of well-meaning conservationists--as well as soulless seekers of fame.

At the end of July, an expeditionary team withdrew over 100 animals from an isolated patch of virgin forest in the mountains of Haiti's Tiburon peninsula. It was led by Pennsylvania State University biologist Blair Hedges, who brought along one of his graduate students, Philadelphia journalist Faye Flam, Dominican freelance photographer-naturalist Miguel Landestoy, a videographer, and a botanist with some knowledge of Haitian Creole. (1)

The group was flown by helicopter to a remote Haitian forest at an altitude of about 1800 meters, where they removed as many lizards and frogs as they could find from a chilly patch of woods that the animals had made their sanctuary.

The journalist reports that:

Near the end of the trip, the team began searching in a region that was lower and much hotter, and the blistering sun was threatening the whole collection of rare frogs and lizards. With my own skin beginning to burn, I volunteered to take the more than 100 animals back by helicopter to the island of La Vache, off the south coast of Haiti, where there was an air conditioned hotel room waiting for them. These high-altitude creatures are adapted to cool temperatures and can die if exposed to more than a minute or so of harsh daytime sun. ... Though some will inevitably die, the goal was to get them through the trip and back to Pennsylvania alive, where they can be studied and catalogued Every time I checked, the frogs and lizards were stirring. By luck, most got through the night, and are now in Port-au-Prince awaiting their first and only trip to the United States! What sorts of scientists would show up for a project like this without a cooler, and then abandon their samples of rare and endangered animals to the heat, or to a journalist, casually expecting some of the animals to die?

From the footage at about nine minutes into the video, it is evident that at least one of the anole lizards was quite furious about being plucked away from the tree fern where he was sleeping on a moonless night. Justifiably so. This animal happened to be Anolis darlingtoni: the rarest lizard in Haiti and the one in the most immediate danger of extinction. It is also given the common name...