The endemic reptiles of Guantanamo Bay
IT’S AN April evening on the island of Cuba, and Peter Tolson is scrambling up a wet ravine in the dark.
Tree frogs and rain frogs croak and chirp while Antillean nighthawks chitter overhead. A slice of Caribbean sky is visible between the trees lining the streambed, and an oversize firefly winks against the stars.
With the help of a battered headlamp, Tolson spots a large electric-green lizard snoozing on a branch above the intermittent stream. It’s a Smallwood’s giant anole, which is endemic to this island, meaning it occurs no place else in the world.
Tolson finds several smaller anoles also resting on twigs. But these are not the reptiles he is looking for. Tolson is tracking snakes. Recent rains mean there is water in the streambed, and he’s hoping some boas will come down from the hills to drink.
Tan and fit from his hours afield, with close-cropped saltand-pepper hair, Tolson moves nimbly, with the enthusiasm of a teen, though he is 72 years old. He’s been chasing snakes for five decades in this spot.
“This is a very snakey place,” he says, noting that he’s caught “about 10 boas in this little streambed.”
The snakes he seeks are thick and muscular and can reach 15 feet long. They, too, are endemic to Cuba. And they are thriving in a seemingly improbable place: The 45 square miles under United States jurisdiction known as Naval Station Guantanamo Bay.
This controversial military base, with its secure perimeter and protective regulations, has become a de facto wild-life refuge, a haven for rare species.
Outside the fence line, noisy debate continues over the US presence on Cuban land and the ethics of using Guantanamo to detain terrorism suspects. Inside the fence line, biologists steadily go about their work, studying the rare wild-life on the base and in its coastal waters.
In the untamed corners of Guantanamo, and even among the razor wire and abandoned bunkers, these scientists find wild, unexpected beauty.
Tolson, who grew up near Cleveland and developed an early interest in reptiles, was deployed to Guantanamo as a young Marine in 1968. He’d read about Cuban boas, the island’s largest snakes, so when he wasn’t serving as a radio operator, he was out searching for them.
“Every spare minute, man, if I had time off, I was up in these hills looking for stuff,” he recalls. “It kept me out of trouble.” It took him six months to find his first boa, hanging on the trusses under the Guantanamo River bridge. “It was a huge thrill,” he says.
When Tolson found other unusual reptiles he could not identify, the base librarian directed him to journals of herpetology (the study of amphibians and reptiles), and he began corresponding with the editors.
Eventually, he connected with Albert Schwartz, an American herpetologist who had worked extensively in Cuba before the revolution. Schwartz made two trips to Guantanamo to search for reptiles with Tolson and encouraged him to consider a career in the field.
Tolson left the Marines after his tour at Guantanamo and attended Michigan State University on the GI Bill, earning a BS in zoology. Then he received a PhD in biological sciences from the University of Michigan. Meanwhile, he took a job as curator of reptiles at the Toledo Zoo, eventually becoming the zoo’s director of conservation and research. Since August of last year, he has served as director emeritus of conservation and research at the zoo.
Over the years, Tolson has written dozens of papers, and his research has taken him to Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
While studying snakes on the Bahamas once, he wore one of his young daughters in a baby carrier.
All along, Guantanamo has continued to be the centre of his curiosity and, often, his research.
Tolson finds no snakes lurking in the dark streambed. So he retrieves his radio gear from a four-wheeler and walks up a dirt road to a knoll. He sweeps the landscape with a handheld antenna and listens for the clicks that will identify one of his snakes.
He is currently tracking 28 Cuban boas, each carrying a radio transmitter, in an effort to determine how many individuals are necessary for a sustainable population. He’s been following the snakes for 14 years, visiting twice yearly.
It’s an ambitious study. Tolson - one of a handful of scientists who receive military permission to visit the base independently each year - wants to understand how many snakes survive in each age class.
Developing a comprehensive life table will show the trajectory of a population. This has implications not only for the conservation of boas at Guantanamo, but also for their cousins dispersed throughout the Caribbean.
With its healthy population of snakes, good infrastructure and supportive military administrators, Guantanamo is uniquely suited for this research. Indeed, the boas are threatened in the rest of Cuba, where farmers kill them because they sometimes prey on chickens. — WP-Bloomberg
With its healthy population of snakes, good infrastructure and supportive military administrators, Guantanamo is uniquely suited for this research. Indeed, the boas are threatened in the rest of Cuba, where farmers kill them because they sometimes prey on chickens.