For Cincinnatians, the sight of a small lizard scurrying across a sidewalk or hanging out on an alley wall isn’t surprising. For more than 70 years, European common wall lizards, known locally as Lazarus lizards, have lived in the Queen City.
Farther north, in Delaware county, a team of Ohio Wesleyan University students is studying how these species have adapted from the mountains of Italy to the hills of Ohio. The so-called ‘Lizard League’ uses fishing poles to scoop up the small reptiles and bring them back to central Ohio for experiments.
“We got to run lizards on a little treadmill and use a balance beam to test their cognition and endurance abilities,” said Emma Foster, a junior studying neuroscience at OWU. “So that process in and of itself was pretty fun.”
These experiments aren’t just a test of the lizards’ endurance. They are an effort to better understand how the lizards scale city walls, regulate their temperatures and move across the state.
“[We’re] studying exactly how these lizards are so good at making a living,” said Eric Gangloff, assistant professor at OWU and faculty lead of the Lizard League.
From the Mediterranean to the Midwest
Back in the 1950s, a 10-year-old boy was fascinated by the little lizards he spotted in Italy. So, he stowed around 10 of them in his luggage and smuggled them back with him to Cincinnati.
Although they were thousands of miles away from home, Gangloff said the lizards were able to thrive along the southwest Ohio city’s rock walls and railroad tracks. They felt at home on Cincinnati’s hills and stone walls.
“From a human perspective, we tend to think of northern Italy and Cincinnati as being very different. But from a lizard's eye view, they're actually very similar,” Gangloff said. “If you map the climate of Cincinnati onto, for example, Milan, the closest big city in northern Italy where these guys are from, it's actually very similar in terms of temperature and precipitation.”
Now, they’re a common sight in the Queen City. In some neighborhoods, a single acre can be home to more than a thousand of the wall lizards, according to Ohio State University Extension.
The prolific reptiles have been embraced by residents of Cincinnati and dubbed ‘Lazarus lizards’, after the last name of the family who brought them here. They’re even considered a naturalized species, worthy of equal treatment as natives, in the Ohio Revised Code.
“People are very curious about the lizards,” he said. “In fact, they love these lizards. Everyone that we meet [in Cincinnati] says, ‘Oh, my aunt has a porch and there's lizards all over; … it's really great.’”
Investigating their impact
Despite their beloved status, Gangloff said they are still an invasive species with the potential to threaten native animals. Right now, they’re concentrated in urban areas, where they aren’t competing with other lizard species.
“Generally they're providing extra food for feral cats and birds, probably,” he said. “However, they have the potential to move into more naturalistic habitats.”
The Lizard League is studying how their migration could impact other native Ohio lizards, like skinks, and monitoring their movement.
Their populations have already spread across the state, Gangloff said. Once solely Cincinnati area residents, the wall lizard now also makes small urban pockets of Dayton and Columbus its home.
The Ohio Division of Wildlife is working to stop their expansion, but they’ve been spotted as far north as Michigan in recent years, Gangloff said.
“It's just a matter of time before they spread northward and all directions across the state and into some of the neighboring states … given how hardy they are and how easily they hitch rides with humans.”
Potential benefits for human health
Beyond understanding Ohio’s reptilian residents, Gangloff said his lab’s research could also have broader implications for human health.
Foster, who studies neuroscience, said the lizard’s unique qualities, like its detachable tail, could potentially offer insights into human neurodegenerative diseases.
“If [the lizards] have a certain regenerative mechanism that we don't possess, I think exploring that could be very interesting in the future for clinical applications, for example.”
The team’s research has also found that the wall lizards are more resistant to the toxicity of lead and to Lyme’s disease. If they can figure out why, it could bring humans a step closer to protecting themselves from those conditions.
The Lazarus lizards may be invasive, but, Gangloff said, they’re not without their merits.
