Navigating the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah involves wriggling through its narrow “slot” canyons—and sometimes making way for wildlife.

“The guidebooks tell you: when you see a rattlesnake, give it a wide berth,” says Peter Baumann, who happened upon one while hiking the rugged cliffs and terraces with his wife Diana. “That's not easy when you're in a canyon that's 30 feet deep and a mile long—but only a foot-and-a-half wide!”

The Baumanns survived the encounter: they leapt over the snake—and then shimmied over a second one by bracing their feet against one wall of the canyon and their backs against the other. But he also parlayed it into a new avenue of research: investigating how some lizards can reproduce by parthenogenesis, a process in which eggs develop without the aid of sperm.

		Lab Lizards Pictures of Baumann's lizards, and his lizard-hunting treks through New Mexico.

As a kid, Baumann brought home his fair share of snakes, lizards, frogs, and rodents. His parents, Baumann says, were “very tolerant”—until he showed up with a lamb. “They didn't see that our suburban yard could be tended much better by a sheep than a lawn mower,” he says.

For years, the Baumanns have kept reptiles as a hobby. But it wasn't until they joined the Stowers Institute for Medical Research that Peter thought of bringing his lizards to the lab. Over dinner with Stowers CEO William Neaves, the Baumanns shared their rattlesnake tale—and discovered that Neaves had studied parthenogenic lizards as a graduate student. In animals that reproduce this way, fertilization never occurs. So Baumann got to wondering: what do their eggs look like? Are they like the eggs of a sexually reproducing animal, with half the number of chromosomes as the rest of its cells? Or, if the eggs have a full set, how exactly are they made?

Illustration: Peter Arkle

	PAGE 1 OF 2	Continue