Meet Rhody ’ s newest creepy crawly , the skink . By Todd McLeish
CityState : Current l Edited by Jamie Coelho
When Emilie Holland , the president of the Rhode Island Natural History Survey , was cleaning up around her yard in South Kingstown last April , she noticed an unusual creature beneath a pile of junk . At first , she thought it was an uncommon type of salamander . But when she focused on its brown- and white-striped body and blue tail , she knew it was something she had never before seen in the Ocean State .
No one else has either . It turned out that Holland found a juvenile lizard called a five-lined skink , the first for which there is a verifiable record in Rhode Island . As word spread about her discovery among local reptile enthusiasts , a second skink was found dead in early May about ten miles away in Ashaway .
Despite their distribution across much of the United States , no lizard species has ever been documented in the state . That ’ s probably because of a combination of their physiology , evolution and ecology , according to Scott Buchanan , a herpetologist for the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management , but no one really knows . Five-lined skinks are common in the Southeast , and they are found in small numbers as far north as southern Ontario and western Massachusetts . The closest known population to Rhode Island , however , is west of the Connecticut River .
How the skinks arrived in Rhode Island is a question of great debate among the state ’ s natural history community . It ’ s unlikely the animals found their way here naturally , since they don ’ t wander far and
none have been observed between western Connecticut and the Rhode Island border . Since the sites of the two Rhode Island lizards are both near building supply storage yards , some speculate that the skinks arrived in a shipment of mulch or compost .
“ In all likelihood , they ’ re hitchhikers ,” says Buchanan . “ We don ’ t know if they ’ ve ever bred here , and we don ’ t know if there are any established populations .” Unfortunately , this type of human-mediated transport happens all the time , he says .
For now , the skinks are being treated as any other exotic species found in the state : like a released pet that doesn ’ t belong here . The monitoring and management of exotic / invasive species is a conservation priority for DEM and Buchanan is gathering as much information as he can about other possible sightings . He does not take the skink sightings to represent an expansion of our biodiversity , but it ’ s difficult to know what the observations mean in the long-term .
“ What ’ s going to happen in 100 years is impossible to know and virtually impossible to control ,” he says . “ They could become established and become part of our naturalized fauna .”
RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l MARCH 2021 17