ByMelissa Malamut
Published July 5, 2023
• 8 min read
There are more than 4,675 species of lizards in the world—long, short, brown, green, multicolored, large, small. They exist on every continent except Antarctica. In North America, Utah has 24 species. There are 15 native species in Florida (and almost 70 non-native and invasive). Four species even call New York State home (three native, one introduced). And although these reptiles have been around for 260 million years, they’re just now going viral.
Every Wednesday at 5 p.m. PST, tens of thousands of social media users pinch-zoom on a photo of the outdoors—to #FindThatLizard . It’s usually hiding amid vegetation, impersonating a stick on a rock, or seamlessly blending into a path like one of its chameleon cousins. It’s a real-time “Where’s Waldo” of herpetology.
The weekly challenge, called #FindThatLizard, is the brainchild of Earyn McGee, a 28-year-old herpetologist who kicked off the game on social media five years ago as a way to increase visibility and provide resources, access, and opportunity for Black women and people of color interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields.
“A lot of the time, people are just like me sitting there [thinking], ‘I wish I could do something with wildlife or animals or nature,’ and they just don’t even know that these kinds of jobs exist,” she says. “It is the coolest job in the world for me, and other people should have the resources and opportunities to be in this job. We are out here doing this work!”
McGee, who now works in conservation and engagement at the Los Angeles Zoo, started posting photos of camouflaged lizards on Twitter in 2018 (the game has since expanded to Instagram) while a grad student at the University of Arizona, where she earned a Master of Science and doctorate in Natural Resources with an emphasis in Wildlife Conservation and Management.
Before she posts the photo, McGee shows followers what kind of lizard they’ll be looking for and gives information about the species.
“I #foundthatlizard on my porch in Central Oregon the other day. They are juicy, marvelous beings!,” wrote one follower recently.
“The other day I was searching jetty pylons for the Endangered White’s seahorse, and it reminded me of the totally cool Twitter game: #FindThatLizard,” wrote a marine scientist in Australia.
Although McGee was “always obsessed” with animals and nature growing up in Georgia and California, she didn’t know there were jobs in the industry beyond zookeepers and veterinarians. But during her pre-fall internship at Howard University (where she received a Bachelor of Science in biology), she realized she could work in nature observing, collecting data, and synthesizing conclusions from that data. The focus on lizards, however, wasn’t pre-planned. There were other animals she was interested in, but some required too early a start time, and others weren’t as hands-on as she would have liked.
“I do not like waking up early in the morning, so birds [were] out, and lizards have a nice little schedule,” she says. “If I get out into the field site by 8-8:30 a.m., I know my lizards are there. And they are relatively easy to get permits for to actually handle. I wanted something that would allow me to ethically and humanely handle animals. So lizards just end up really working for me. I got lucky there.”
Of course, McGee wasn’t expecting to start an international community of lizard lovers through her weekly challenge. But after a few months of posting the #FindThatLizard game, she started noticing some growth. After a year, she was getting about 5,000 new followers a week.
McGee says people are drawn to the game for the challenge and “because of ego.” But the people who came for the challenge stayed for the lessons. “They’re like, ‘Oh, it can’t be that hard,’ and then it is, and then they’re like, ‘Let me try another one!’”
“The whole point of [the game] is to reach out to people who wouldn’t be interested in this otherwise. If you’re subscribing to Nat Geo, you’re already invested. What we need is to get people who are not invested in these things,” she says.
McGee says she’s received countless messages from people excited to learn about the scaly creatures. At first, McGee was responding to almost every comment to help build the community. “If I wasn’t responding, I was liking, I was retweeting, I was quote tweeting,” she says. McGee’s full-time job now commands most of her attention. But she still posts every Wednesday.
On June 14, for example, followers learned that western fence lizards are abundant in California and that McGee based two of her research papers on them. In mid-May, it was a photo of invasive brown anoles in Florida. Sometimes there are repeats (the lizard species, not the landscape). While most of the photos are from her work in the field, McGee will sometimes post user submissions for some variety.
A couple of years ago, when her reach hit a million with hundreds of thousands of interactions, she stopped checking analytics. Still, it was never about the numbers.
“I’ve had people who have been like, ‘I didn’t even like lizards before, and now I can appreciate their role in the ecosystem,’ or ‘I’m not as afraid of them; I don’t feel the need to kill them anymore,’ and things like that. It is great that we are having fun, but it is also about some kind of changed emotion and, ideally, changed behavior,” McGee says.
Meanwhile, #FindThatLizard is one of social media’s most wholesome clubs, and the lizards keep going viral.
While she keeps posting the weekly challenge, McGee has plans for the future, including hosting a natural history television show and creating a #FindThatLizard coffee table book.
After all, it’s McGee’s time to shine—the lizards already had 200-plus million years.
Melissa Malamut is based in South Florida and her work has appeared in multiple publications. Follow her on Twitter.
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