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My name is Jesse Grismer.
I'm pursuing a graduate or Ph.D. degree, or dissertation degree, in Herpetology.
My father is a Herpetologist as well.
So that's kind of how I got into the game, was,
I grew up a little kid watching him and his students
do research in Baja, California and other parts of Latin America,
and I just always enjoyed it.
I just thought it was really, really cool.
Our colleague this guy, Ngo Van Tri, who this new species is named after,
we just called him Tri for the sake of pronunciation.
He's a real go getter, like he does all this stuff on his own dime,
and he really just hard charges, goes out to these places,
and goes to places that no ones ever thought to go to.
He knew that I was working on Leiolepis for my master's research,
and he also knew that my father and I
had kind of this ongoing interest in Leiolepis for a long time.
So he took it upon himself to go to southern Vietnam
and collected a large series of these things.
Sent me tissues for DNA analysis, and he sent me pictures of the specimens,
and they looked just like the females of the already known species
that we thought existed there.
So I just assumed it was that. So I started sequencing the DNA.
What happened was, is when sequencing the mitochondrial DNA,
to see who the maternal lineage or the mitochondrial Eve of these asexual species is,
and so this population that Tri had found in southern Vietnam
kept, kept coming out close related to all the other asexuals.
I called up my father and said, "Hey, do you have those specimens that Tri sent?"
And he said, "Yea." I said, "Take a look at them, but compare them to other asexuals."
We kind of came to the conclusion that, no kidding,
Tri had found this new population of new asexual species.
So just getting to the place was an eight-hour motorcycle ride,
just basically weaving on these back roads, and we'd go through villages.
Tri knew all these shortcuts,
and we didn't know where we were going so we're just following him.
We've known for a long time that people throughout Indo-China
eat the genus Leiolepis because they're very common.
They're a large lizard, and so just like anywhere else,
you know just like in the United States,
if somethings available you're going to eat it.
We saw two, you know, on our own.
They're just so difficult to catch, and so we went back to this restaurant owner
where Tri had said he originally saw them,
and the guy was like, "oh no he's got like 60 of them waiting for you guys."
And so we get there, and you know, I can't blame him,
he had a bunch of customers come in,
and he was like well, too bad, cooked them all up and sold them.
But, so he had pointed us where we could go,
and so we went and found some other local people,
and they showed us how to catch them and stuff like that, and that's how we finally got them.
But we actually went back to the restaurant and said, "Do you have anymore?"
And the guy said yea, he actually had a couple more, so we ate some of them.
It's a taste that, unfortunately, only I think a herpetologist can relate to.
And then when we got back in the lab we're able to sit down,
and we basically laid out all the other known asexuals,
including this new one, and then just came up with a set of morphological characters,
and just basically created a key to try
and diagnose it from other populations if we could.
And it turns out there were some really unique characteristics
that separated this from all the other asexuals,
and on top of that it's geographically isolated.
It's the only asexual in southern Vietnam.
The fact that there's a lot to be discovered out there, like if you know,
we're still finding species at, new species as this accelerating rate
at the fact in which some of them are even being eaten by local people.
It speaks to the fact that there is still a lot to be discovered out there,
and a lot to be explored, which I think is a good thing.