Christmas Island Reptiles

Christmas Island National Park’s captive breeding facility is known as the Lizard Lodge. The enclosures of the Lizard Lodge hold almost every blue-tailed skink and Lister’s gecko known to exist. There’s a much smaller breeding population at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo, but this facility, in the lizards’ native environment, represents their last, best hope for survival.

Christmas Island was once home to five endemic reptiles, but today it’s quite possible that only one of these species survives in the wild. What is known is that small-island populations are hit hard by introduced pests and diseases. Prior to the late 1880s, people rarely visited remote Christmas Island, and never permanently settled. But when people eventually did stay to mine the island’s phosphate, they brought with them a range of invasive hitchhikers. After millions of years evolving in isolation, the island’s endemic reptiles suddenly had company. Five new non-native reptiles arrived, among them the voracious wolf snake, as well as a cadre of other aggressors, including yellow crazy ants and giant centipedes.

The Lizard Lodge was built in 2014 as a safe place for the remaining lizards, with enclosures free from predation and carefully furnished to make the inhabitants feel at home. Since 2009, these captive populations have dramatically increased and now can’t all be held within the existing facilities. The expansion project was undertaken in 2015 with funding from FNPW. Within each tank are arranged sticks, rocks and sheets of bark for the lizards to lounge upon. There are also small wooden boxes, about the size of a deck of cards, crafted to mimic the nooks and crannies of the island’s porous limestone.

Local community and tourists have been involved through educational, photography, and volunteering activities. Before this expansion, captive populations had reached a peak number that could be protected within the existing facilities. Now new enclosures mean reptile populations can continue to grow and, once threats have been mitigated, they’ll be released into the wild.