Michael Bull's decades-long study discovered more than a three year project ever could.
(ABC RN: Ann Jones)
One man was behind almost everything we know about sleepy lizards.
We know that sleepy lizards live for 50 years in the wild; that they display an incredible system of perennial monogamy, coming together in an elaborate annual, slow-motion dance.
We know they have long-term friends and foes and a complex social network.
And we know that they grieve.
We know all this because of a 35-year study led by Flinders University's Michael Bull at a place called Bundey Bore in South Australia.
"It's a big slow-moving skink," Professor Bull told me when we spoke last year.
"It's around about 30cm long, it weighs up to nearly a kilogram and it's got armoured scales which give it protection."
Also known as the shingleback, the stumpy tail, the pinecone lizard and the bob-tail goanna,Tiliqua rugosa is found across southern Australia.
"When you come across it, its main form of defence is to open up its mouth and hiss at you with a big, blue tongue.
It looks quite imposing," said Professor Bull.
Bundey Bore Station is in the rain shadow of the Mount Lofty Ranges.
You drive off an escarpment at Burra onto flat, dry land, which continues that way until you reach the Murray River.
The flats are home to many thousands of sleepy lizards, which are omnivorous.
However, their puny legs mean they mostly eat foliage, especially flowers.
Michael Bull researched sleepy lizards for more than three decades.
(ABC RN: Ann Jones)
It's not uncommon to see a sleepy lizard with its mouth stuffed with flowers petals sticking to its lips.
As an honours student, Professor Bull's focus was parasites, specifically the ticks that suck sleepy lizards' blood.
But as his work continued, he became more and more endeared to the ticks' slow moving hosts.
Then he noticed something strange.
"During the springtime we have this incredible situation where the male will follow closely after the female for many days and up to eight weeks before they get to mate," said Professor Bull.
"The male follows the female within a few centimetres; it's like a little train.
"When I first saw this I was a young biologist and thought that since the sleepy lizard was one of the more common species in southern Australia, certainly that everyone would've seen this and would know about it."
The sleepy lizard can live up to 50 years in the wild.
(ABC RN: Ann Jones)
When Professor Bull returned the next year, he found the same two lizards together.
"I looked in the literature, and found that nobody had reported it in any other lizard anywhere in the world," he said.
"So this really common species was showing this completely unique behaviour."
The studies led by Professor Bull completely overturned the previous understanding of reptiles as scaly, unsociable recluses.
His investigations revealed complex social networks between lizards, which visit and share overnight safe zones with each other, and can navigate well outside of their own small territories, making their way back home like a very slow homing pigeon.
Death of a researcher
Professor Michael Bull completed his last field visit for 2016.
A lizard hissed at him with its blue tongue and its mouth full of flowers and he drove the highway back to Adelaide from Burra. Another field season was wrapping up.
Then, one morning after his normal exercise, Professor Bull had a heart attack in the gym change room and died. He was 69.
The immediate responsibility for informing everyone involved in the study fell to Associate Professor Mike Gardner, a former student and Professor Bull's presumed successor, though no real planning for a takeover had been undertaken.
"When I rang Dale he was in the field at Bundey Bore," Professor Gardner said.
"I rang him up and I said what'd happened to Mike, and that he'd passed away.
He said 'thank you very much' and hung up on me quite abruptly.
"Then five minutes later he rang me back and said: 'Sorry about that, I just had a moment.'" Listen to Off Track
Mr Burzacott had worked with Professor Bull for 35 years in an incredibly long and fruitful research relationship.
Mr Burzacott had all the hands-on experience, and though there was still no official succession planning in place, he attempted to impart what he knew to Professor Gardner.
"I now see that Dale was trying hard to tell me what was happening in the field.
He kept shooting information at me and I kept putting him off," said Professor Gardner.
"Everything's great in hindsight."
Then, just a few months later, at 3:00am on a Tuesday morning, Mr Burzacott had a brain aneurysm.
He was taken to hospital brain dead, and was pronounced deceased.
"Both of these people passed away within a few months of each other with a body of work that is substantial," Professor Gardner said.
"I think this data set is bigger than both of them.
It's something that needs to be continued not because of them, but for the rest of science really."
The death of the study's academic leader and the logistical organiser within months of each other was a tragedy for ecological monitoring in Australia.
Academics are highly specialised, no-one is like another, no filing system is quite the same, no post-graduate supervision approach is equal, no thinking is identical, and they often approach their work in such idiosyncratic ways.
It isn't entirely obvious how the 35 years of the study was organised in practical terms.
But Professor Gardner has pulled together a group of Professor Bull's former graduate students, now academics scattered the world over, and field assistants from years gone by to help him undertake the first season of sleepy lizard studies without Professor Bull or Mr Burzacott out in the scrub.
But despite the goodwill, the future of the project is unclear and funding is uncertain. Professor Gardner estimates there is just a 20 per cent chance of gaining funding in the Australian Research Council grant system this year.
"I'm definitely committed to doing this," said Professor Gardner.
"It's vital to the ecological community in Australia that we continue this, because long-term data sets are extremely rare and this one is probably the longest-running lizard survey in the southern hemisphere, if not the world."
Michael Bull and Dale Burzacott are missed by their friends, colleagues and families.
And after their work proved conclusively that sleepy lizards had long-term relationships, internal maps of their world, annual rituals and rhythms, maybe they will also be missed by several hundred reptiles who live in the scrub at Bundey Bore.
After: Michael Bull in 2016 (Supplied by Grant Smyth)
