Çiğdem Eroğlu
MSc Herpetology · Ankara
Biologist with an MSc in herpetology. I study the life histories of Anatolian lizards — how long they live, how fast they grow, and where they still hold ground — and work today in clinical analysis at a public health laboratory.
How old is that lizard, and how do you know?
Reptile bone records the seasons. In temperate species, each winter of reduced activity leaves a thin, dense line of arrested growth — a LAG — in the cortical bone, and a cross-section through a single toe phalanx preserves that record for the animal's whole life.
What lives here, and is it still here next season?
Faunistic survey is unglamorous and irreplaceable. Walking fixed transects at set times of day across a season, recording every amphibian and reptile encountered with its habitat, substrate and microclimate, builds the baseline against which every later change is measured.
The same discipline, a different specimen.
Since 2025 I have worked in the urinalysis laboratory of the Ankara Public Health Laboratory, performing physical, chemical and microscopic analysis of clinical samples under national quality-control protocol. Earlier, I prepared environmental assessment reports for landscape projects — site inventories of flora and fauna with habitat description and mitigation advice.
Kaplan, Ç., Tok, C. V.
Selçuk University Journal of Science Faculty, 2021
Tok, C. V., Günay, U. K., Yakın, B. Y., Kaplan, Ç.
Doğanın Sesi, 1 (2): 3–17
They share the same slopes and the same summer, but not the same clock. Comparing how fast each one grows, matures and ages is the simplest way to ask what body size actually costs a lizard.