Few herping trips are more difficult, than reaching Pori island. Pori or Prasonisi is a very small, uninhabited islet north of the very small inhabited (20 people) Antikythera island, which in turn is situated between Peloponnese and Crete. Even reaching Antikythera can be difficult sometimes depending on the weather, and the ship connection is very sparse. But to go to Pori you need to hire a private boat. Antikythera is so small that it is very difficult to find a boat, so many a herper have reached Pori from Kythera, which is a long boat trip. I had set foot on Pori many years ago for monitoring sea-bird nests, and I saw those lizards everywhere. I thought of them as a subspecies of Podarcis erhardii and in the August heat I didn't spare them a second look. Imagine my dismay when some years later I learned for the newly described Pori wall lizard Podarcis levendis. I had to go back. But it was very difficult to reach the islet.
Speaking with friends Petros Lymberakis and Ilias Strachinis we agreed that we had to make this trip one day. Petros has been on the island many times before and was one of the guys that gave the name to the species. In August 2017 Bobby Bok with a team planned to go there and we arranged to go together. But the boatmen from Kythera were not positive on the phone and advised me not to go there because no one would hire a boat to us. Another opportunity lost.
To make a long story short, in spring 2018, Antigoni Kaliontzopoulou, another scientist that was involved in the naming of the lizard, needed DNA anew for a scientific project and asked Petros to go there again. That was a perfect opportunity in the middle of the spring. Petros called Ilias Strachinis, who called me, who called Elias Tzoras, and the trip began. Ilias came fron Thessaloniki to Patras and all of us traveled to Neapolis, where we camped for he night.
We reached Antikythera at last, were we met with Antigoni, Spanish Fernando Martinez Freiria, and Portuguese Neftali Sillero and Veronica Gomezed, and just wait for Petros that would come on his own from Crete, by his inflatable speed-boat!
Next morning with a light breeze off we went, to the rocky island.
So we finally reached the rock. It was a steep place but Petros is a very experienced skipper, so off the boat and on the rock we jumped.
The lizards were everywhere. Not very easy to get close for photos, but you could see them easily. Finally we managed to focus our lenses on them! At long last!
After this very successful day, we slowly made our way back to our boat, happy as one can be.
Podarcis levendis is a very large Podarcis lizard. This phenomenon called gigantism is common on islands. They are living here and on the nearby islet of Lagouvardos, which is even smaller. These two populations are the only in the world and are two different subspecies because they are isolated for millennia. The larger Kythera and Antikythera islands ( closest land masses to the north and south) have no species of Podarcis at all. It seems that Podarcis levendis is a species of some ancient lineage that somehow managed to cling on these two rocks, as the Aegean sea was going through transformations during geological eras.
More Podarcis levendis photos can be found at www.greeknature.com