We intend to use the reserve's facilities as the "hosting institution" as required by the regulations covering this region and as a base for our collecting activities. I communicated with Jean-Yves Meyer, who suggested Gump Station as a possible option, and given my association with the McGuire lab at UC Berkeley through our work in the Lesser Sundas, this seemed to be a good fit. We would also like to explore the possibility of working with an interested local graduate student, who could assist in some of the planning and collecting activities on other islands (nearby or further afield). At the moment, this is a privately funded exploration with the stated goals, but with one very specific target: Hemidactylus garnotii, originally described from Tahiti, and without any tissue samples from the type locality. All gecko phylogenies use other populations, very distant from Tahiti, as the source of their DNA for this species, and I believe this might produce pervasive errors unless the situation is remedied.

Approved