This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Jason Goldman. At about 7.30 p.m. on September 7, 2017, Hurricane Irma reached the Turks and Caco's Islands.

By the next morning a neighborhood called Blue Hill was gone.

And on South Caco's Island, 75% of rooftops were obliterated. Two weeks later, Hurricane Maria followed in Irma's

destructive footsteps. And Harvard University biologist Colin Donahue

happened to be there a few days before the hurricanes blew through.

The Turks and Cacos Islands

is home to a couple of different endemic species of lizard, that's lizards that are only found there.

We were interested in one in particular called Anolis Scriptus, the Turks and Kekosinol.

The mission of that first expedition before the two hurricanes The to eradicate the islands of invasive rats, which threaten the lizards.

This work included taking detailed measurements of the bodies of lizards that they trapped

and then released.

The researchers intended to return several years later, after the rats were

gone, to reassess the lizards. But that plan changed.

We realized after the hurricanes had come through that we had a really serendipitous opportunity to test this question of whether hurricanes can act as agents of natural selection on wild populations in their path.

Now this had never really been asked before because hurricanes are just really hard to predict.

We just happened to be in the right place at the right time to have that baseline data.

Which is why he and his team returned to the archipelago, just six weeks after his first visit.

They expected that lizards with longer limbs and larger

toe pads would be the ones better able to cling to trees and therefore more likely

to survive the storms.

And they were almost right.

Longer front legs and larger toe pads indeed helped.

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