Jambo. You are about to see a little “pet store chameleon” (a green anole, actually: not a real chameleon) decide he’s in the mood for love. He’ll try to attract the female by showing his dewlap and doing a lot of head-bobbing.
These same gestures are also used to threaten rivals.
Head-bobbing intrigues me because so many unrelated lizards, thousands of miles apart geographically, do it–and for the same reasons: courtship, threat, defense of territory. This is an aspect of lizard life that has no way of being preserved in any fossil record. Which in turn is a reminder that we don’t know an awful lot about animals–especially prehistoric ones.
None of my lizards ever head-bobbed at me. I must be a nice guy.
Oddly enough, real chameleons don’t head-bob.
I know some of you have bearded dragons. Do they eventually give up head-bobbing–or do they always find some occasion for it?
