Tag: lizards

What Are Slowworms?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Hi, kreeg-ah, Mr. Nature here. I have been asked, “What are slowworms?” Well, the little fellow in the picture is a slowworm, lapping up a drop of water.

Slowworms are small legless lizards from Europe. You might wonder how you tell them apart from snakes, but once you’ve seen them, you’ll appreciate the difference.

Slowworms are a nice bronze color with engaging little faces. They make good pets, if you can keep them supplied with live food in the form of slugs and earthworms. WARNING: Slugs and earthworms pick up any pesticide that’s been tossed around the neighborhood, which makes it easy to poison your slowworms. I learned that lesson the hard way.

Slowworms tame quickly, they learn to recognize you and take food from your hand, and if nothing bad happens to him, a slowworm can live for up to 50 years. And of course, large-scale habitat destruction throughout Europe is whittling away at their numbers.

Still, here we see again that God knows how to put good things in small packages.

A Prehistoric Mystery

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Here’s a bunch of hands stenciled onto a cave wall by prehistoric artists with a lot of time on their… er, hands. But the hands in the Sahara cave are too small to be human.

In many places throughout Europe and elsewhere, cave-dwellers used to blow a mist of paint through a tube to create stencils of their hands on the walls. It was a very common pastime. Well, it was still the Ice Age outside, they had to find something to do to stave off cabin fever (before cabins were invented).

Scientists exploring a cave in Egypt were puzzled by hand stencils made of very, very small hands, smaller than a baby’s ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3469858/Tiny-handprints-Stone-Age-shelter-NOT-human-8-000-year-old-baby-stencils-Cave-Beasts-created-lizards.html ). Having ruled out human hands, the best theory they could come up with was that these are the outlines of lizard hands.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it for a while.

There was no Ice Age in the Sahara, and back when these paintings were made, it wasn’t a desert. There are lots and lots of paintings here of people and animals, lots and lots of stenciled hands–and these little bitty stenciled hands.

Why would anyone go to the trouble to stencil-paint a bunch of lizard hands? We take it for granted that the lizards didn’t do it themselves. I have a lot of experience with lizards, and I can tell you it’d be hard to get a lizard to hold still while you made a stencil of his paw. A dead lizard would suffice–but why would anybody do this?

We are not told whether the scientists have bothered to rule out space aliens, gnomes, or fairies.

My money’s on the gnomes.

When Lizard Etiquette Fails

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Hi, Mr. Nature here! No more politics for a while, eh? Let’s look at lizards instead.

Here is an adult male bearded dragon–they’re from Australia, and have become very popular as pets–getting upset with his reflection in the mirror because it doesn’t seem to know the rules that govern lizard interaction. It just copies whatever gesture the real lizard makes. Anyone who has had a kid brother or sister knows how irritating that can be.

A lot of unrelated kinds of lizards use head-bobbing as a means of communication. The polite response, among bearded lizards, is to answer the head-bob with a submissive gesture, which keeps everything nice and peaceful. If you bob back, as the reflection does, you’re looking for a fight.

Note the lizard running around, trying to see if he can get behind the mirror to take a bite out of the supposed newcomer. Like most animals, lizards can’t recognize a reflection for what it is. Unlike some people, they won’t fall in love with it.

When I was a kid, I had a dime-store “chameleon” (not a real chameleon, but a Carolina anole) who went absolutely postal whenever he saw his reflection. You wouldn’t believe how mad he got.

In real lizard life, though, head-bobbing, arm-waving, stomping, push-ups, and other gestures often preserve the peace and keep lizards from getting injured in fights. Once they get to know each other better, and decide they can get along, they stop the head-bobbing.

My iguana never head-bobbed because he got along with everybody–except for a certain cat who would come into the room for no good purpose, and the iguana knew it. Her he would attack on sight, never mind the head-bobbing. With the other cat and the schnauzer he was the best of friends.