Almost Magic

A couple of weeks ago, Iain was on fall break, and he and Tom went to Florida to kayak a couple of rivers.  I took several days off that week, including the two days they were gone; I thought I'd get some things done (I did, although not much) and look after the dog, who is not used to being home alone all day.

One of those days I was home by myself with the dog, I was sitting at the dining room table doing something on my computer, and heard a rustling sound from the kitchen.  It was not a loud sound, just a plastic bag changing position.  The first time it happened I thought it might be happening on its own - a draft or gravity or something, not anything that meant anything.  When I heard it again I only had one thought, that there was a rat in the kitchen.  We have had rats in the house before, and I found this a quite upsetting idea.  I looked; I didn't want to, but I felt that I had to, and I didn't see anything.  Relieved, I went back to whatever it was I was doing.

A little while later, I heard it again.  There definitely was something moving around the plastic bags with produce in them that were on the kitchen counter.  It did not sound big enough to be a rat.  Maybe it was a mouse, but it was something.  So I looked again, and saw a lizard that was just starting to make its way up the wall.  So I grabbed a plastic container and caught it.  It wasn't happy.

It was a green anole,  Having pursued many small lizards in the wild over the years and failing to catch them, I figured I could keep this one for a little while, given that it had intruded into my kitchen.  So I went to Pet Supplies Plus and got a plastic terrarium and a dollar's worth of small crickets, and put some dirt and a plant and the lizard it it. 

The lizard spent most of its time immobile on the small plant or on the sides or top of the terrarium.  Green anoles change color.  Sometimes they are green and sometimes they are brown.  This one was brown most of the time but one evening I couldn't find it when I looked; it was green, and sitting on a leaf, was so well camouflaged I didn't see it for several minutes, even though I knew it must be somewhere in that small container.  

Caroline came home over the weekend.  She had had a pair of green anoles as pets for a time and pointed out that this one, lacking the characteristic dewlap that male anoles have, was a female.  By then Iain was back from Florida and he noted that the lizard was molting.  We didn't know that lizards molted but that is what this one did, that first weekend.

The terrarium eventually got moved off the dining room table onto a shelf.  There were still crickets and I figured I'd turn it loose when the crickets were gone.  Every day I misted the terrarium, but I was getting ready to go out of town for a week and I didn't want to ask Tom to take care of it, so last weekend I figured it was time to let it go.

So I took the terrarium into the back yard and took the lid off of it and watched.  I thought the lizard would make a run for it immediately, but it didn't.  

It was immobile, except for its head; it looked around from its perch on a philodendron leaf.  

Over the next several minutes, it turned nearly completely green, starting from its armpits (if a lizard can be said to have armpits).

Only then did it move from the philodendron leaf, to freedom.

Since then I've read a little about color changes in anoles.  There is less known about this that you would think there might be.  Color changes in anoles are thought to have less to do with camouflage than with level of stress.   According to Wikipedia, the green anole (or Carolina anole, in this article) has three layers of chromatophores in its skin that account for the color changes.  

But watching it last Saturday morning it almost seemed like magic.