Southern Alligator Lizard

Fascinating facts about the Southern Alligator Lizard

• The southern alligator lizard includes western black widow spiders in its diet and can tolerate the spider's potent venom. Its broader menu also features small arthropods, slugs, other lizards, tiny mammals and occasional young birds or eggs. By eating such a range it can thrive in diverse habitats from grasslands to urban yards. This venom immunity lets it safely exploit a prey that many predators avoid.
• Its tail is long, somewhat prehensile and can be twice the length of the body, giving the lizard a total length of up to a foot. When threatened the lizard can autotomise, shedding the tail to distract a predator and increase its chance of escape.
• A band of smaller granular scales runs along each side, creating folds that let the body expand to hold food or eggs. This expansion is facilitated by 14 rows of keeled scales across the back and the flexible skin between them.
• After the eggs are laid, the female remains with the clutch, defending it until the young emerge. She usually deposits the eggs between May and June in decaying wood or plant matter, which helps keep them warm. The species can produce two clutches each year, a pattern that begins after spring mating that runs from April to May. The eggs then hatch in late summer or early autumn, completing the reproductive cycle.
• When it feels threatened, the southern alligator lizard will bite and even defecate on a handler as a vigorous self-defence. It is frequently encountered close to human dwellings, often foraging in the mornings and evenings. You can commonly see it in suburban yards, garages and other garden structures where it searches for prey. This bold behaviour makes it a noticeable resident of urban and garden habitats.

Sources

Every fact above was checked against these pages, and kept only where one of them states it.

• Wikipedia

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