So I live in a SoCal location which has encouraged gentle residents to rip out their turf lawns and replace them with water friendly gardens. Many neighbors and I have done so happily. Also got paid. But aren’t there always unintended consequences? Turns out we transformed our suburban, gopher friendly lawnscapes with this beautiful lizard habitat. These guys are having a great time. The dogs are specifically tuned in.
So we’re watching this lizard coming over the wall and hiding in this rose bush. Apparently he lives on the other side of the wall and spends time on our side doing lizard business. Well he’s hiding in the rosebush, and I see him come up to the top of the fence, run for a few feet and stop. The light was right and we had a good view. A little flying bug came fluttering around him. (Her? I don’t know.) It fluttered off the other direction, and the lizard took off. We saw the tongue come out and, poof, the buggy was gone. I have never seen that before, live.
Cool. I like having lizards in the yard; wish we had more. Your Wiki link had something I didn’t know:
“Studies have shown Lyme disease is lower in areas where the lizards occur. When ticks carrying Lyme disease feed on these lizards’ blood (which they commonly do, especially around their ears), a protein in the lizard’s blood kills the bacterium in the tick that causes Lyme disease. The infection inside the ticks’ gut is therefore cleared and the tick no longer carries Lyme disease.”
We basically have 3 types of lizards where I live in So Cal., Alligator, blue belly and Uta. The alligator lizards do fine in my yard but the Blue Bellies start off good and seem to be getting established when a cat will come in and wipe them out within a couple of years. I transplant them into my yard from the local fields.
I had two bearded dragons and a water dragon at one point. One of my beardies would snatch flies out of the air if they got near her tank. It was kinda nice knowing that if a fly got into the apartment, it would probably be gone within a few hours.
When our tortoise was tiny, I added a few Isopods (aka rolliepollie bugs) to his environment. The African Spur Thighed tortoise’s diet is 99.9% vegetarian (grasses, weeds, flowers, cacti) but they will opportunistically eat insects.
I watched him “hunt” an Isopod one day. He’d follow it around, then stop and try to grab it, but it would move, causing him to miss. I watched him try to get it for about thirty minutes, then he finally caught it.
Never saw it with a lizard, but one night I was outside and came across a large toad. I happened to have my camera with me and switched it to infrared mode and followed the toad around, watching it in “night vision” on the camera’s display. I was hoping to get a shot of it capturing something with a high shutter speed and flash, but while I saw it snap up several bugs, the camera never captured the fraction of a second that the tounge was out. (I really wish I had had a more modern camera with a multiple shot per second burst mode and bright LED.)
We have these critters at our house in Hawaii. They are somewhat new, as an invasive species that more or less took over from the far less beautiful pinkish-brown geckos they have displaced.
While invasives are generally considered bad, I gather these guys aren’t raising any alarm bells yet. My experience with them has been very positive. They don’t seem to leave as much poop in the house, and it’s easier to clean up than the old-style geckos. They also exhibit some pet-like behavior - you can roll a marble across the floor and a gecko will zoom after it and lick it, hoping it’s food. They also motivate me to keep my kitchen counters very clean - but before I get all the crumbs wiped up, I’ll most likely get to see a gecko delicately licking whatever crumbs are out. They are very fond of sweets and are guaranteed to appear if I have cookies cooling on a wire rack.
Down here in San Diego where I live, I see mostly alligator and blue bellies. I had noticed the cycles with the blue bellies from predators (I always assumed more birds than cats). But then a predator for the outdoor/stray cats came along: coyotes (they have always been here, but with the drought their diet changed with the lack of rabbits and ground squirrels). So now the blue bellies are rebounding.
One thing I had to get used to after moving to SW FLA was the continuous “Bow wave” of scattering lizards that would precede me whenever I’d walk around in just about any residential area. most of them are anoles, either brown or Cuban, in the vegetation or geckos hanging around the door light at night. But I have seen some native green anoles and even a large skink once or twice. There are a few curly tailed lizards which scare me sometimes because at first glance they can look like scorpions.
I’ve gotten really tired of lizards falling on my head when I open my front door.
Monitor lizards are the coolest but don’t exist in N. America except as an invasive species in Florida. I had a Nile Monitor for a while. Like a crocodile that climbs trees.