Читать книгу Extreme Nature - Mark Carwardine - Страница 38

NAME	Texas horned lizard Phrynosoma cornutum
LOCATION	southern USA and Mexico
ABILITY	blood squirting

© Raymond Mendez/Oxford Scientific Films

Revered by native peoples for thousands of years, the Texas horned lizard has an array of abilities. It eats mainly ants – and lots of them, since much of an ant is indigestible. This necessitates a huge stomach. Eating more than 200 ants a day means exposure in the open for long periods, and being stomach-heavy means a horned lizard finds it difficult to scamper away from predators.

Instead, it relies on an armoury of defences. It has camouflage colouring, with an outline broken by spines and outgrowths, and it will freeze if a predator approaches. Its horns and spines can pierce the throat of a snake or bird, and it can hiss and blow itself up to look even more fearsome. When it comes to coyotes, foxes and dogs, a horned lizard’s most spectacular defence is to squirt foul-tasting blood from sinuses behind its eyes. That usually has the desired effect. But it squirts only when it’s provoked, since it risks losing up to a quarter of its blood.

Such abilities are, however, no defence against human invasion of its land. Its strange shape and colouring has made it attractive to reptile collectors, and its habit of freezing means it is prone to being run over. And with humans have come exotic fire ants, which it can’t eat and which are replacing the native ants on which the lizard depends – a sorry way for such a determined survivor to go.