Complete Guide To The Green Anole Lizard

How To Find Green Anole Lizards

• Green Anole Lizards are one of the easiest reptiles to spot in North Carolina.
• They are diurnal and active throughout the day.
• Many individual lizards, especially males, bask out in the open in bright sunlight, although they’re never far from trees or bushes into which they can escape if needed.
• Look for Green Anole Lizards throughout North Carolina, in and around shrubs, trees, and on the walls of buildings.
• You can also listen for the rustling movement they make when they dart away.
  • If you back off and stay quiet and patient, Green Anoles often creep back out into the open and resume their activities. This makes them easy, and entertaining, to observe.
• If you’re in the mood for a (kind of spooky) nature adventure, try searching for Green Anole Lizards at night with a flashlight.
  • Their scales reflect light and make them glow a strange, ghostly yellow-white.
  • But remember to enjoy the spectacle quickly and move on. Don’t spotlight the lizards with your flashlight for more than a second or two.
    • What is visible to us becomes visible to nocturnal predators, and helping a lizard get eaten would be poor repayment for the thrill they give us by being so easy to find at night.

Green Anoles: The Great Color-Changing Lizard of North Carolina

• Special pigments embedded in their skin cells allow Green Anole lizards to change color from bright, lime green to dark brown in minutes both at will, and in response to environmental and seasonal conditions.
• Some people question whether Green Anole Lizards change color to match their surroundings.
  • But I’ve witnessed them doing so too many times to question that they do in fact respond to potent threats by trying to blend into the background.
  • Their transformation from bright green when perched amongst green leaves to dark brown within moments of darting into dead leaf litter is truly remarkable and an exciting event to witness.
• Green Anole Lizards also change color in response to temperature.
  • In cool temperatures, they turn brown and bask in the sun. The darker color helps them soak up more solar radiation and warm faster.
• These reptiles also change color in response to stress, like during breeding season, and in response to light levels (usually turning bright green in bright sunlight and brown in dim light).

Drop Your Tail And Run: Tail Autotomy In Green anole Lizards

• Green Anole Lizards have excellent eyesight and hearing and watch and listen for predators.
  • When threatened, they usually leap into vegetation and scramble up as high as they go go, even if they start out on the ground.
• But if escape is impossible, and predator attacks, Green Anole Lizards have a special type of defense mechanism called “tail autotomy”.
• Tail autotomy means that these reptiles can break off the ends of their long, fragile tails to escape predators without hurting themselves.
  • When a predator grabs a Green Anole Lizard’s tail, special breakage planes within the lizard’s tail snap and separates the tail end from the lizard’s body.
    • Reflexive muscle action causes the tail end to twitch for several moments after separation, which hopefully distracts the attacker and gives the lizard time to scurry or jump to safety.
• Tail separation doesn’t hurt the lizards and Green Anoles can regrow their tails, given enough time.
  • Unfortunately, tailless individuals are especially vulnerable to predators during the regrowth process because they’ve already lost one of their defenses.
  • Regrown tails never reach the same length as the originals, which can also hinder the lizards’ balance and how they are perceived by members of the opposite sex.
  • Losing and regrowing a tail also uses a lot of energy and nutrients that the lizards must obtain and replace.
  • For all these reasons, Green Anole Lizards only drop their tails during desperate situations as a last-ditch survival strategy.

On The Menu: What Green Anole Lizards Eat

• Green Anole Lizards hunt by sight using their excellent vision.
  • They either sneak up on, or rush, their prey then snap the prey up into their mouths.
    • Green Anole lizards have many tiny, very sharp teeth.
• Green Anole Lizards eat a tremendous number of different insects including:
  • Grasshoppers
  • Crickets
  • Beetles, like Japanese Beetles (Popillia japonica)
  • Flies
  • Butterflies
  • Moths
  • Other insects like cockroaches (yay!)
• They also eat other small arthropods, like spiders.

What Eats Green Anole Lizards

• Predators of Green Anole Lizards include:
  • Birds like:
    • Red-Shouldered Hawks (Buteo lineatus)
    • Red-Tailed Hawks (Buteo jamaicensis)
    • American Kestrels (Falco sparverius).
  • Large orb weaver spiders like:
    • Yellow Garden Orb Weaver Spiders (Argiope aurantia)
    • Golden Silk Orb Weaver Spiders (Trichonephila clavipes):
      • These spiders only prey on Green Anole Lizards when the lizards accidentally become tangled in their webs; the spiders never actively hunt prey.
      • But these spiders are definitely large enough—and have venom strong enough—to make excellent meals out of Green Anole Lizards.
  • Snakes like:
    • Corn Snakes (Elaphe guttata)
    • Pine Wood Snakes (Rhadinaea flavilata)
    • Black Racer Snakes (Coluber constrictor)
    • Kingsnakes in genus Lampropeltis, like:
      • Scarlet Kingsnakes (L. triangulum)
      • Eastern Kingsnake (L. getula getula) (Gibbons and Dorcas 2005).

Mating And Reproduction

• Reproduction in Green Anole Lizards is controlled by photoperiod and occurs during the longer days of summer.
  • Watching males display triggers ovulation in female Green Anole lizards.
  • They can lay one egg every two weeks and can store sperm within their bodies for many months, so can lay viable eggs even if they haven’t mated in some time (Martof et al. 1980).
    • Eggs are about 0.25 inches (6.4 mm) long and 0.19 inches (5 mm) wide (Tyning 1990).
  • Females lay their smooth, off-white, rubbery-looking eggs in leaf litter, rock piles, moist debris, and depressions on the ground.
  • Assuming they’re not eaten in the meantime, Green Anole eggs hatch in about seven weeks.
  • Hatchlings are tiny replicas of adults (only about an inch and a half long) and must fend for themselves—their parents provide no care.

• Juvenile Green Anole Lizards shed their skin as they grow.

• Because these reptiles rely on sight, Green Anole Lizards communicate through body language including:
  • Push-ups – rapidly bend and straighten their front legs while holding their bodies stiff.
  • Head nods – hold their bodies still but nod their heads up and down.
  • Dewlap extension.
• Green Anole Lizards are territorial. Both sexes maintain territories but for different reasons.
  • Females establish their territories based on food and allow their territories to overlap with those of other females.
  • Males establish breeding territories that can encompass feeding territories of several females.
  • Territories can range in size from a few square feet to areas of one hundred feet or more in diameter. They are always three-dimensional and include vertical area like shrubs and trees.
• Male Green Anoles defend their breeding territories aggressively and put themselves at great risk to do so.
  • First, they spend a lot of time out in the open in bright sunlight performing push-ups and extending their dewlaps to both attract females and deter potential male rivals with their physical fitness and endurance.
    • Unfortunately, this makes them very obvious to passing predators—unlike females, who are more apt to remain hidden in vegetation as they watch and judge the males’ displays.
  • Second, while male Green Anoles always try to intimidate potential interlopers away from their females, these attempts don’t always work.
    • If a rival male insists on entering another male’s territory—despite having been warned off by the resident male’s push-ups and dewlap size—the two lizards will fight.
    • Green Anole Lizards have many sharp teeth that can do a lot of damage even to their scaled skin, so males risk serious injury for the chance to mate.

Dewlap Extension In Green Anole Lizards

• Dewlap extension is a huge part of Green Anole Lizard life.
• Males extend their bright pink dewlaps to attract watching females and warn away rival males.
  • The highly visible dewlaps might also communicate to lurking predators that they’ve been spotted and that their planned attacks might be wasted effort.
• Interestingly enough, dewlap size doesn’t correlate to body size or bite force in large, mature Green Anole Lizards, but does explain “a significant proportion in the variation in jump distance, velocity and acceleration” across all all individuals (Vanhooydonck et al. 2005, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-005-0022-y).
• In “small mature males and juveniles of both sexes, dewlap size is an indicator of size and of bite strength” (Vanhooydonck et al. 2005, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-005-0022-y), possibly so that smaller, more physically vulnerable individuals can advertise their ability to fight back if physically challenged.