The Desert Lizard Dance

Or, how to keep your fingers cool

There are some animals I never think about. Then, for some reason, I do, and my life is made that much better by it.

Meet the Shovel-snouted Lizard.

This is a tiny little lizard who lives in Angola and Namibia, where the desert can reach extreme temperatures. And because, to use a worn and hackneyed phrase, nature abhors a vacuum, a bunch of organisms still decided to live there.

Now, all organisms have a number of adaptations to the environment they evolved to live in. Usually when people talk about adaptations, they’re talking about physical characteristics. Penguins have blubber to keep them warm, jackrabbits have long ears to cool down faster, etc. And these are all very important to the survival of an individual.

However, what’s even more interesting (to me, at least) is the behavioral adaptations. In other words, what organisms do to thrive and survive in their natural habitat. And to illustrate this point, let’s get back to our friend the Shovel-snouted Lizard.

As anyone who has walked across a beach on a hot, sunny day knows, sand gets hot. Like, very hot. So hot that you want to throw your towel down and run to the water before you start getting blisters on your feet.

This strategy (in itself a behavioral response to an external stimulus) works very well when you live by the water. Unfortunately for our little lizard, deserts are not known for their abundance of cool water. So they’ve had to find another solution.

Except in extreme conditions, mammals and birds are able to maintain a stable body temperature, making them endotherms. Humans, for example, are more or less fine whether it’s 50 F or 90 F, and if it gets much lower or higher than that, then we’ll start putting on sweaters or going swimming or something else to help regulate our internal temperature.

Lizards, however, are ectotherms, meaning they don’t produce their own heat. This makes it even more important for them to regulate their internal temperature through behavior, because their bodies won’t do it for them.

So what can our shovel-snouted friend do to avoid burning to a crisp on the hot sand?

Start to dance, obviously.

In one of my favorite styles of animal dances, the lizard lifts two of its legs up at a time and holds them in the air for a few seconds. This allows the feet to cool down. Then, when the two feet still on the ground start to protest, they switch, so the cooler feet are now back on the sand and the hot feet get a break. And so on and so forth.

Eventually, though, the desert gets too hot even for this strategy, so another one comes into play: swimming under the sand. The lizard takes a running start, dives into the sand, and just swims its way into the cooler sand under the surface (but not so far below it can’t breathe). This technique earned it its other name, the Namib sand-diver.

I don’t know if these behaviors are learned or innate, and I won’t get into it now anyway because the difference between the two is a huge source of debate in the biological science community. But I do know that this little lizard, not much bigger than a thumb, knows how to survive in a desert, and that’s pretty cool.

For a video on the lizard, click here; for an article, click here.