They're everywhere!! Carolina Anoles (Anolis carolinensis)

You know how when you get fixated on something (i.e. a car, item of clothing, etc.) you tend to see it EVERYWHERE you go as if suddenly the universe is purposefully mocking you because whatever you’re after is clearly out of reach? Well that’s kind of what I’ve felt like over the semester being in Herpetology. You go on these amazing field trips, find all kinds of different reptiles and amphibians, obtain this ‘Biologist’ mentality and decide that you yourself want to be able to find all of these wonderful things without the help of others. Anyways, the point of this story is to basically say that for the last two or three weeks every single time I walk into the backdoor of my house what do I see?—Anoles! And every single time I’d like to snap a shot or a video documenting the changing from green to brown or the extending of the dewlap, my phone is either nowhere to be found, dead, or by the time I’ve got the camera up and ready, the Anole is gone. Well I finally got lucky. It happened about two days when I went into the shed in my backyard to finish laundry. As I went to open the doors I jumped back thinking that a wasp was about to fly out (I’m terribly afraid) until I realized that I was either going completely crazy or whatever was there was now gone. As I stepped back to figure out what the heck was going on, I saw an Anole, commonly called the Green Anole or Carolina Anole (Anolis carolinensis). They are found in numbers in South Carolina in backyards, climbing sides of houses, on decks and porches, they’re everywhere! They look like baby dinosaurs with pointy heads and long slender body’s. They tend to have extremely large back legs with large feet adorned with toe discs, an adaptation for their arboreal (tree) lifestyle.
Just because these lizards can be found so often doesn’t make them any less unique. Anoles possess chromatophores, layers of pigment cells that aid in the color transition displayed by these lizards. When the Anole turns brown it is often a sign of stress, when it turns green it is normally an adaptation for camouflage, protecting them from predators as well as aiding them in prey capture. Another interesting aspect of these lizards is the dewlap. The dewlap is a bright red extension off the underside of the mouth (to make this more clear it would be like humans having an extension off the underside of our chin) that aids in mating along with the movement of the head called head bobbing. And just to add to these already fascinating lizards, Anoles tails have the ability to break off, allowing them to escape from predators or fights with other Anoles. This particular characteristic is known as tail autotomy—don’t worry, the tails grow back!
The particular Anole I spotted was brown at the time, maybe a little stressed since I kept getting closer and closer in order to snap a few pictures or perhaps trying to blend in with the tones of the shed. Either way, it was great to finally capture a few brief moments of it before it quickly went away.
(Samantha Reeves, Charleston SC)