Brendan Buckley's Sixth-Grade Experiment (28 page)

• When anoles shed, they sometimes eat the skin.

• In the wild, anoles live less than 2.5 years. In captivity, they can live 3 to 6 years, with examples of up to 8 years. Unfortunately, most live less than 1 year because of owner ignorance. (Oops! That would be me.)

• Anoles reach adult size in 6 to 8 months.

• A male anole will extend his throat fan, or dewlap, when he wants other males to know they're stepping on his territory.

• In spite of what most people think, these lizards don't change color to match their surroundings. They change to
thermoregulate
, becoming darker when they're cold and lighter when they're too warm. When sleeping at night, they
adopt a light coloration, which makes them easy to collect with a flashlight. (Morgan told me this. She's actually done it.)

• Be sure to keep your anole in a glass tank with a screen top to provide adequate heating (plastic containers will melt under the lightbulbs your anole requires to stay warm). You want to have at least a 10-gallon tank (20 inches long by 12 inches high by 10 inches wide) to give your anole lots of space to run around.

• For a 10-gallon tank, you need a 40- to 60-watt bulb in a room kept at 70 to 74 degrees, assuming you've got a screen lid. The bulb should be in a reflector-type fixture.

• Your thermometer should read 85 to 90 degrees in your anole's basking spot. Daytime temps away from basking sites should be 75 to 80 degrees.

• Anoles can climb glass and will quickly escape from any uncovered enclosure. (I know all about this!)

• Spray your tank a couple of times a day with purified water (or you'll have hard-to-clean mineral deposits on the sides of the tank and plants). Humidity, measured with a hygrometer, should be kept at 50 percent or higher. Anoles drink water by lapping off leaves. They won't drink standing water unless trained to do so. To train them, set up a dripper over a dish of water.

• Your anole
is
what he or she eats, so you should only offer him the best! (Something I learned the hard way.) Commercially raised insects lose nutritional value during storage in a pet store. They should be gut-loaded with
nutrients before you feed them to your anole. For example, put your crickets in a small plastic terrarium for 12 to 24 hours and offer them ground rodent chow, high-quality tropical fish flakes, or high-protein flaked baby cereal. For water and vitamin C, offer the crickets oranges. For beta-carotene, feed the crickets grated carrots. Then give the crickets to your anole the next day. Your lizards should stay healthier that way.

• Some anoles may become comfortable with being gently handled (like Einstein was after he got used to me). At first, though, all anoles will run from you when you go to pick them up, and they may bite (something Khal can tell you about). Biting, as much as it may hurt you, may be more dangerous for them if you jerk your hand away—this can break their jaws or cause teeth to be ripped out. So handle them as little as possible, and don't jerk your hand if you get bitten. Put them back in their enclosure so that they can feel something under their feet—that will get them to let go.

• They also can drop their tails if you grab them there (this is called autotomy), and their fragile toes can be broken or injured if they're removed too roughly from branches, bark, or your clothes.

• You know you've got a sick anole on your hands if he stops eating, or will not eat very much, or if he just sits there on your hand not trying to get away. Also look for loose skin and sunken eyes. But hopefully yours won't get sick. And hopefully I'll do better with Einstein Junior!