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We’ve featured some interesting animal defense mechanisms in the past,
from moths that camouflage as two flies feasting on bird poop, to
caterpillars that mimic snakes, but this horned lizard’s secret weapon
is on another level of weirdness.
The regal horned lizard is a small reptile native to Mexico and the
southwestern United States. Their main habitat is the Sonoran Desert
Mountains, where they spend most of their time eating harvester ants and
other small insects. They can eat up to twenty five hundred ants in one
meal, but if you think that’s impressive, you’ll love its most unusual
self-defense mechanism – squirting blood out of its eyes.
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Life in the Sonoran desert is pretty tough, and the regal horned lizard
has its share of predators. From snakes and carnivorous rats, to coyotes
and wolves, they all love feasting on the small reptile. Luckily for the
protagonist of this article, it has a wide range of self-defense
tactics, each specially designed to deal with specific predators.
Observing the regal horned lizard in the wild, scientists observed that
it saves its blood-squirting technique for very specific situations. For
example, if you were to pick one up and even pretend to harm it, it will
probably just sit there and maybe hiss a little. It won’t bite, scratch
and it will mot certainly not squirt blood at you. It saves that trick
for when it’s most effective.
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Squirting blood at snakes, rats or even humans does little to help the
regal horned lizard, but for some reason, it’s very effective against
canids and felids, like coyotes and bobcats. The small reptile is able
to target where it squirts the blood from its eyes, and it usually waits
until its assailant is ready to bite it, so it can shoot straight into
its mouth, where it does the most damage. Even though the blood is not
poisonous, canids and felids hate it.
“They have an almost violent reaction,” Wade Sherbrooke of the American
Museum of Natural History told the BBC. “They shake their heads, they
salivate profusely, and try to clear the material out of their mouths.”
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The blood apparently contains a toxin that binds to receptors in the
canid’s mouth, receptors that are not found in human or other species.
Sherbrooke claims to have tasted the blood many times, but didn’t detect
anything more than a mild acrid aftertaste. Coyotes and bobcats
unfortunate enough to get the blood sprayed in their mouths reportedly
take up to 15 minutes to recover. By that time the lizard is long gone.
So how does the regal horned lizard shoot blood out of its eyes? A pouch
below the lizard’s eyes, the ocular sinus, swells as it fills with
blood, and using a sudden surge of pressure, it squirts it out through
pores in its lower eyelid in a stream that can travel up to two meters.
It can shoot the blood several times if necessary.
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Sherbrooke claims that regal horned lizards are very good at
differentiating between different predators. When threatened by a whip
snake, which actively hunts its prey, it will sit still, blending in the
background, whereas when running into a rattlesnake, which waits for its
prey to get close enough, it will run for its life. Somehow it knows
what to do against every type of predators, and even though it doesn’t
always escape with its life, this ability to make the right call
increases its chances of survival.
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