andersonbowen.comBLOG

the cats have taught me something that i never knew about lizards.

i knew that lizards could lose their tails and regrow new ones, and i thought/assumed that the reason they would lose their tail is if something had a hold on the tail, the lizard could jettison it and escape. that’s partly true, but it’s more interesting than that. uno and ttaano have both discovered their inner predator here in africa and are fond of bringing in lizards that they have caught to show off their prize to their humans. so i have witnessed this a number of times firsthand.

the lizards tend to be large and other than sitting there in the cat’s mouth, look to be be doing ok and seem to be unharmed. they’re too big to eat and i’m not sure if the cats know what to do with them after the sport of catching them is over. anyway, on to the tail tale.

i haven’t seen if it’s a spontaneous ejection or if the cat assists in pulling it off, but somehow the tail detaches from the body and immediately proceeds to bounce and jump and flail like a fish out of water. i mean, it is active. the cat goes after the tail and the lizard chills until it sees that the cat is distracted by the tail and slinks away. that’s usually when i pick it up and put it outside in the bushes.

so the tail is a decoy. like a mom conspicuously pretending to be wounded to lure the predator away from the hiding chicks.