Hi everyone,
I’m taking this opportunity to introduce a wonderful blog entitled Serenity Spell which offers stories and photographs about the wildlife in the depths of South Florida. This post about anole lizards is my favourite so far—but every post on the site is well worth reading. I highly encourage everyone to check it out. I have added a link to the site under the heading Other Great Nature Blogs.

Cheers,
EC
PS–When I created Macrocritters I didn’t intend to focus entirely on invertebrates, yet this is the first post that features photos of vertebrates. Funny how that worked out…

Serenity Spell

There are myriad lizards in our Florida wilds — chirping geckos, monitors, prehistoric basilisks, stealthy iguanas, invasive curlytails, skinks, lined racerunners, and colorful anoles, just to name a few. But the anoles  stand out in  ever-lovely radiance. I’ve had the luck to spot not only green, but rare yellow-phased anoles — and now, a newly discovered (and as yet, unwritten) mutation — orange!

While I haven’t seen anything scientific written on this new color variant to date, a few others have noted their existence in South Florida in the last few months. At first, it was considered an oddity — or perhaps a side-effect of the high concentration of iron in the ground water. However, I captured this guy in the wilds of thenorthern section of the Everglades, not in an urban neighborhood with sprinkler systems. FASCINATING! The red/orange coloration of…

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