- Oct 9, 2002
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Mexican mole lizard D:
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/absurd-creature-of-the-week-mexican-mole-lizard/
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/absurd-creature-of-the-week-mexican-mole-lizard/
Wired said:Absurd Creature of the Week: The Adorable Mexican Mole Lizard Has a Disgusting Reputation
Absurd Creature of the Week: The Adorable Mexican Mole Lizard Has a Disgusting Reputation
Dont you be coy with me, you little pervert.
Down in Baja California there crawls a beast so bizarre, so cruel, so foul, that the mere mention of it sends locals scurrying. Its an opportunist, said to attack humans at their most vulnerable moment: potty time.
Should you be foolish enough to drop trou and answer the call of nature in the wilderness, youll find the beast will enter your body by the most unspeakable means, said Carl Franklin, a herpetologist at the University of Texas at Arlington. And itll rip your guts, shred them to pieces. The death is slow, not to mention embarrassing.
OK, its not truethe creature, a reptile called the Mexican mole lizard, is in fact totally adorable and completely harmlessbut it sure is a powerful myth. A few years ago Franklin was driving through Baja with his wife searching for the critters, and pulled up to two cowboys. He handed them a picture of the mole lizard and asked if theyd seen any lately, and they just twisted up their faces in disgust, and they went over and saw my license plate is from Texas. They then proceeded to admonish him for coming to their country for such things.
I get to the next town, 10 miles away, Franklin recalls, and I see a young guy walking on the side of the road and I stop and I ask him and he just starts backing up, and he says, Hey mister were all really good people here. My uncle just called me and told me you were coming.
The Mexican mole lizard eats just about anything small enough and soft enough.
Except ice cream. It never really comes across ice cream.
Which is all to say, finding Mexican mole lizards is hard on its owntheyre about the size of a large earthwormand much more so when youve alienated the locals. Regardless, this is one of the strangest, most mysterious reptiles on Earth (it technically isnt a lizard or a snake, but sits in a category all its own, the amphisbaenians), with powerful front limbs and rear limbs that have vanished save for vestigial bones you can only make out on X-rays. Strangely, the three species of Mexican mole lizard are the only amphisbaenians that havent lost all their limbs entirely. Why that is, no one is quite sure. Stranger still, each species has a different number of fingers: one with three, another with four, and the last with five.
Part of the problem with finding these things is that theyre subterranean, burrowing through sandy soil with their reinforced heads while scooping back debris with those well-developed claws. Its no wonder, then, that theyve lost their back legs. Often in evolution it makes sense for a structure to evolve away if its no longer useful, or indeed a detriment, sparing you the energy and resources and time needed to build it. As a bonus, what you dont have cant get injuredor in the case of the Mexican mole lizards hind limbs, perhaps losing lose legs means you can move better through the soil.
The creatures eyes are quite beady and underdeveloped. If youre basically a mute inhabitant in a dark underworld, you gotta figure that touch and taste and smell are going to be the three keen senses, said Franklin. So anything like vibrations, they certainly can feel, but finding mates and even locating prey, its going to be chemosensory cues, which they pick up with their tongue.
And as for prey, these critters are going after pretty much anything soft they can get their tiny conical teeth on: a whole range of small insects, as well as things like cockroach eggsand good on em for that. Franklin may be the only person in the world who has legally obtained them to raise in captivity, and he can attest that theyll happily eat things that dont even live with them in the wild, including earthworms. I swatted a little spider one day and tossed it in, he said. They ate everything except for his fangs. So why that wasnt eaten, I dont know. Maybe they could smell it and decided it wasnt tasteful.
Mexican mole lizards spend so much time underground in search of food that they lack the melanin that gives organisms their color. These guys, man they would need lots of SPF, because theyre really fair skinned, and accordingly emerge only at dusk, Franklin said. You can even shine a flashlight right through them (which is technically known as candling, by the way).
And these things are about as comfortable above ground as we are below it. Its hard to classify their method of locomotion. The critter isnt using its limbs much, and it isnt quite slithering. Its actually anchoring itself at points along its body, then pushing forward. This makes sense underground: By contracting itself against the walls of its burrow, the Mexican mole lizard can slowly inch forward, leaving its limbs free to shove loose soil back.
Those powerful claws help the creature shovel dirt out of the way.
Now, a year ago I featured another charming little subterranean creature, the pink fairy armadillo from Argentina. Like the Mexican mole lizard, it faces a problem living underground: thermoregulation. As a burrower, youre pretty much stuck with the temperature of the soil. You cant seek shade or water to cool down. The armadillo has solved this problem by turning its shell into a radiator of sorts. If it overheats, it can pump blood into the shell, cooling itself down. Conversely, if its too cold, it can pump the blood back into its body to raise its core temperature.
The Mexican mole lizard isnt blessed with such a shell, so how does it regulate its body temperature? For the moment, Franklin isnt sure, though he notes that hell find them in the roots of vegetation, perhaps taking advantage of the cooler soil under the plants shade. So they would just move from one site to the next for thermoregulatory needs, is my educated guess.
Mexican mole lizards lack pigment because it wouldnt really do them much good, on account of spending pretty much their entire lives underground. A spray tan wouldnt kill them, though. Just saying.
Also a bit of a mystery still is their sex life. According to Franklin, the rules that you would use for sexing lizards and snakes just pretty much go out the window, which is probably a sentence you never thought youd ever read. Male snakes and lizards, you see, have sex organs known as hemipenes, two of them to be exact, which they use alternately to fertilize a female. Because of these, typically males will have bulgier or longer tails, but thats not the case with the Mexican mole lizard, whose hemipenes are particularly tiny.
Accordingly, Franklin isnt sure if he even has both males and females in his labsomewhat of a necessity if you want to get things to breed. For his sake, I hope he does. The less time snagging more specimens out in the field and making the locals uncomfortable, the better.
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