Blood Squirting From the Lizard’s Eye, Part 2

of Mexico up through parts of western Canada. Now again, this is part two of the series. In Part one, we focused mainly on the horned lizard's relationship with various predators and their fascinating anti predator defense strategies which include camouflage, spikes, and armored scales which can make them difficult and in

some cases quite dangerous to eat. We talked about some eating related mishaps from various predators, and then finally, their weaponized blood jets, the adaptation that allows them to shoot streams of apparently foul tasting blood out of their eyes when threatened by a dog. Rob in your words last time, a way of deterring predation with the most aggressive and

unpleasant free sample in the world. That's right to refer back to something that came up last time, that we're still interested in this question of why the blood apparently tastes so foul to dogs, and I read in some cases maybe also cats, but not noticeably so to humans, and certainly not to predators such as birds.

You know, cats are great spluters, But man, I have to say the horned lizard isn't natural as well.

a predator, say a bird flying overhead, to see their outline. Also, since we're just talking about reviewing the tape on horned lizards since the last time we talked, I was watching just more blood squirting footage since we recorded the previous episode. And I don't know if I emphasized enough how much it looks so alarming. If you haven't seen this, look it up. The blood that the jets out of the

eyes somehow looks darker and thicker than I expected. And it's also just weird how much blood is coming out compared to the size of the animal, which is quite small. It doesn't look like something that should be happening.

horned lizard's relationship to water. Of course, horned lizards generally live in dry places, deserts and semi arid ecoregions, where the sun cooks you, the rain is scarce, water is hard to come by, and horned toads, like all animals, of course, need water to live, so much of their biology has gone still suit mode. They are very efficient at sourcing and preserving water. There is a great passage about the horned lizard's relationship to water in a book

that I referred to in the last episode. That book is Introduction to Horned Lizards of North America by Wade C. Sherbrook. This was published by the University of California Press in two thousand and three. The author, Wade Sherbrooke, was director of the Southwestern Research Station of the American Museum of Natural History. So, of course, losing water is just part of having a body. It is impossible to avoid losing

some water content through ambient interface with the air. We lose some water vapor from our lungs when we breathe. We lose some water through evaporation from our skin, and the same is true for horned lizards. To reduce water law to evaporation. Horned lizards have some behavioral adaptations. For example, sometimes they burrow underground or partially bury parts of their bodies in the soil. This can reduce water loss from evaporation. But they also have some clever ways to source water

from their environment. They will, of course, just drink free standing water when they can get access to it. If there are puddles after a rainstorm or something like that, they will drink dew that collects on plants in the morning. But much of the water that they get from external sources comes from food like juicy juicy harvest or ants. But here's where Sherbrook gets into something I found really fascinating.

One of these strate strategies they have for sourcing water is that some species of horned lizards use their own backs as what Sherbrook calls a rain harvesting surface. So he singles out three species as examples, the Texas horned lizard, the round tail horned lizard, and the desert horned lizard. And when these animals sense that rain is about to fall, they do the opposite of what humans usually do. You know,

we go inside. They go outside, They run out of cover into the open and stand with their backs sort of cupped like they raise up there, they raise up on their legs, they flatten out their backs, and they lower their heads. Now what does this do. It turns the lizards back into a kind of combination rain barrel and whatever you call that. You know, the beer drinking helmet where you got the beers on the sides and it's got a straw running to the mouth. So you

combine that with the rain barrel concept. Their back collects water over the widest possible surface area, which is the lizard's flattened out dorsal scales, and then it funnels the water to the edge of its mouth for drinking. So like my body is a catch basin and my mouth is the receptacle.

But my search came up largely empty. But I did find an interesting blog post by Charlie Buck of the University of Arizona Poetry Center about an elementary school exercise where they brought in a herpetologist to talk about horned lizards, and then a poet led the class in filling out horned lizard worksheets with descriptive text to create concrete poems or visual poetry. So it's like an outline of a

horned lizard and then you fill in with text. And I included one example of this in our outline here. Joe and folks can look up the blog posts and see an example of this as well. And for instance, written by one of the students in the head is a horned lizard eats ants. I babysat horned lizards. I can't read the rest of it. I spit my blood out of my eye at snack, I drink water from the sky. And then like later on one of the legs,

it says I eat ant every day. And then there's also a part of the anatomy that says I drink water from my back. So I read that before I actually got to that point in reading about their biology. So I was like, I wonder if that's true. Gonna have to FA fact check this child.

It seems like it has a fairly sophisticated system of like this sort of this matrix of layers underneath and between the scales absorbing water and then routing it by capillary action down to the edges of the mouth where the where the lizard then sort of sits there opening and closing its jaws slowly to drink the water as it trickles in from the corners of the mouth. And so it's got a fairly sophisticated topography on the back there to get the water to the mouth.

semi solid substance rather than dissolved in water. So a Schrberch writes, quote, water carrying uric acid from the kidney is reabsorbed in the kloaca. From here, the uric acid, mixed with some insoluble crystals of urate salts is voided as a white mass attached to the end of the

fecal pellet. And I thought this was interesting because in just a minute, I want to mention, and there was a video I was watching, like a short documentary about some conservation efforts with horned lizards, and it was showing some of their feces that the researchers were finding in the wild. And yeah, there fecal pellets did have these

interesting little white caps on them. So apparently that is what the lizard releases instead of liquid urine solid P and some solidness crystals of solid P. Also, as we have discussed with some other reptiles in the past, horned lizards can sometimes remove excess salts from the body, not by urinating, but by sneezing. So salts accumulate in glands

around the nostrils where they are secreted. As this hyper concentrated salty brine in the nose, which you can then you just hank it right out, and Sherbrook says that you can find horned lizard individuals with noses covered in this salty white trust from the process. So the moral of the story is when you don't pee, you poop, and you sneeze. Different other anti predator considerations that we didn't have time to talk about in the last episode.

We were talking about the advantages of the horned lizard's armor for self defense, you know, the tough scales, but especially the sharp bony spines around the crown of the horned lizard's head. That these pieces of armor increase the risk a predator has to take in trying to eat one of these lizards. The predator has to make a judgment call is it too big for me to survive swallowing this? Will the head spikes split open my throat

or puncture my organs? That can actually happen. But in the context of looking at another predator prey relationship that we didn't talk about last time, Sherbroke had some interesting thoughts on the evolution of these head spikes. So Sherbrooke is talking about the Southern grasshopper mouse or ani Comis torridus, and this animal will prey on some smaller horned lizard species by biting the skull right over the eye socket. So this is before you get to the crown of spikes.

This is the skull above the eyes. And when the grasshopper mouse attacks other prey animals, most other vertebrate prey, it bites in a different place. It bites at the back of the neck near the base of the head, attempting to damage and sever the spinal cord, and this is apparently a common attack area for predators to target.

I was actually kind of thinking, I know, I've read about big cats often targeting the back of the neck and the base of the skull in those rare cases where they happen to attack humans, and I was trying to remember where I came across that fact, and finally I realized it was from Mary Roach's book fuzz When Nature Breaks the Law, which we interviewed her about on

the show. That was one of my favorite interviews we've done, and it's from the part of the book where she's talking about taking the class learning to identify different common wound patterns from different types of animal attacks, and so for example, she talks about how when a grizzly bear attacks a human sometimes a lot of the injuries are

sort of face on. They're like to the face in the front of the head, almost as if the bear is fighting a human the way it fights a rival bear, where they're both kind of like biting at each other's faces. Whereas cougars are used to killing their prey with a powerful bite to the back of the neck, which they in these rare cases where a cougar attacks a human, they will sometimes target the same sort of place on the body, like the back of the neck, base of the back of the head.

attack this well, defended area. Instead, it has got to kind of like awkwardly chew with the head over the eyes, and Sherbrook speculates that these horns could have evolved from what was originally a more modest kind of bony defensive ridge at the base of the skull designed to protect against this kind of attack to the back of the neck. And studies have shown that the spines do protect against predator attacks. And you can measure this because the size

of the spines around the head actually matters. Like research has shown that lizards killed by birds tend to have order spines around the head than lizards of the same species in that area, so the ones that are picked off the most and to have the shortest headspikes. Now, there's one more thing we brought up in the last episode that I did want to make sure we came back to today because I wanted to clarify something about it.

This was when we were talking about the relationship between horned lizards and the red imported fire ant or Solenopsis in Victa. It came up that non native fire ants in North America are thought to be a reason for some horned lizard population declines, and this does appear to be true. There are a number of horned lizards whose ranges have been shrinking in recent decades. There are places where you used to find them, you don't find them anymore.

Many of their populations are in decline, and in the case the case with a lot of these species does seem to be that the fire ant is playing a role there, especially because the lizards have such an important relationship with the native harvester ants, which are sometimes sort

of driven out by the fire ants. So while it's true that the fire ants appear to be playing a role in population and range declines for these horned lizards, they're not thought to be the only factor, or necessarily even the main factor everywhere.

It is a video specifically that's focused on an attempt by the San Antonio Zoo to breed Texas horned lizards in captivity and then release them back into areas from which they have largely disappeared since the nineteen seventies. Just one of the many charming things in this short documentary is that the conservation biologists are working with a lizard

sniffing dog. So you know, imagine the canine unit at the airport, but instead of a drug sniffing dog or a bomb sniffing dog, it's a dog that is trained to find Texas horned lizards in the wild and not to bother them by the way, not go like pick them up in the mouth and harass them until they get a blood squirt, just to signal from a safe distance that they found one.

stuck in a dog's paw around there. But anyway, the conservation biologists and the parks and wildlife workers they interview in this video, they talk about a few other things that are affecting the range and population of Texas horned lizards. For example, human attempts to eliminate harvester ants from large areas of land. Of course, again, Texas horned lizards need to eat harvest or ants. Without the ants, the land

cannot sustain the lizards. And then also things like replacing native grasses with different grass types, so you replace what are called bunch grasses with turf grasses. This is not what the lizards are adapted to and they can't really survive in it. Of course, as you mentioned, Rob, just general urbanization and reformatting of a lot of land area roads cutting through natural land ranges, which interferes with movement

back and forth. But there's another thing I just wanted to mention from this video because I found it hilarious. There's a part where they're showing a lab at the San Antonio Zoo where they're trying to breed lots of lizards. So it's sort of it's a lizard sex lab, and they are trying to facilitate mating, and they will put

a male lizard into a female lizard's tank. And there's one part where the technician is explaining that the head movements that we are seeing back and forth between these two lizards indicate that they are both interested in mating. But it totally looks like two lizards on a log just nodding back and forth at each other, like yep, yep, it's great. It's a very Texas kind of nod as well.

who lived nineteen oh five through nineteen sixty. I've talked about this text a little bit on the show before.

The version I have is from nineteen eighty nine with some additions made to it, and there are several mentions of the horned toad's use as a key ingredient in various alleged spells in Navajo witchcraft, which I want to stress the term witchcraft is used here as shorthand, not for mainstream religious rituals and practice, but rather for what is described, as described by Kluckhohn as quote Navajo ideas and action patterns concerned with the influencing of events by

supernatural techniques that are socially disapproved.

a pregnant woman. A personal item is placed inside the body of a horned toad or a horned lizard, or a purse made from its hide.

some aspects of its biology, as we've discussed. So this is the quote that is included in a Navajo Witchcraft as a commentary on something else that's reference to the book quote. The story is about the holy toad who eats ants that give him power. One day, he was swallowed by a coyote who he had kindly given of

his best corn. So while inside, he asked the code what all the things he sees are for, and finally comes to the back brain and asked what it was for, and the coyote said, that is what I live by. Leave it alone. So the toad cut it into, killed the coyote, and came out of his throat.

am hungry, and then he eats the horned toad. But then horned toad begins to move around inside the code he's belly, and at first coyote thinks it's just the corn that he ate, but then the toad begins to talk to him. He's like, where am I? It's dark in here, and he like kicks the inside of the stomach just to you know, to sort of punish the coote a little bit. But then he moves to the windpipe, keeps speaking. Then he moves to the heart and this is where he carves across in the heart and it

kills the code. He dead, and then he emerges from the code. He's body in this telling or retelling of it from the code he's anus.

spikes serving as arrow points that protect one. And he also drives home that the horned toad is close to the Earth, and which matches up with the way that it lives its life, you know, not only being a very terrestrial organism, but being solo to the earth, flattening itself so that it doesn't cast that shadow as we discussed. But he stresses that it can be used to bless one's mind, to bless one's spirit, and to bless one's physical well being.

of negative spiritual energy to it. But so we have these traditions that can consider the horned lizard as like a route for a blessing, a blessing of the mind and spirit and the health of the body. But also just if you read about people's personal relationships who grew up around these lizards, people have overwhelmingly positive feelings about them, like very positive feelings about catching them and handling them as children and things like that. Do you know what I'm talking about?

and so forth can can result. That's not really the case here, Like, they're pretty much not a threat to us, and so there's almost a certain like natural kinship with them because they're out there in the world. They're dealing with stress, stresses, they're dealing with predators, enemies, and they have these natural defenses against them. But they also seem very much like an underdog because they are small, and

you know it doesn't always work. Yeah. So there are some other details on some of these traditions mentioned in another book. I looked at Jane Manister's Horned Lizards. This is a two thousand and two book from Texas Tech

University Press. The author here sites that at least in some tellings of this the code is being punished for stealing corn from the sacred stalk, that the horned lizard is associated with inner protection, especially for warriors traditionally, and then the author also cites that there may be a Navajo taboo, or there may have been a Navajoa taboo against including certain animals, including this one, in various rug

weaving designs, perhaps in deference to its special strength. Now, I want to stress that Navajo traditions vary across time and geography, as with pretty much any belief system, and there are also aspects of Navajo traditions that are not meant for me to know of. And I hope that I've been respectful with what I've brought to the discussion here. But I think this is always there's always a fascinating relationship to be observed between a people's beliefs and a

people's natural environment. And I think that we see that here with the horned toad or horned lizard, both as a metaphor as well as an interpretation of what I assume were observations of the horned lizard's biology in the wild. Now, another source I looked at. I was looking at an article by Joyce Gibson Roach writing for TCU magazine talking about different cultural interpretations of the horned lizard, and this

author points to Spanish folk beliefs. So this would have been you know, in Mexico for the most part, where they would sometimes refer to the horned lizard as a torrito dilo virgin or the little bull who protects the virgin. And so this is there's kind of like two different things going on with this this nickname. So we talked about this in the last episode. How they may be observed to charge like a bull and are sometimes referred to as the little bull.

that the horned toad is crying tears of blood. So there is a long, sometimes controversial, and also generally skeptically debunked history of statues of the Virgin Mary weeping tears of blood in Catholicism, and accounts of of weeping statues in general, aiding back at least to the writings of Plutarch in the first and second century see now. I should also point out that humans can experience blood in the tears or blood from the tear ducks or hematuria

for various reasons. So for instance, when my son was younger, he had tubes put in his tear ducks to correct a minor problem, and immediately after surgery he shed a single tear of blood, which was pretty awesome. At the time, we knew everything was fine, you know, and it was just kind of like, oh, wow, that was a blood tear, but only got the one agreed, if you know, not to worry. That is pretty cool, all right. Now another connection to the horned toad the horned lizard in culture.

This is one that was shared in that book by Jane Manister Horned Lizards from two thousand and two. She gets into a number of different traditions, at least mentioning that there are a number of ideas about them being tied up in weather predict and rain generation, which I guess is understandable of a creatures that clearly is able to thrive in a very arid environment, and we have these unique observations, you know, concerning the way that they

catch rain and so forth. But then she also gets into this account that some of you may have heard of before. I believe stuff you missed in history class did a whole episode about this last couple of years. There's the story of Old Rip. This is a horned lizard originally named Blinky, that was placed in an Eastland County, Texas time capsule along with a bible, some coins, and some newspapers. And then when the capsule was dug out thirty one years later, the lizard was allegedly still alive.

got him out and he's still alive. Everyone and take a look at him. So this was very popular at the time. Old Rip toured the country, even met President Coolidge at the White House, and ultimately died in nineteen twenty nine. Now, various folks later took credit for switching out lizards at the capsule's opening. So this is that I want to stress that this is almost certainly a hoax, and there's a lot of reason to believe it was

a hoax. This was not carried out with any kind of like scientific rigger, but it was a big deal and it was covered in the New York Times among other major publications. In fact, I want to read to you from the New York Times. This is from February twentieth,

nineteen twenty eight. Oh boy, toad alive after thirty one years sealed in Texas cornerstone, Eastland, Texas, February nineteenth ap hey hornage toad sealed alive in the cornerstone of the courthouse here thirty one years ago, was alive when the stone was removed yesterday. According to County Judge Edward S. Pritchard, the old courthouse is being raised, and it goes into some additional details, including this bit that I also have

to include. After the cornerstone was removed, the toad appeared lifeless for some time, but in a little while it opened its eyes. In about twenty minutes, it began to breathe. The mouth, however, appeared to have grown together.

And then on the other hand you had others pointing out, well, clearly the animal survived in the time capsule because there was a Bible in there. The Bible sustained the lizard. I guess the Bible also made the lizard's mouth grow together. I'm not sure. I've read other accounts that it had a broken leg and worn down horns but was otherwise healthy. Yeah, and then others claim that their eyes were sealed shut

as well. There seems to be a certain amount of drift in the telling and retelling of this this feat. But here's what we actually know to be true. So hornet lizards can live around five but normal lifespan in the wild is not fully known, according to the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation. But I think we can probably

take that as like a ballpark. According to Texas Monthly in a twenty fifteen article by Alex Dropkin, the Texas horned lizard species hibernates, or rather bermates between October and April, and this is likely where that cowboy lore originated, that these creatures can live without food or water for one hundred years. And this is the lore that the folks

in Eastland, Texas decided to put to the test. This is why they put a horned lizard inside of a time capsule to test or I think, if we're being rightfully skeptic here to prove that the cowboy lore was correct. There is no evidence that horned lizards in the wild choose hibernation spots based on the presence of biblical texts or coins or newspapers. But I guess we should note that long lifespans for lizards are not completely unheard of.

The New Zealand tuatara can live twenty five to thirty five years, typical age ages to sixty or apparently common, and one captive specimen apparently lived to be over one hundred. Meanwhile, some wizards can go without food or water for weeks or months. I think it's safe to say that the accounts of Old Rip places the story so far outside of anything reported or at least, you know, authenticated to any reasonable degree that common sense leans us very strongly in the direction of hoax here.

the dynaic alps in cave systems. It lives in the dark for much of the time, and it is thought that sometimes these creatures can go for like ten years without food, and that in itself is incredible, but that seems to be sort of the upper bound of where you can where you can push push the slow motion metabolism too.

in endangered status of hornet lizards. This particular incident was so popular that it resulted in a horned toad boom, so the yet specimens being harvested and then exported for novelty's sake, hurting local populations in the process. But hey, old rip is allegedly currently entombed in Eastland, Texas. I

think he's on display. So if we have any Eastland listeners or visitors to Eastland, or folks who have been to Eastland and can report on the body of old rip rite in, we would love to hear from you. I believe he has at least historically been stolen at least once and returned.

grease and moisture of hundreds of squashed hornet lizards. What so, Apparently it was so bad that brakemen and firemen aboard the train would have to scramble down onto the tracks and sweep it all off to get all this gunk off the tracks, and it led to the idea, nay,

the ideal of the horny toad man. So, a horny toad man is not merely like somebody that goes down and sweeps off the rails in the scenario, this is a railway man with eyes on corporate promotion, willing to do anything and everything the company requires in order to advance, and that certainly includes going out onto the tracks in the desert heat and removing lizard guts from the rails.

many horned lizards getting run over by trains? And I found a possible answer here In a nineteen twenty two paper by J. P. Givler, Givler writes, it is an interesting fact that at such times horned lizards are very abundant under the crossties of railroad tracks. Often they burrow through into the area between the two rails. Here they emerge and are literally trapped. The rails are usually too high to be climbed over, and the lizards run up

and down frantically. Occasionally one climbs up on a rail just in time to be crushed by a passing train. Many live for the rest of the summer in this uncomfortable pasture bummer. Now it doesn't come I mean, it doesn't completely answer my question, but it at least puts a lot of horned lizards in the vicinity of those train tracks. And you know, he only mentions it as being like an occasional squad. But may I guess that's close enough to like a mass squashing that we can

consider this reality. Now, I look for any discussions out there in the literature about loss of traction due to animal railway mortalities, and I looked at it. At least one full source on animal railway mortalities or one that deals with this in depth titled railway ecology. And there's no mention in this of tracks getting greased up by dead animals or dead lizards. So if true, maybe this was indeed more of a concern with an historic engine

and an historic local population of lizard. I'm not sure, but I will add the following from another paper. I looked up Experimental evaluation of effect of leaves on railroad tracks and loss of breaking by Kumar at All. This is in the Journal Machines in twenty twenty four. Quote loss of traction results in either breaking of the train or slip, which arises at lower track active coefficients. This case occurs when there are third body layers that cause

reduce traction, such as in the case of leaves. Various traction enhancers are adopted by the railway to improve adhesion when the rail is contaminated.

cowboy lore or indeed cowboy poetry. I'm still at a loss that there's not at least one cowboy poem out there on the Internet that deals with these guys.

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