Lizards feasting!

Really, there isn’t much to this post. Other than to point you to Northern Arizona University biologist Kiisa Nishikawa’s fabulous web page where you can see all manner of lizards eat at lightning quick speed. There are cute ones. Pebbly ones. Horned ones. They eat harvester ants, fire ants, and crickets: crunch.

Now just to clarify: when I say lightning speed I’m not kidding. The videos you’re watching are already slowed down to 1/15th of real time. And they go by real quick.

The female fringe-toed lizard for example can catch her prey in one fifth of a second. Some of them have to take the time to properly chew and ingest their prey (ie. the juvenile bearded dragon is slowed down by over a whole extra second and a half). But not the Desert horned lizard. This little fella hoovers up harvester ants and eats them in one swift movement that takes just under half a second. That said the single feeding event in of the Australian thorny devil (pictured above) is fastest of any iguanian lizard studied to date. Ant on ground to ant in belly takes it a mere 350 milliseconds. I don’t think an ant could even register getting eaten at that speed. Wouldn’t that be nice. To be eat living things so fast it didn’t hurt them?