Chameleons Not Seen by Scientists for Century Found in a Madagascar Hotel Garden
goodnewsnetwork.org
goodnewsnetwork.org
African chameleons are very cool critters.
Where I lived, most were about three inches long (in the body). The tails could be a lot longer. The tails are prehensile, and the lizards use them as anchors.
Their feet end in these opposable little claws. Their eyes are completely independent of each other, and are usually wandering around, looking at everything around them.
Their camouflage is very good. They can become downright invisible in seconds.
They are also slow, and easy to catch.
We used to catch them, then put them on our index fingers, facing out. They would wrap their tails around our fingers, and didn't usually make much of an effort to escape. Real laconic little buggers.
We'd point them at flies. When they spotted a fly, both eyes would snap to the front, forming a binocular pair. Their mouths would slowly open, exposing their tongue.
Then the tongue would shoot out, fast as hell. It was often a lot longer than the chameleon. The end of the tongue has a sticky bulb that grabs the fly.
The next thing you know, they are calmly chewing (yes, they chew) their new snack.
After we got bored, we'd put them back into a bush, where they would calmly get off our finger, and change color.
>Chameleons Not Seen by Scientists for Century...
All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage. It was not, he declares, anything connected with the cubes and caves of those echoing, vaporous, wormily-honeycombed mountains of madness which we crossed; but a single fantastic, demoniac glimpse, among the churning zenith-clouds, of what lay back of those other violet westward mountains which the Old Ones had shunned and feared.
It is very probable that the thing was a sheer delusion born of the previous stresses we had passed through, and of the actual though unrecognized mirage of the dead transmontane city experienced near Lake's camp the day before; but it was so real to Danforth that he suffers from it still.I know we don't often do the flippant remarks thing here, but that headline was far too inviting.
Lizard people? NWO? Worry about the ninjas first.
https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bio_info/
I think my sense of things is similar to what you articulating. Take something like a water bear. It can survive in extreme environments and is very specialized to do so. If it changes certain characteristics, it's range of habitable environments may decrease significantly. To maximize it's survivability it minimizes it's evolutionary flexibility.
Species in more stable/predictable environments on the other hand can change more characteristics without impairing their ability to survive in their environment, so their stable/predictable environment allows them to maximize their evolutionary flexibility at the expense of being confined to that environment.
Also looking at the paper it seems that the female had 7 eggs in her
It's a tradeoff. They had to kill two animals in order to adequately catalogue and study this species.
Just as it would be a tradeoff to decide and take some for captive breeding. Which may also fail.
Yes the above is meant as a joke.
Places I want to visit but are so far from where I live, you really need to plan it out.