Guido the Anole

I'm the newest and smallest pet in the Ziring household, and my name is Guido. They call me the killer anole because I eat insects in a very violent way.



Color:	brown
Eye color:	black
Weight:	< 1 gram
Gender:	female ?
Birth date:	6/1/99 ?

Guido is a Bahaman brown anole; their full taxonomic name in the animal kingdom is:
Phylum CHORDATA, Class REPTILIA, Subclass LEPIDOSAUROMORPHA, Order SQUAMATA, Suborder Sauria (Lacertilia), Family Iguanidae, Subfamily Polychrinae, Genus Anolis, species Anolis sagrei ordinatus.

Guido was found on a recently delivered potted plant in the office of a partner at the Washington law firm of Arent Fox Kintner Plotkin & Kahn on June 24, 1999. See Special Feature: How Guido was Found! below to read an amusing short story. After briefly evading capture, little Guido was trapped in a styrofoam cup and brought home to Columbia, Maryland. At that time, he/she was just over an inch long. The picture at right was taken on July 5, 1999. Depending on the size of your monitor, it is something like 2x or 3x lifesize. Yes, Guido is a very small lizard! When first captured, each front leg was as thin as a cat's whisker.

• Guido's Care and Feeding
• Picture Gallery
• Anole Links

Anole Care

When we first got Guido, we had nowhere to keep him/her and had no idea what to feed an anole (except we knew that they eat bugs of some sort). By reading web pages, some of which are linked in below, we were able to keep him/her alive and apparently healthy. We now believe the Guido is actually a female, based on the distinct diamond-shaped marking on her back.

 

Housing

We bought a small 2-gallon plastic 'critter cage' and set up a little environment in it for her. We are starting to build a terrarium in a 29-gallon fish tank, so that she will have a large and comfortable place to live. Anoles like to climb, dig, and hide, so we will try to provide for all of those activities. Note that anoles can climb sheer vertical smooth surfaces, sometimes even glass, and can wiggle through gaps that look too small for them.

Guido seems to like to sit on the brown branch we got for him, or on the green leaves of the miniature violet plant.

 

Feeding

Brown anoles are carnivores that subsist primarily on insects. In the wild, they'll eat almost any kind of insect, and some kinds of arachnids and other small creatures.

When we first started taking care of Guido, we fed him ants. Unfortunately, they put up quite a fight, and eating them seemed to be very hard work for him, even very small ants. Plus, they climbed up and out of the cage too quickly. We also fed him aphids, but he didn't seem to care for them very much because they didn't move enough. Finally, acting on advice from Melissa Kaplan's site, we bought Guido some live, supposedly 'flightless' fruit flies; Hydei sturdivant from The Drosphila Company. He likes to eat them. His favorite snack is still the tiny larvae that look like a worm. They are soft and easy to eat, now that Guido has learned to eat them head first instead of sideways. They are harder to find so we'll probably keep ordering the fruit flies until Guido is large enough to eat crickets.

 

Watering

Anoles won't drink standing water, like we tried to give him in a dish. They will recognize and drink water in droplet form, so we give Guido his water by spraying the inside walls of his little habitat with a plant mister several times a day. He walks along the walls and licks at one droplet after another.

 

Picture Gallery

Here are some pictures of Guido. These were taken with a Pentax K1000 on Kodak Gold100 film at F22 and 1/60sec, using a variety of close-up (magnifying) filters. Click on one of the thumbnails below to see the full-size picture. Note: the flower pot visible in some of the pictures is 2 inches in diameter and the aphids in the middle photo are actually about the size of a period.

Special Feature: How Guido was Found!

It was a typical day in the law offices of Arent Fox in Washington. Julie was working at her desk when from across the hall, she heard conversation between an attorney, John, and his secretary, Pat. It sounded like this: "blah, blah, blah, baby lizard." Julie was listening just like Ginger from The Far Side. She asked, "Did I hear someone say 'baby lizard?'" It turns out that there was a microscopic (well, almost) baby brown anole running around in John's office. It was decided that it must have come in clinging to his new plant which was probably raised in a warm climate, then shipped to a florist in Washington. Julie easily captured (with John's help) the baby lizard in a styrofoam cup and brought it home. That night, Julie and Neal went to Petsmart to buy a critter cage, heater and log for the lizard.

Anole Links

Here are some sites for anole information and care that you may find interesting. You can also read about reptiles in the rec.pets.herp newsgroup.

Anolis sagrei - Brown Anole - informative little page by a German lizard breeder.

Green Anoles information page - great background & care page by Melissa Kaplan
         (about A. carolinensis rather than A. sagrei, but care is quite similar)

Brown Anole Page at Geocities - includes helpful housing and handling advice

ANOLE page - under construction, but could be useful someday.

Green Anole Care Sheet - concise care instructions from Creatureville.com.

Anoles - Exotic Pets - care info and links from About.com.

Anole Forum at Kingsnake.com - discussion board about Anole care and breeding

For information and links about another kind of lizard, visit the web site
of my much larger associate Kiwi the Green Iguana.