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If you’re in the field looking for lizards, knowing where they sleep can be tremendously useful. Anyone who’s tried catching an anole at night knows how much easier this can be than catching it during the day. When I began working with Sitana, therefore, I was keen to locate where these lizards slept. Being primarily terrestrial, it made sense that they would sleep under rocks, in cracks in the ground, or buried beneath grass, bushes, or leaf litter. I had some indirect evidence for the utilization of these locations as sleeping sites–I had seen lizards emerging from and retreating to these locations early in the morning and late in the evening, respectively.
However, I did not expect that fan-throated lizards would sleep completely in the open on the ground. Yet that is precisely what my colleague Divyaraj Shah recently observed. You can see the lizard’s head pointing downwards, resting on the ground below–he does not seem disturbed at this point.
Is it common for terrestrial lizards to sleep in open, unsheltered spots?