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Living Habits of Reptiles (Part 6)

© Janat Khatoon

There are not many kinds of living space from which reptiles are absent. Invasions of the soil, for example, have been made repeatedly by unrelated kinds of snakes and lizards, many of which have lost eyes, legs or both in adapting to a burrowing existence. Three different ways of living underground may be distinguished. One is to dig and inhabit a permanent burrow, as monitors and various other lizards and some tortoises do. In these cases, feeding is not subterranean. The burrow serves only for concealment or for maintaining a tiny set of favourable weather conditions to retire into when it is bad outside. Another way to go underground is to wriggle into and through loose soil or sand. Such sand-swimming is the habit of various kinds of snakes. And of skinks like the Australian sandfish and the little, nearly legless Neoseps of central Florida, and of several other kinds of lizards. The sand viper of African deserts shuffles itself quickly into the sand and, incidentally, leaves the black tip of its tail protruding from the surface as a bait for prey. Like burrowing, sand-swimming is more a way to hide or avoid unfavourable physical factors than a means of locomotion. Sand-swimmers are mainly desert animals, for the not surprising reason that deserts are where the most sand is.

The third way to live underground is to live there all the time. The most confirmed subterranean reptiles are the true underground foragers like the blind, mostly legless, amphisbaenian lizards. This bizarre group has inhabited the soil since the days of the dinosaurs. Most of them stay below permanently, and they evidently travel about over considerable distances, finding their food-mostly worms and insects-in the subterranean habitat. As they move through the soil, they leave tube-like trails behind them, but no one knows to what extent these are re-used as permanent tunnels or burrows.

One burning question posed by the extreme privacy of the lives of subterranean reptiles is how the males find the females at breeding time. As in all reptiles, fertilization is internal, and an interlude of mating must take place. But how does it happen, with each worm lizard wriggling around deep down in the ground and cut off by cold earth from the sight, sound or smell of a prospective partner? No one knows.

To be continued...

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