Scientists have long thought that a lizard losing a leg should be a death sentence. New evidence seems to overturn this assumption, showing that some lizards can not only survive, but even thrive after losing one or more limbs.
James Stroud, an evolutionary biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has spent years catching lizards in the wild to study how they evolve. He and his colleagues long thought that even the smallest difference in the length of a lizard’s leg could affect its ability to run from predators and chase their prey. Losing an entire limb seemed much more severe.
However, every now and then he and his colleagues would observe something odd. “We’ll find a lizard completely missing its leg, and it seems fine,” Stroud said. He casually calls them “three-legged pirate lizards.”
Speaking with other researchers, he would hear similar stories.
To further investigate, he and his colleagues contacted a long list of lizard biologists, asking them whether they had ever seen a lizard with three legs. “Most have never thought about it and just had a random picture on their phone, just like: ‘Huh, this is odd’,” Stroud said.
The team received images that documented 122 individuals on four continents, with 58 species included, from geckos to iguanas to chameleons. Some had lost only one foot, others even two legs.
This allowed Stroud’s team to establish that surviving the loss of a limb is widespread among lizard species. They reported their finding last week in the journal The American Naturalist, adding that usually less than 1% of individuals in a population are missing a leg.
While there were no lizards missing two limbs from the same side of their body, some were observed surviving with just two legs. “There was that one lizard that only had two back legs, and hopped around like a kangaroo,” Stroud said. The observation was sent from researchers in Jamaica, depicting a Jamaican stripe-footed anole. “I still can’t believe it happened,” he said, although it was unclear how long the animal had survived in that condition.
The team also found that some of the limb-lacking lizards were heavier than the average body size in their population, suggesting they managed to feed even if strongly injured. Some individuals were reproducing, and some females were even carrying eggs.
To understand how the lizards managed to survive despite missing one leg, the team analyzed and compared the movements of three-legged individuals with four-legged individuals.
The results showed that injured lizards used different strategies to compensate for the lack of a leg. They can strengthen their undulating movements, or take more steps than a four-legged lizard. Both solutions, however, are energetically expensive for the animals, which may have long-term consequences.
Stroud and his colleagues highlight that not all three-legged lizards survive, and that their study focused only on those that do. A lizard that loses a leg might not always manage to make it.
But there are different reasons some of them do, the team hypothesized. Some lizards might compensate for the loss of a limb with the strength of their other traits, such as being very good at camouflaging. Or some three-legged lizards might be so lucky that they never encounter a predator during their lifetime, making losing a leg in a nonpredatory scenario “not that big of a deal,” Stroud said.
“It’s impressive,” said Mark Scherz, a herpetologist and evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark. “Not only are they overcoming the injury, but they’re going on to modify their behavior to compensate for it.”
He said he hoped that such research could be expanded to more four-limbed animals, in order to fully understand how animals are able to deal with these kinds of injuries.
“Animal adaptability to injury is remarkable,” Scherz said. “An animal is going to do everything it possibly can to survive.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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