Aruba Photos

[wyntir_knight]

For those who may be interested, here are the few photos I took of Aruba. There honestly wasn't a lot to photograph ... but ther are many pictures of the local iguanas. ... Yeah, I'm not a photographer.

Comments

[darkfire-blade.livejournal.com]

Aw man it looks real pretty over there. I like the lizards ^^

Mmmm

[wyntir-rose.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it is truly beautiful :)

And the lizards were fantastic. You had to be careful not to actively feed them, 'cause they'd beg, but they were just fantastically social little (and not so little) creatures!

[nightwind69.livejournal.com]

Got a bit of an iguana fetish there? :) I don't blame you. Wild but socialized iguanas are fun. :)

I don't think the lizard in your first pic is a chameleon. The feet are all wrong, as chameleon feet have opposable digits for branch-grasping. In fact, it has iguana feet. (Note the long 4th toe, which is, I believe, exclusive to the iguana family.) So my initial guess would be an iguana of some sort. There are dozens of species of them. Most lizards, after all, have at least limited color-changing ability, though most are not the masters that the chameleons are. Iguanas are no exception.

Thanks for sharing the pics. Wanna go back to Aruba...

[wyntir-rose.livejournal.com]

I love iguanas ... actually, I love just about all reptiles except for the Komodo Dragon, and they frighten me more than they disgust me. I've often been tempted to get a reptile, but I worry about how my cats would react, and my mother forbids me from letting one into the house. I figure I can wait.

As for the "chameleon", yeah, you're right. The body and eyes are all wrong too. I think it might actually be some kind of a colour-changing iguana, but I don't know enough about herpetology to tell what it is. The little bit of research I've done so far says that the Green Iguana (and all the iguanas we saw were Greens) changes colour from green to brown, but these little ones turned blue and purple. I think I need to do more research.

[nightwind69.livejournal.com]

I believe that there is something called a "spotted iguana," which IIRC is a Caribbean-island native. Given that your critter has spots, that would be my first impulse for identification, but I certainly don't know for sure.

Lizards as pets are a lot of fun, but when/if you get one, do lots of research as ALL of them have some fairly demanding and specific environmental and, in the case of vegetarians like iguanas, dietary/vitamin supplementation requirements. Carnivores like monitor lizards are a lot easier to take care of in that regard, but you don't want to be bitten by one. :) Not only does it hurt, but the wound is practically guaranteed to become infected. :p So, it's a toss-up. :)