When you live in a place where the fires are on the agenda, and they can become devastating, it is important to have some alarm system that allows you to make you safe well in advance.
Take the lizard Rugosa Tiliquawho lives only in Australia and lives the most arid meadows and deserts on the continent: here the risk of fire is always very high, and now a study published on Biology Letters He demonstrates how these lizards have evolved a “fire -fighting alarm” system that allows them to prevent, instead of cure. The secret is in their nose (and in the language).
From a burnt lunch … these lizards are many widespread in Australia, where they are also known with the name of “Sleepy Lizards”, sleepy lizard. Yet the starting point for the study of Sydney’s Macquarie University came from the United States, to be precise from the Audubon zoo, in Louisiana.
Here, one day the guardians burned their lunch by mistake, and they noticed that the lizards of the terrarium nearby were shaking: they sniffed the air, made the tongue shit and tried to escape from the terrarium. The other reptiles of the zoo, on the other hand, have had no reaction.
… to the experiment. The anecdote came to the Australian team, which decided to replicate the experiment, however using local lizards and not grown in captivity. The animals were exposed to the smell of smoking, but also to the noise of the fire that crackles: the lizards reacted to the first exactly as expected (shaking, smelling the air, trying to escape), while they ignored the second.
Fire alarm. It is worth explaining that, when the lizards “pull out the language”, they do it for olfactory purposes, or if you prefer chemorecection: they capture particles from the air and bring them to the vomeronasal body, which has precisely olfactory function. The “sleeping lizards” of Australia, according to the authors of the study, have therefore evolved a particular sensitivity to the smoking of fires, to be able to perceive it in time and escape before the fire “explodes”.
Survival strategy. It is a fundamental feature to survive in places where fires often burst: many Australian animals that share the habitat with these lizards have evolved some rapid response strategy to the fire. Knowing them is also important for conservation issues, especially now that fires become increasingly frequent and devastating.
