Dragon-like Gliding Lizards Disguise Themselves with Christmas Colors

Lizards are using some Christmas colors in order to survive this holiday season. By mimicking the red and green colors of falling leaves, Bornean lizards avoid falling prey to birds while gliding through the forest.

These gliding lizards, called Draco cornutus, have evolved extendable gliding membranes which allow them to glide between trees in their territories. In order to better understand these lizards, the researchers journeyed to Borneo to observe two populations of a gliding lizard that have different colored gliding membranes.

One population that the scientists studied has red gliding membranes, which match the color of red falling leaves in their coastal mangrove forest habitat. The other population has dark brown and green gliding membranes, which match leaves in lowland forest habitat.

The scientists determined how these colors would be perceived by a predatory bird. In the end, they found that the gliding membrane color would be indistinguishable from a falling leaf in the same forest.

"It's a cool finding because these gliding lizards are matching the colors of falling leaves and not the leaves that are still attached to the tree," said Danielle Klomp, one of the researchers, in a news release. "In the mangrove population the leaves on the trees are bright green, but turn red shortly before falling to the ground, and it is this red color that the lizards mimic in their gliding membranes. This allows them to mimic a moving part of the environment-falling leaves-when they are gliding."

The findings reveal a bit more about how these lizards manage to use these colors to camouflage while gliding. This, in turn, tells scientists a bit more about this species.

The findings are published in the journal Biology Letters.

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