![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/An-amputee-American-green-anole-credit-Tony-Gamble-supplied-to-Washington-University-1024x597.jpg\")
An amputee American green anole \u2013 credit, Tony Gamble supplied to Washington University<\/p>\n An amputee American green anole \u2013 credit, Tony Gamble supplied to Washington University<\/p>\n
The Bahamas were once crawling with pirates, but have always been crawling with lizards.<\/p>\n
Do the two have anything in common? Well, much like the old trope of pirates missing legs and hands, many of the lizards of the Bahamas are too.<\/p>\n
The reason we know this is because there happened to be the right person in the right place with the right interests at the right time: Jonathan Losos\u2014who began to notice that peg-legged lizards were pretty nimble.<\/p>\n
In fact, after decades of study and a worldwide academic collaboration, Losos\u2019 paper on the subject reveals that agility and capability was a trait possessed by over a hundred amputee lizards.<\/p>\n
Losos first formed this ad-hoc study project when he was catching and measuring anole lizards (pronounced a-nole-ee) in the Bahamas over 20 years ago, and noticed a female who was missing part of her hindleg.<\/p>\n
She was nonetheless speedy and agile, and it got Losos thinking how one could persevere at hunting and avoiding predators with such a debilitating injury. Joining with herpetologist James Stroud, Losos began corroborating field research on 58 different species observed over 100 times by some 50 scientists.<\/p>\n
Published in a paper recently<\/a> in the American Naturalist, Losos, Stroud, and dozens of co-authors present evidence that these \u201cPirates of the Caribbean (and other places)\u201d can continue to plunder even after losing some or most of their hind or forelegs.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t help but be impressed by lizards that do well even when they lose a good chunk of a limb,\u201d Losos, the William Danforth Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told Wash. U news outlets.<\/a> \u201cThey\u2019re remarkably resilient.\u201d<\/p>\n However resilient the anoles and other lizards may be, limb loss must be a significant predictor of mortality, and indeed just 1% of surveyed lizards during the study period had limb injuries. Unlike the tails of some lizard species like anoles and geckos, limbs do not grow back.<\/p>\n