Lizards making a comeback in the North
Richard Gleason
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Mar 28/01) - Joel Smith rolls a cricket in calcium then holds the insect inside the terrarium. Zoom is immediately interested. He scoots up to a nearby branch and with a few quick lunges grabs the cricket from Joel's fingers and gobbles it down.
"He has the record for our anoles," says Joel with some pride. "I gave him eight in one day."
Zoom is one-quarter of the lizard population in the Smith household. With a little help from their dad Len, Joel and his 11-year-old sister Chloe share two pairs. Zoom and Zip are anoles and Felix and Felicity, at about 15 centimetres, are examples of the larger giant Madagascar day geckos.
"They're cool," says Chloe. "Felicity comes out when I call her."
The Smiths' reptiles are part of a handful kept as pets in the city. Felix and Felicity are the offspring of lizards owned by Anne Gunn. Gunn has given away six hatched from eggs laid by her lizards.
"When they hatch they're stunning," Gunn said. "They look like cheap plastic jewelry."
Gunn uses a home-made incubator to warm the pea-sized eggs and keeps the young separate from their parents, who have a tendency to view them the same way they do crickets. Gunn, a biologist, said there's more to keeping healthy lizards than most people realize.
Lizards need infrared heat, specific kinds of light and a careful diet, including calcium supplements.
"It's quite a performance to set up a terrarium that's fairly healthy, rather than one in which the lizards are just existing," Gunn said. When they walked the Earth millions of years ago, the ancestors of Zip and Zoom and Felicity and Felix could hardly have imagined (if lizards imagine anything) their descendants would end up in a place like Yellowknife.
"There's something almost bizarre about this, when it's the middle of winter, having these little emerald worlds," Gunn said of the large terrariums her lizards call home.
Lizards live farther North than Yellowknife.
The next time you visit Inuvik drop in at Ron Morrison's office and you'll see a giant Madagascar day gecko in an aquarium, another of the progeny of Gunn's geckos.
"If they're really happy, they'll have eggs and ours have had eggs," said Brenda Dragon, mother of Joel and Chloe.
