And You Thought Broccoli was Bad...
As children most of us have devised some sort of trick to be able to swallow or pretend to swallow the food we didn't care for because our parents insisted it was good for us to grow up big and strong. Whether it be by blocking your nose, feeding it to the dog, or some other clever way, we found some way to get the job done to make our parents content. In nature, one reptile shares a similar method. Horned lizards live in the western U.S. and are forced to have a diet comprised mostly of harvester ants due to their harsh habitat.
Harvester ants are not very nutritious due to their exoskeletons, which are made of indigestible chitin. They are "armed with a venomous sting and powerful mandibles for biting". They also are thought to taste terrible because their bodies contain a bit of formic acid, leaving a bitter taste. Observations on the horned lizard and their foraging behaviors tell us that they have developed a way of eating differently from most other lizards. Instead of chewing their food like other lizards, they swallow the ants whole and in the process they coat each ant in a film of mucus. This way they don't have to experience the awful taste and they protect the lining of their GI tract and stomach from tearing.
Evolutionary biologist Kurt Schwenk, has dissected road kill horned lizards and found something that was not found in other lizard species. In the back of their throat, they have small protruding structures that are made up mostly of mucus producing cells. Apparently the lizard has to get these tiny beasts to the back of their throat and ball them up in mucus with great speed before the ant has a chance to cause harm to the lizards throat.
Harvester ants are not only hard to digest, but they also have very little nutritional content. At least when we were forced to eat vegetables, we were getting nutrients to help us thrive. I find it hard to believe that the horned lizards are able to sustain life mostly by taking in tons of ultimately indigestible food sources.
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/929/2
Posted by: Ashley Maillet (3)
posted by PWH @ 3:21 PM
19 comments
19 Comments:
This is interesting. I would like to know more about the environment that the lizard lives in to have a better understanding of why they don't eat other things.
-Sasha Rogers
This is an interesting finding. I know that many animals over time will produce and lose certain adaptive characteristics through evolutionary processes. These characteristics help them to be better adapted to their environment such as beak sizes in Darwin finches which varied in size depending on the seeds available to eat. Do you think that the lizards always had this mucous coating ability or that they developed it over time as an adaptation to more easily and comfortably ingest their prey?
Posted by: Lindsay Goodyear
This mucus trait that these lizards have developed- are there any other cases of this development in any other reptiles besides lizards? Is it often that one of these lizards fails to correctly swallow a harvester and and have it do significant harm to the lizard?
-Kiel Boutelle
Harvester ants do not seem to be the best of diets at all. Not only are they hard to digest and loathsome in taste, but they are also provide little nutritional value? Do these lizards have other sources of nutrition?
-Helen Thi
If these harvester ants are not nutritious then why are they the main source of that lizards diet? I mean I know the environment is the most ideal environment to make up the best diet but I'm sure they're other creatures in the area that are more edible. I guess you could say that eating isn't so much of a delicacy as we humans would like to think.
Patrick Salome
So can the lizards be harmed if they don't get the ants to the back of their throats fast enough? Nice job, very interesting.
Ericka Adey
Interesting. Too bad for the horned lizards, it sounds like they don't have many options wen it comes to food. Since they swallow the ants whole i wonder how long the ants are alive inside them, and that if they don't coat them properly with mucus what kind of damage could they do to the lizard?
-Alex Pavidapha
This interests me a lot, mostly because I find it hard to imagine how and why a lizard would develop such specialized digestion for something bad tasting and unhealthy. I guess it's hard to understand how anything manages to survive in extreme environments.
-Jane de Verges
This comment has been removed by the author.
The environment must be harsh to provide enough selection pressure for the lizards to evolve a mechanism to eat a low nutrition food. Did the author mention that the environment had a low prey density?
Jimmy Sullivan
Great post! I love the analogy. Do you know what the lizards preferred diet consists of? I understand that availability of resources determines a lot of what they eat. Also I think it's really cool that the lizard has developed a mucus mechanism to eat the ants. Do you know of any other lizards that might use this same mechanism? I wonder when the trait might have evolved. I would imagine being that the nutritious factor of ants are low they would have to find other sources of nutrients. Thank you for your post.
Amanda Sceusa
In response to comments: Horned lizards are found in very harsh habitats such as the hot, sandy deserts of western U.S. and Mexico. They have very little choice of prey and the most abundant is the harvester ant. I gather that these ants are snacks to "hold them over" until they can find something more nutritious. The mucous also drowns the ants so that they are already dead once in the lizards stomach. Another interesting fact about the lizards: they can squirt blood from their eyes to confuse their predators.
Posted by author: Ashley Maillet
Wow, I love how you tied it into children and eating brocoli. I wonder how they evolved to have these extra mucous secreting organs in their throats.
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