Lizard Luaus at Summer @ CALS

For the first Lizard Luau of Summer @ CALS, the staff and patrons at the CALS Hillary Rodham Clinton Children’s Library & Learning Center welcomed Megan, who works for Arkansas Reptile Rescue. I brought the lizard stickers and the reptile toys, the lizard coloring sheets, and the presentation full of pictures and factoids to the Children’s Library. Kelly at the Children’s Library brought a huge container of crayons and made sure we had plenty of tables and chairs in the meeting room we were using. But Megan’s buddies were definitely the stars of the show: she brought a blue death-feigning beetle named Jerry, a white ball python named Ozzy, a Savannah monitor named Jaws, and a Nile monitor named Cinder.

Megan explained to me that the beetle is a great place to start with any kids who might be feeling scared. Shya Washington, head of the Children’s Library, was kind enough to provide a pet store gift card for Megan to take back to the rescue, but she was too scared to come in and commune with our new reptile friends. We opened with Megan taking her animals around the room and letting everyone see them and touch them, if they wanted to. Then we went into my presentation.

I talked about Arkansas lizards first, pulling all kinds of information from our very own CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas (EOA). Did you know we have thirteen species and subspecies of lizards found in Arkansas? Then I expanded to lizards worldwide, from anoles, chameleons, and skinks, to frilled lizards, iguanas, Gila monsters, and Komodo dragons. The kids were duly impressed with the Komodo dragon, the largest lizard on earth, and they were thrilled and disgusted to learn that the horned lizard can squirt blood out of its eye to confuse potential predators! They insisted on seeing that pic up close, so I walked it around the room. I also let the kids know that the easiest way to tell reptiles like geckos apart from amphibians like salamanders is this: amphibians are wet and slimy while lizards are dry and scaly. 

I showed them the current smallest lizard, the nano chameleon, but let them know that’s just for now, because new species are being discovered all the time. (The Jaragua dwarf gecko previously held the title.) I talked about how geckos lick their eyeballs because they don’t have eyelids to blink, chameleons can look in two directions at once, some lizards can change their skin color to camouflage, and some lizards can reproduce by parthenogenesis, i.e., by creating clones of themselves. Some lizards even have GREEN blood! Some lizards can “breathe” underwater (by carrying air with them in a bubble) while Galapagos marine iguanas can hold their breath for an hour. Lizards like the blue-tongued skink can use their tongues to smell. Lizard hearing is much poorer than human hearing, but lizard sight is much better than ours—about 350 times better!

The kids weren’t as impressed as I’d expected by the basilisk lizard—nicknamed the Jesus Christ lizard because it can run on water—but the parents, grandparents, aunties, and uncles got a chuckle out of it. I even told them how there are legless lizards that can be mistaken for snakes; it is easier to tell they are lizards when you look at their skeletons.

At the end, I reminded the kids that the table full of lizard library books could be checked out, and then Megan was able to show them the animals a second time before we called it a day. With all the kids and family members we had forty attendees, so it was a total blast!

My second Lizard Luau was in Perryville at the Max Milam branch. It was a bit of a drive, about an hour each way, and Megan wasn’t able to make it. Fortunately, Trinity at Milam had me in a big room, because we had thirty participants! Kids were happy to share coloring supplies, and I stretched the presentation time by engaging the kids more, asking them how many species of lizards they thought existed—a thousand or a trillion gajillion were popular guesses—before telling them that the number is somewhere between 4,000 and 7,000, depending on the source material! This group of kids was really talkative, and they already knew lots of stuff about lizards. They knew about the horny lizard shooting blood out of its eyes—wowza!—but were still impressed by the parthenogenesis (cloning) that some lizards can do in low- or no-male populations. They knew chameleons could change colors but were still impressed and disgusted to learn that geckos lick their eyeballs instead of blinking. And after only two programs, my library stash of lizard books was whittled down from twenty to four, so that’s a definite success!

More Lizard Luaus are coming to a branch near you this summer (the next one is July 8 at the Sanders Library; more info here), so check the Summer @ CALS schedule and bring your little ones to learn more about some really interesting creatures…and maybe even pet one! There are also many, many other Summer @ CALS activities throughout the summer: Register here.

The CALS EOA also offers coloring sheets and scavenger hunts here to help drive that summertime boredom away.

And, as part of Summer @ CALS, the CALS Roberts Library offers Color Our City! Bring Little Rock’s Story to Life with Color; complete the downloadable coloring sheet and bring it to the Roberts Library by July 31 for a prize. (Visiting info is here.)

By Jobe, editorial assistant at the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas and programmer for the CALS Writing Circle

 

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