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RE: My 2nd Favorite Pet of The High Desert!
Cool post.
These were super common when I was a kid. We'd find them in the Phoenix area all the time. Our last home in the valley was in Apache Junction, where we would see one occasionally. Now, in Eastern AZ, I think I've seen one in the last four or five years.
They're really cool animals. I wish we had a bunch of them around the place to complement our lizard herd. :)
Yes I was reading about them recently and their populations have declined just about nationwide and across all species. That is why some species are now protected. It is a bummer because they really are neat animals. The reason for the decline is most likely a destruction of habitat by people and a destruction of harvester ant habitat... their main food source
We have ants... too many. I wonder if I could interest a horned family to move in. :)
Haha! Maybe they just need to be reintroduced ;)
I don't understand what happened to the horned lizards in Tucson. I have a tiny house in the Glenn/Alvernon area that hasn't changed for decades. It had ant hills and horned lizards in the yard until maybe 2003 or 2005 and then they all disappeared. Not just the horned lizards, but the ants. Nobody in my neighborhood has any "lawn" worth spraying with anything - it's Tucson dust - so I've just been confounded. Those horned lizards did just fine in that neighborhood for so long. I really enjoyed having them around.
That is strange... I wonder what happened... Yea I read that ant populations have been destroyed so the lizards leave...
It's the scale of change that makes me think it was a fungus affecting the ants. Or it's a change in the kind of ants, to ones that the horned lizard just doesn't eat. I grew up catching them and playing with them in western Kansas. I really like them.
Could be... was there some kind of fungus problem out there recently?
I think about Valley Fever, which is from a fungus that really gets growing in the soil during the wet El Nino winters. Then it gets airborne when the soil is disturbed by construction or dry winds -- a La Nina following an El Nino is the worst. I'm not saying that the Valley Fever fungus is the problem. But it's an example of a soil-borne fungus that changes from year to year over huge areas. Vets see it in dogs and doctors see it in people. Nobody is looking out for the little horned lizard. Maybe they have their own fungal nemesis, down there in the dust and dirt. : (