Blue Knight Anole: What Is It?

Back in the ’90s I had several blue-phase Knight anoles. I was breeding them, at first I only had one pair that produced young but then I received a couple more pairs and their young – from a nine-year-old girl who’d also been breeding them at home. I guess her parents got sick of her growing collection. Ha-ha – it certainly humbled me about my own skills, as I was keeping mine in Ficus trees while she’d pulled it off in small aquariums, so she’d managed to pull off the artificial incubation that I’d had so many problems with, whereas my own eggs had hatched in the roots of the Ficus. I’d started with my first pair up in Grande Prairie, but later I was working at Riverfront Aquariums in Calgary (in the late ’90s before it went to hell) My point being, my first hatchling was now an adult female – I paired her up with an adult male blue-phase from the young girl’s group. ANYWAY – the blue young only came from one pair, who were otherwise normal equestris yet perhaps with some elevated blue colouration, just spots really. Now, about half of my hatchlings seemed to have the heavy striping as neonates, but this passed with age and it didn’t matter whether they were normal green phase or blue, just a normal thing I’d expect. I also had several I’d characterize as a yellow-phase, and chartreuse adults who were very close to completely yellow. Let’s just say I had a LOT of Knight Anoles back then, over a long period. We also brought in a few small shipments at work – we were a direct importer, no middle-man etc. I placed ’em all with good homes, ’cause I really cared about this species above all others. Now, I let somebody have a hatchling once who kept it in a “sweater box” and killed it, and HE came up with the EXCUSE that my blue hatchlings lacked some dietary requirement, just as green basilisks lose colour with captivity and diet – I call B.S. on that ’cause I had hatchlings from four pairs and they bred true, so WTF. Thing was, he published a magazine, so he was an “authority” – though he was just a student and wasn’t nearly as experienced with reptiles as those whom I “apprenticed” to at work. But he presented himself as such, so there you have it! Anyway, yeah everybody took his word for it at that point. It’s been a long time, I don’t feel the need to play god and stick little animals in glass coffins anymore – hell I’ve even let go of the vegan lifestyle I lived for a good ten years after I left the biz. Sadly, my lone male Heosemys depressa died 2 years ago, I knew of his captive history going back to WWII when he was brought back from the Burma theater of war by a British veteran. But I looked ’em up recently and I see they’re being bred now. It’s seldom I look into any of this stuff, just out of curiosity or nostalgia really – and today I looked up the anoles. Good to see they’re mentioned at all, though the controversy and mistaken identity is to be expected. Not all is to be found in the books! Hell, there was a point in time when I was taking home sick and dying chamaeleons from bad shipments, just so they could die in peace among the houseplant jungle at our apartment – well one day I’d brought home a three-horned chamaeleon, I think it might have been … it wasn’t Jackson’s and I don’t think it was Johnston’s … in any case the book said they were egg layers but when I examined the heavily gravid female who should NEVER have been transported … well NONE of ’em should be really … but yeah, she was full of nearly developed young. NOT eggs. Just a petite lil’ gal. Very sad memories. THAT is what I carry with me from those years. Sadness. My point however, is that the official tomes of reptile wisdom were waaay off the mark. So don’t just jump to the descriptions. Incidentally, I identified my H depressa (Papa Champa) from the original description, based off drawings of the intersections of plastral/carapacial scutes – NOT from layman’s descriptions – as such I wasn’t swayed by his large size or the couple of orange spots on his face. Though, I kept alive a suspicion that he was a hybrid with H grandis, and that’s what I told people, because it assuaged my guilt over keeping such a critically endangered species and not going to EVERY possible effort to find him a mate and breeding program. Well, I did for a long time, I just gave up after a few years, after too many zoos said they couldn’t take him. Of course, none of ’em would take the enormous female leopard tortoise who came to me with the depressed turtle, even though they had a 2.1 trio right there in the city they wouldn’t take her – It’s a mistake to confuse exactly what zoos are and what they DO – what they DON’T do – for a long time I believed in the whole Noah’s Ark b.s. that they trundle out for their critics. We are not the care-takers of these animals, nor of this Earth – all we can do is destroy ourselves or bide our time a little longer – Nature’s diversity can – and WILL – always replenish itself. Even if we kill off everything but one mote of pond scum, deep in some salt-mine cavern, a bubble of water preserved deep in a salt mine – life will remain on this planet with or without our help. Which is to say, if you wish to help preserve diversity it’s all about the HABITAT – not about keeping displays in zoos for photo opportunities. You can’t put Humpty-Dumpty back together again, not the same way at least. But nature will fill in the cracks, it’s all just a question of whether the resulting environment will be inhabitable for humans after the fact. Let alone beautiful. I used to say my job, with the 700 aquariums I cared for – was like a dishwasher’s job with a TV to watch always tuned to PBS nature documentaries. I guess it was true, in the sense that I only saw through the blinders of the narrow vision of looking down the length of the lens, the cathode ray tube, the length of the wiring etc. Far better to have traveled – maybe not on an airplane with all the resultant pollution, carbon foot-print etc – maybe if I’d stuck with working on old Honda motorcycles and just toured around on one of them, I could’ve seen so much more in my youth. But I was fixated on creating little “snap-shots” in the sense of aquarium/terrarium compositions. I considered myself an acolyte of Takashi Amano, as I took composition of naturalistic scenes very seriously. Possibly the best integration was when I had a blue-phase anole egg hatch out from it’s position within the roots of a Phaelenopsis orchid, which was situated in a hang-on-tank filter converted to a hydroponic plant pot (like an algal filter) hooked into my fully planted Discus community tank, which was a mere 100 gallons. There were Discus laying eggs in that tank, as well as dwarf cichlids, bristle-nose plecos – probably thirty species of aquatic plants – I liked to plumb all of my terrariums with waterfalls and aquatic zones. Well not the desert tanks usually, though I did that too come to think of it. And I cut glass and made my own tanks, besides the tanks I made at work which were the size of your bathroom – mainly I liked to employ an open non-caged scheme, for birds to fly around etc. Until my tokays began to eat the baby finches from their nests ha ha – and a friend dumped a six & 1/2 foot long ornate nile monitor on me when it ate the neighbor’s cat. Strangely enough, he didn’t eat any of my pets, as he was dog tame. Lucky I’d known him since he was less than a foot long, so we got along famously. I might’ve been his favourite human. And then I placed him with a permanent home – we did reptile “rescue”, though I mean ALL of ’em we didn’t just cherry-pick breeding stock or profit the way many so-called “rescue” groups do! They sure did back then. The one guy, I’d even busted him on stealing a guy’s tortoises from his yard, told the guy who it was and everything it was beautiful ha ha – but before that even, I had called his classified advert, described a large rare tortoise, vague as to whether it was an Aldabra or a Galapagos – and gave him directions to pick it up that went around in circles in the country-side North of the city, West of the city, South of the city, etc – Ha-ha. That guy was a real piece of work. At least, though I lost my own way – at least I had a good character foil to show me where not to tread! I hope he’s found his own way out of it too…. -S.