Don McLeish has photo-documented an amazing battle between two green anoles in his backyard. The fight went on for at least an hour, and when he checked in on the lizards at night, one was still breathing hard hours later. Check out the photos!
Professor of Biology and Director of the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in Saint Louis. I've spent my entire professional career studying anoles and have discovered that the more I learn about anoles, the more I realize I don't know.
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Yoel Stuart
Fascinating! As best I could tell, even after that long vigorous fight, both tails were still intact. It seemed like there were bite marks on the tails but no breakage. Just one more observation in the ongoing debate about how to interpret tail autotomy – predation or intra-specific interaction or both?
Martha Muñoz
OK, so that was amazing! Did anyone else notice that they were battling on the ground? Is that common in native populations of A. carolinensis?
Jim Jackson
Years ago in Mississippi, I observed a prolonged (>30 minutes) engagement between two large male anoles about 4 meters high on the limbs of a small tree. The crunching sounds of teeth-on-teeth when they were jaw-locked were quite noticeable. That contest ended when one lizard fell to the ground. The flipping behavior that Don McLeish described may function to throw the opponent out of an elevated arena.
azara
what is that stuff on them that looks like pepper seeds?
James T. Stroud
It looks like ground substrate to me (more of it visible out of focus in the background)
Beth Hewitt
I noticed that only once or maybe twice did I actually see teeth being used. To the very casual observer it seems when fighting over territory they’re more about posturing and wrestling, because had they actually been “fighting to the death” it seems there would have been a lot more blood around their necks, and possibly even a very unhappy ending.