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WHAT IS THE ADAPTATION AND HABITAT OF LIZARD
Habitats

The Sonoran Desert has a variety of habitats where lizards can be found, including grasslands, woodlands and forests, desert-scrub, etc. Incredibly, many of these habitats are found in or near Tucson. Most likely, your school is (or was) surrounded by Arizona-Upland desertscrub (with saguaros, cholla and prickly pear cacti, and paloverde, ironwood, and acacia trees, etc.) However, a short drive up the Mount Lemmon highway takes you through manzanita, oak and juniper woodlands, pine-fir forest and riparian zones, too. You can find different lizards in all of these areas. Keep in mind that they also use different microhabitats (habitat within a habitat). Within a given habitat one may find several microhabitats, which are smaller areas with distinct characteristics that create a unique place to live.  These differences may be obvious, such as trees versus rocks, or subtle like a certain kind (limestone vs. granite, etc.) or size of rock, or different rock crevices with certain thermal (heat) characteristics.

Adaptation

Some lizards, like the chuckwalla (Sauromalus obesus) are well adapted to desert living. The Chuckwalla is a herbivore with a major attraction to rocky hillsides below elevations of 4000 feet.  The body temperature of this medium-sized lizard has been documented up to 102°F, which allows it to be active at much higher temperatures than many other lizards.  When it is too hot it will pant and take refuge from the heat, which for chuckwallas means diving into nearby rock piles or small caves.  Its somewhat flattened body allows it to go into rock crevices and then small, rough scales combined with super-inflation of the lungs (up to 3 times their normal volume) make it virtually impossible to remove.   The chuckwalla is a typical lizard in that it passes pasty uric acid instead of urine, which conserves valuable water.  But this species goes a couple of extra steps, for it possesses nasal salt glands which allow it to rid its body of excess salts without using up precious water in the process.  It can also determine the water content of plants that it consumes, and when the water content is too low, it stops eating them. Another intriguing feature of the chuckwalla is its lateral lymph sacs that allow it to store excess fluids, which means that when there’s extra water it can save it for many non-rainy days!


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