A supposedly welcome guest in the underground chambers of leaf cutter ants is the amphisbaena, a nearly limbless lizard about a foot long which looks somewhat like a gigantic earth worm. These creatures, seldom seen, can be found from Brazil north to lower California and there is one isolated species in Florida.
“Those brought to me,” observed the noted British naturalist and explorer of Brazil, Henry Walter Bates, “were generally not much more than a foot in length. They are of cylindrical shape having, properly speaking, no neck, and the blunt tail which is only about an inch in length is of the same shape as the head. This peculiar form, added to their habit of wriggling backwards as well as forwards, has given rise to the fable that they have two heads, one at each extremity. They are extremely sluggish in their motions, and are clothed with scales that have the form of small imbedded plates arranged in rings around the body. The eye is so small as to be scarcely perceptible.
“They live habitually in the subterranean chamber of the Sauba ant; only coming out of their abodes occasionally in the night-time. The natives call the amphisbaena the “mai das Saubas,” or mother of Saubas, and believe it to be poisonous, although it is perfectly harmless. They say the ants treat it with great affection and that if the “snake” be taken away from the nest the ants also will forsake it. I believe, however, that they feed on the saubas, for I once found remains of the ants in the stomach of one of them.
“Their motions are quite peculiar. The undilatable jaws, small eyes and curious plated integument distinguish them from other snakes. These properties evidently have some relation to their residence in the subterranean abodes.”
Closely related is the Florida worm lizard, rose-colored and completely legless and earless. It is about a foot long and looks so much like an earthworm that expert collectors have been fooled. A peculiarity is that it always goes down into a burrow tail first.
The Arizona worm lizard, a somewhat fabulous animal of the same family, is not, so far as is known, represented in any collection. One veteran miner told of dragging “a purple snake with two legs on its neck” from the gravel. A woman claimed to have kept as a pet for three months “a purple snake with its legs where its ears ought to be.”
All these animals are in the same general family as the glass snakes of Europe and the United States. These are long, slender, legless lizards. They are burrowing animals which occasionally are turned up by ploughmen, but they often come to the surface voluntarily at night. Specimens occasionally found in daylight usually are hiding in dark recesses.
Each animal consists of apparently quite separate parts, body and tail. The body is from six inches to a foot long, according to species, and the tail may be twice as long. The animal can disengage its tail by a single twist when caught by that organ. The slightest injury or rough handling causes this tail to fly to pieces. Each piece wriggles energetically, supposedly to attract attention while the lizard itself crawls to safety in its burrow. The body does not break up and does not, as popularly reputed, come back later to gather up fragments of its tail. Instead it grows a new tail, always smaller than the original, from the stump.
The Only Bug in the Sea
Only one group of insects has taken to the sea—the small, gray long-legged water striders. Unlike fresh water relatives of the same genus, these have permanently lost their wings. They have no further use for this means of movement in the ocean.