Do Lizards Eat Bread?

I threw some bread crumbs on the ground the other day to feed my pet ants, but that proved to be their undoing when a brown anole lizard (Anolis sagrei) pounced on the little guys that were feeding on the crumbs.

The lizard got a little over-zealous, I thought, and ended up swallowing a whole crumb (is that an oxymoron, or what?) just as I had my camera out waiting for him to do his red dewlap display.

A quick check on Google verified that anoles only eat insects and not grains. So … the only thing I can figure is that the ants flavored the bread crumb for the lizard. Eh? No? Well then what? Maybe the all-protein diet (shades of Dr. Robert Atkins) needed a little carbohydrate boost?

That speculation had to wait a bit, because there was another character waiting to horn in on the mini-ant feast (I say “mini-ant” because these ants were teeny little buggers that have somehow supplanted the larger ants that used to forage in our driveway and turnaround).

It was a little garden skink (Lempropholis delicate) that got into a lizard-skink testosterone stare-down with the anole, which started bobbing up and down in its threat display.

“Whoa!” I whispered in lizard talk, “There’s plenty of ants to go around. Share and share alike!”

They looked at me, shook their heads and ran off. The nerve of those little rascals!