New Reptile on the Block: A New Iguana Species Discovered in China
Published:08 Feb.2024 Source:Pensoft Publishers
A new iguana joins Asia's rich reptile fauna, officially described as new to science in the open-access journal ZooKeys. From 2009 to 2022, researchers conducted a series of field surveys in South China and collected a number of specimens of the Calotes versicolor species complex, and found that the population of what they thought was Calotes versicolor in South China and Northern Vietnam was a new undescribed species and two subspecies.
Wang's garden lizard (Calotes wangi) is less than 9 cm long, and one of its distinguishing features is its orange tongue. Calotes wangi is found in subtropical evergreen broad-leaved forests and tropical monsoon forests in southern China and northern Vietnam. It is active at the edge of the forest, and when it is in danger, it rushes into bushes or climbs tree trunks to hide. Investigations found that the lizards lie on sloping shrub branches at night, sleeping close to the branches.
It is active from April to October every year, while in the tropics it is active from March to November or even longer, and eats a variety of insects, spiders, and other arthropods. For now, the researchers estimate that the new species is not threatened, but they do note that in some areas its habitat is fragmented. This is why they suggest that the local government strengthen the protection of their ecological environment and pay close attention to the population dynamics.