A bathroom lizard in Colombia. But which lizard? Learning about Alopoglossus

‘I’ve just found this in the bathroom’ is not an unusual cry in tropical wildlife lodges. This time my wife was clutching her hands together as she joined me outside. ‘Running around the floor—it took a bit of catching’ as she opened her fingers. It was a small lizard, an interesting lizard with its array of tough-looking scales arranged in rows and columns. It did not object to sitting unrestrained in the hand and after a couple of quick iPhone photographs it was persuaded to scuttle into the undergrowth.

We were staying at the lodge popular with wildlife groups visiting the Otún Quimbaya reserve. Hotel Kumanday (4°45’33.162”N; 75°36’45.858”W, altitude 1,670 metres) is on the edge of the village of La Florida. La Florida is on the Rio Otún which flows westward from the peaks of the Cordillera Central into the valley of the Rio Cauca. The Cauca flows northwards between the Cordillera Occidental and the Cordillera Central to join the Magdalena before flowing into the Caribbean.

Back home a search indicated it was a shade lizard, genus Alopoglossus. By searching for images of those species that occur in Colombia and notwithstanding the problem that photographs of animals shown online may not have been correctly identified, we seemed able to narrow the search down to two species that occur in the Cauca drainage. Then, using the descriptions of the two species in original papers and the morphological differences between them, we concluded that this one was Alopoglossus stenolepis, originally described from further south and on the eastern slope of the Cordillera Occidental. The lizard from La Florida fits the description of A. stenolepis rather than A. vallensis in that the dorsal scales are not pointed front and back thus creating a zig-zag line where two rows meet, and the snout is curved in lateral view and not straight.

If this is indeed Alopoglossus stenolepis then it is one that was first described by George Albert Boulenger at the Natural History Museum in London in 1908 from a specimen collected by Mervyn George Palmer (1882-1954). Palmer was a collector for the Museum in Colombia, Ecuador and Nicaragua between 1904 and 1910.

The question is: did we get the ID right?

The taxonomy and phylogeny of those lizards currently included in the genus Alopoglossus has changed a great deal and has proved controversial. Currently, the thirty-odd species are the only ones included in their own family, Alopoglossidae. Many species were formerly included in the genus Ptychoglossus. I will not dwell on higher classification other than point out that these small lizards are often called microteids since the whole teid clan (for want of a better word) ranges from these small lizards to tegus, the size of the smaller monitors of the Old World.

Alopoglossus lizards are oviparous and occur from Costa Rica through northern South America, both east and west of the Andes and across Amazonia. They are diurnal inhabitants of the forest floor where they forage in the leaf litter. They have been found in human dwellings but how did this one come to be running around under a wash-basin and lavatory bowl?

Hotel Kumanday, La Florida

Harris DM. 1994. Review of the teiid lizard genus Ptychoglossus. Herpetological Monographs 8, 226-275.