“The Horned Toad represents longevity and self-reliance. He also represents the conservation of native bounty. He is believed to empower a person or group with self-sufficiency.” — Perry Null Trading

By DR. CAMERON BARROWS

Hopi, Navajo, Tohono O'odham, Pima, Tarahumara, and Zuni cultures portray horned lizards in their ceremonies and stories as symbols of strength. The Navajo also consider horned lizards as protectors of their homes. It is not uncommon to find horned lizard images on petroglyph panels created by ancient pueblo tribes, centuries, perhaps millennia ago. Those images have continued to be part of some of the current artwork produced by today’s Indigenous people. At a Heritage Arts and Crafts festival in Flagstaff, Arizona, I chatted with one such young Navajo artist, who related two stories passed on by elders that had inspired his art today.

The first story began: One day Lightning started arguing with Horned Toad, saying that he had more power than the Toad. Lightning threatened the Toad, saying that he was so powerful, his strike could kill Horned Toad dead right on the spot. Horned Toad, however, was pretty clever. In his experience, by moving his head and tilting to the side, he was harder to hit than Lightning realized. One afternoon Lightning said to Horned Toad, “If I were to strike four times, I bet I can kill you.” Taking up the challenge, Horned Toad walked a distance away and stood in the field and waited. When the lizard felt the spontaneous urge, he moved his head to the side and his body rolled to that side. When the flash of light and bolt of lightning arrived, it hit the ground nearby and missed Horned Toad. Three more strikes and three more times with the same result. Horned Toad had avoided all four strikes. Next, Horned Toad said to Lightning, “It’s my turn.” He took his position above Lightning and pointed his spiky head at Lightning. The Toad thrust his head down and his spikes hit into Lightning and sent a fierce bolt of electricity that splintered into a vast array of smaller strikes, which quickly exploded wildly across the sky. The image lit up the entire horizon, as the sun was setting.

The second Navajo story has horned lizards protecting their homes from fierce giants. The horned lizard stood up to the giant to protect the Navajo’s homes, but the giant reached down and swallowed the lizard. You might think that was the end for the horned lizard, but when it reached the giant’s stomach it thrust its horns into the stomach wall causing the giant’s stomach and the giant to explode. These are stories of power and self-reliance and protection imbued through a small but defiant creature. They are also stories of respect for all creatures.

Why attach such power and respect to horned lizards? One obvious retort is, why not? Nevertheless, there are characteristics of horned lizards that seem to embody these qualities. Unlike other lizards, or snakes, or small mammals, or birds, or butterflies, when a larger creature, such as a coyote, fox, bobcat, or human, approaches them, horned lizards are far more likely to hold their ground in a seeming act of bravado and defiance. They appear to have an attitude of confidence and self-assurance unlike that of any other creature we might encounter. An additional explanation is that if they hold their ground and remain motionless their excellent camouflage will render them invisible.

The primary source of food for horned lizards is ants. For some horned lizards ants are almost all they eat. Many ants have painful stings; in order to swallow an ant and at the same time avoid its sting, horned lizards produce mucous that immobilizes the ants as they pass through their digestive tract. Ants are typically abundant, especially in the arid landscapes where horned lizards live. Except ants are small and are not all that nutritious; a horned lizard needs to eat lots of ants to meet their physiological needs, often eating 70 or more ants a day. That volume of ants requires a very large digestive system, and that requires a wide body. Wide bodies are typically comparatively slow moving and slow moving can make one vulnerable to being captured and eaten by a larger predator. The 21 species of horned lizards are restricted to North America, the U.S. and Mexico, however, in Australia there is an unrelated species of lizard that eats only ants, Moloch horridus, or “thorny devil." Like horned lizards, Molochs also have large digestive systems, have wide bodies, and are extremely well camouflaged.

Being camouflaged, cryptically blending with the rocks and sand upon which they live, helps horned lizards avoid becoming something else’s’ meal. In areas with gray sand and rocks, horned lizards are mottled gray in color; in regions with brown or red sand and rocks, the same species of horned lizard will be brown or reddish colored. For both horned lizards and thorny devils, part of the camouflage is color, but equally important are the horns and rough skin that creates an irregular outline allowing the lizard to blend in with their irregular substrate. Some horned lizard species have long, sharp horns protruding from the back of their head, while others have just bony crests. The longest, sharpest horns belong to flat-tailed horned lizards, found only within the Colorado Desert. In earlier times if I was too clumsy handling one, it would jam its horns into my fingers, sometimes drawing blood. A friend, Kevin Young, was conducting research on flat-tails and found the most common predator to be shrikes. Loggerhead shrikes often hang their prey on thorns so Kevin retrieved the carcasses and then was able to measure the horn length on those lizards killed by shrikes and the compare those lengths to live adult lizards that had so far avoided shrike predation. The horns on the live lizards were 10% longer.

For horned lizards, camouflage is just their first line of defense. If a snake detects them, rather than rely on their camouflage, some horned lizard species will flip on their side revealing the antithesis of camouflage, their bright white underside. At the same time, they expand their ribs becoming even wider, essentially declaring to the snake that they are far more than the snake can get its jaws around, so don’t bother. If the snake doesn’t get the message and tries to swallow the lizard anyway the lizard’s horns provide yet another deterrent. If the snake still persists, those horns will puncture the snake’s esophagus, and perhaps not coincidentally, much like the giants of the Navajo legend, it will be the last thing that snake ever tries to swallow. Those snakes that get the horned lizards’ message and leave it alone will survive, those that don’t will not pass along their genes to the next generation.

Revealing their bright underside works for snakes, but for a predator that typically chews their prey into small bites, such as coyotes, foxes, or a bobcat, that would be a bad idea indeed. For those and only those predators, horned lizards have still another lesson to teach. Such predators often bite the heads of their prey to quickly subdue them. However, for some species of horned lizards, just as a they are going headfirst into the jaws of one of these predators, they squirt blood into the predator’s mouth.

This begs at least two questions: how do they squirt blood and why? The how is well known. The lizards constrict capillary flow around their eye, building up pressure until one or more capillaries burst, and squirts a jet of blood usually into the upper pallet of the coyote, fox, or bobcat. The why is more challenging. Why give the predator a taste of your blood just before it kills you?

A friend of mine, Wade Sherbrooke, who also conducted the horned lizard – snake research, figured it out. The assumption was that, probably due to their ant-based diet, their blood tasted really bad. Wade tried that on himself; the horned lizard blood tasted just like blood, there was nothing offensive about its taste, at least not for Wade. However, then Wade set up an experiment using a captive-raised live kit fox and bobcat, both of which had never seen or eaten a horned lizard before the experiment. Both predators eagerly grabbed the horned lizard and began to eat it head first. But, before the predators could provide a killing bite, the horned lizard squirted blood into their mouths. Instantaneously the fox and the bobcat released the lizard and began to foam at the mouth. For the next hour or so the predators kept foaming and wiping their mouth while the horned lizard, shaken but not killed, scrambled away. The predators fully recovered but then showed no interest in horned lizards as prey. Apparently, the negative blood reaction was species-specific, having no effect on humans. The lizard was a Texas horned lizard; some but not all other species are known to have the same blood-squirting ability.

It is easy for me to share the same reverence for horned lizards as did and do Indigenous people today. The lizards’ attitude of confidence and self-assurance unlike that of any other lizard plays a big part in that feeling, as do the many lessons they tell about how to survive in a challenging environment.

Nullius in verba

Go outside, tip your hat to a chuckwalla (and a cactus), think like a mountain, and be safe