THE DESERT SUN (Palm Springs, California) 25 September 05 The desert iguana likes it hot (James Cornett)
The desert iguana likes it hot, really hot.
Though common to retain a body temperature of 108 degrees, one lizard was discovered with its at 115, the hottest temperature ever voluntarily tolerated by such an animal.
Such preference for high body temperatures explains why the species is restricted to the sandy and rocky flats of the Sonoran and Mojave deserts and absent from the colder Great Basin Desert to the north.
The need to maintain a higher-than-average body temperature is partially explained by diet. Desert iguana food consists of hard-to-digest plant material that takes much longer to break down into useable nutrients than does usual animal food.
Ability to assimilate
By maintaining the warmest possible body temperature for the longest period, a desert iguana maximizes its ability to assimilate plant material.
It also eats its own feces, reworking digested food and doubling the time it is worked upon by digestive enzymes. The ingestion of fecal pellets may also provide microbes for intestinal fermentation, a process that results in the releasing of even more nutrients.
Desert iguanas consume a wide variety of plant species. In addition to its staple food of creosote bush flowers and leaves, it eats encelia flowers, most parts of sand verbena, coldenia, sand-mat, and the leaves of dicoria, indigo bush and burrobush. Insects, including blister beetles and ants, are also important and in some regions make up half the diet.
Though iguanas drink readily when water is available, most water is obtained from free water in food and water that is produced by the metabolic process.
Breeding activity
Breeding activities begin in April, shortly after the iguanas emerge from hibernation. Territorial males pursue intruding males and battles can result in the loss of a combatant's tail. The tailless loser is driven from the area. Females are permitted within a male's domain and the dominant male may breed with more than one female.
Females lay eggs in burrows, and after deposition, the eggs are covered with soil and abandoned. Eggs hatch in about 45 days.
This species is the second-largest harmless lizard in the U.S., with adults reaching a maximum length of 18 inches. From a distance, they appear whitish but on closer inspection, the upper surface is seen to have gray or reddish-brown spots or bars.
The desert iguana likes it hot