A venomous lizard, a rare iguana, and a cactus “tree”.
Check out this weird relationship among two of the planet’s rarest and most endangered reptiles and this cactus.
Thinking about Gila monsters and beaded lizards as emblems, icons of the Pacific coast of Mexico. How these unique, enchanting, superlative, venomous lizards are so closely associated with the landscapes along the Pacific between the Mojave Desert and the mountains of Guatemala.
It turns out that there have been 2 more unique species of Gila monster/beaded lizard hiding in plain sight. (Subspecies which are now technically considered to be unique species.) 2 “new” Gila monsters. One of theses lives in the tropical dry forest and scrub of the Motagua Valley, where organ pipe cactus and thornscrub give this Guatemalan habitat a look kinda like the Sonoran Desert. Here lives the Motagua beaded lizard, one of the rarest and most endangered reptiles on the planet. The other “new” species is the Chiapan beaded lizard. Look at this venomous lizard and its unique habitat in the tropical mountains of Chiapas:
And one of the iconic creatures of this imaginative coast: Gila monsters. Since Linnaean taxonomic classification is a loose and ever-changing and fallible way to attempt to categorize living things, let’s just say that beaded lizards are similar enough that I just consider them, basically, to be Gila monsters. All together, there are 6 subspecies, 6 variations, of these venomous lizards. And there are two of these venomous lizards that don’t really get talked about too much despite their extra-cool lifestyles. They were recently determined to be unique species.
Landscapes can be perceived as the product of the human imagination, right? I adore the Pacific Rim, but I especially love the Pacific coast of the Americas. The edge of the world. Globally-unique Mediterranean-climate chaparral of both California and Chile. The planet’s most extensive temperate rainforests in both the Pacific Northwest and Valdivia. The Sonoran Desert, the vibrant sea of the Gulf of California, tropical mountains of Chiapas, the fog oases of the Atacama Desert, volcanoes, the fjordlands and “miniature forests” of the Magellanic region. Run away from Europe, try to escape the panopticon of industrial Europe and its history, go as far west as you can, and you reach the Pacific coast of the Americas.
Beyond this coast? The vast Pacific ocean, nearly boundless seas, the tropical South Pacific, Aotearoa. You could leave the coast of Sonora and sail without encountering human beings or land until you reached the frozen world of Antarctica.
Here be dragons, or whatever.
Here’s where the “dragons” live. Distribution map of the Gila monsters that I made using “working-class GIS” (M!crosoft Paint):
Check it out, from north to south.
Heloderma suspectum cinctum. The “banded Gila monster”, though I prefer to think of it with a more ecologically meaningful name like the “Mojave Desert Gila Monster” or “Colorado River Gila monster”. Lives along the Colorado River near the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas.
Heloderma suspectum suspectum. The “reticulate Gila monster”, though I prefer the more ecologically meaningful name “Sonoran Desert Gila monster”, since its distribution range is essentially an outline of the Sonoran Desert bioregion.
Heloderma horridum exasperatum. The “Rio Fuerte beaded lizard”, though I prefer to think of it as the “Sinaloan beaded lizard” or “Sinaloan thornscrub beaded lizard”.
Heloderma horridum horridum. The “Mexican beaded lizard”.
Heloderma alvarezi. The “Chiapan beaded lizard” which only lives in a small/limited range in the mountains of Chiapas.
And finally.
Heloderma charlesbogerti. The “Guatemalan beaded lizard” or “Motagua beaded lizard” of the Motagua Valley, critically endangered.
Less than 200 survive in the wild. One of the rarest and most endangered reptiles on the planet.
And get this. For food, it relies on the eggs of the Motagua spiny-tailed iguana. The Motagua spiny-tailed iguana is itself also highly endangered, with less than 2,500 surviving animals, and also only endemic to this one single valley.
That’s two lizards, found nowhere else, in an intimate relationship, nearly extinct.
But that’s not all. For food, the Motagua spiny-tailed iguana itself relies on the fruit of several cactus species. One is Pereskia lychnidiflora. Pereskia is one of the two only known genus/genera of cactus where the cactus essentially produces leaves.
Making this cactus a “tree”.
And the “tree” spreads itself thanks to the iguana’s fruit consumption.
