Can anyone advise our correspondent in North Carolina who writes about the anole above with enormous growths that may be endolympathic sacs out of control:
Maybe you have some ideas about this growth, which I originally thought were calcium storage seen in anoles, but this just looks like it is going to pop any second. I bred this girl about 2.5 years ago and she usually lives with my boss unless he goes on vacation, which is when I take care of her. I also still have her Dad and sister (long story and I’ll never do it again!). I let the other eight (!) babies that I raised and Mom, who was used to the wild, go. This girl has always been very hyper and green all the time and has laid a bunch of eggs this past spring and started getting these pockets (thought calcium). But now the one side is sooo big! She gets almost the same care as my two (Dad and sister), except maybe a little less sunlight (mine are at a window). I was worried it is an abscess or parasite or something. I asked someone at the NCSU vet school and he wasn’t sure. Oh, she hasn’t been eating well, either, the last few days.
Attached is the photo of her and also a fun one for Christmas that was part of our Christmas card. We rescued Dad out of a spider web when he was maybe a few days old. He was dragging his hindlegs, but then regained his strength a few weeks later and we couldn’t let him go at that point. The lady he made the other 10 babies with is a different story. My husband found her inside our house and I told him to let her go, but instead he put her in with “Gimpy.” They had sex the same night :).
Laura
My male anole had this, and currently a couple females. The male passed away in September… He ate well and drank water but got thinner and thinner. I think it’s either hormonal or an infection. I’ve never seen them that large, though. Strange phenomena…
The females ae fine so far..eating etc.
Petra Vasilik
Thank you. I posted an article below. Interesting that your other females have it, too, which makes me wonder if it’s something infectious? Do you have pics of them?
Laura Jones
Unfortunately I don’t have photos. I need to see if there are two more or I am seeing the same female. At first I thought..perhaps it might be bacterial/ fungal infection.
My gut says hormonal…esp. if they exalt themselves in the springtime 🙂 to procreate. The excess of vitamins in a powder form I think contributes esp. if they get too much. It is a phenomena. I’ll try to take a photo of her if I see her today.
If you suspect Fungal…you can get rid of a fungal issue or bacterial using grapefruit seed extract. one/ two drops in their water. It is safe…
Perhaps it is logical since they include citrus fruits. I was skeptical until I saw one of the females eating it, so perhaps they need more orange with C and it is inflammatory at the same time.
I hope they get better or it resolves on its own.
Petra Vasilik
Found this. Guessing whatever she has is not good. Hoping for a miracle at this point. She’s still eating. http://www.eclinpath.com/december-2018-case-of-the-month/
Laura Jones
Hypercalcemia. Maybe it’s due to excess calcium. they need it of course, but maybe they don’t need as much and how much do they require? Maybe it’s not being absorbed properly.
I would keep giving her lots of water/ fluids and not dust crickets with calcium maybe for a month, maybe it’ll resolve itself. My anoles are in winter phase, not eating much as they do in the winter.
Laura Jones
I saw her today and she looks better. All of them are brown…for the moment with green eyes. I put the powdered vitamins in a water bottle now, just a tiny bit so it diffuses better and squeeze an orange in for the juice. They seem to love it…
melissa
Maybe the environment is becoming toxic because the heat in the tank is breaking down any plastics in there.
Laura Jones
I haven’t thought about that before. The painted stones and the plants are fake. We tried real plants… but the dirt had these tiny bugs/ mites in them and I didn’t know if they were a toxin to us and the lizards. For now I haven’t seen any bugs.. maybe I’ll have luck planting them myself in clean dirt…to avoid the bugs since I bought them at the local Home Depot.
Jeanne Tribble
My potted Hoya in my 10 gallon tank thrives and grows nicely, and my two Anoles love it!
I also bring thick moss in from the (Ohio)
woods BECAUSE OF the bugs that it provides to my Anoles, besides their daily lives crickets.
I am trying to learning here on this thread why my green anole has those lumps behind her ear holes. I just added sliced oranges, which I’ve done only a few times before. I’m going to incorporate citrus into their regular diet. They are tropical, and it makes good sense. THANK YOU EVERYONE! ❤️
Donn
Hm, oranges are not native to Florida. Green anoles are. I would recommend native fruit, if you’re going to provide fruit. Citrus is typically too acidic for lizard tummies.
Native fruits include persimmons, plums, and passionfruit (or native equivalents close enough to domesticated varieties that it makes no difference).
Jonathan Losos
check out this video of another anole species gorging on oranges!
Donna
Just because an animal WILL eat something, doesn’t mean it’s good for them, lol. Anoles love sweet things, and oranges are sweet. But it’s not a natural food for them, and native fruits aren’t so acidic.
Jeanne Tribble
I understood that it was recommended to add grapefruit seed extract, and/or oranges to help them utilize their calcium more efficiently and effectively. I assumed it was necessary being from their natural habitat, the southern united states. My girl sure likes it. She’s the one with the lumps.
Donna
Note: Humans and a few other animals, like guinea pigs, have lost the ability to synthesize their own vitamin C. So they need to get it from the food they eat. Anoles syntehsize their own vitamin C, so they don’t need it in their diet.
Vitamin C does help with calcium absorption. So, well-meaning humans might theorize that giving foods high in vitamin C to reptiles would be helpful. But the reality is, they already have plenty, and that isn’t likely the issue.
UVB light is a much bigger factor.
Ryan
I realize this is now two years out of date, going on three, but growing up as a pre-teen in the mid-to-late 90’s, I had a pet anole I named Joanna that eventually developed a growth exactly like this. I only had her about a year and a half before she died. My Mom had told me the growth in her neck burst and she bled to death. I actually found this page because I got curious about what exactly was up with that growth, because I’ve never had a clear answer.
Donna
I lost animals to this condition a couple decades ago when I kept green anoles. It’s striking that, after all this time, there is STILL no answer as to what this is, or why it is happening. It is NOT a bacterial infection. Cultures taken turned up nothing. My vet tried lancing the swellings and draining them, but they kept coming back. They’re filled with fluid, not calcium. This isn’t something anyone’s ever seen in wild anoles. I’ve also never heard of it occurring in other anole species.
If it’s the result of excessive supplements, which ones? It isn’t calcium.
I sincerely wish some reptile veterinarian would research this problem and get to the bottom of it.
Lisa
This happened to my anole. The vet said he treats these things. He lanced it and on the way home my baby died!! He had no idea what the hell he did and why it happened. It was fluid and he said come back in two weeks because it’s not completely ready to drain. Only did a little and mixed with blood. He also gave me an antibiotic that is apparently not great for reptiles. Unbelievable how vets who claim they are exotic experts don’t know anything about this!!
Anole Owner
This happened to a female anole that I came to possess. What’s interesting to me after reading some of these other comments:
1. My anole was of wild origin, but found her in a commercial office building in poor condition. I didn’t want to release her, so I put her into a bioactive enclosure and fed her back to health. She was already close to maximum size, so I don’t think she was younger than a year or older than 2 years. She developed these about two years after being in the enclosure.
2. She got calcium supplements early in life in the form of occasional dusted crickets, but I haven’t given them to her for a long time and these developed long after I had discontinued calcium.
3. Her diet consist mostly of banded crickets, but there are also pill bugs in her tank she occasionally digs for.
I hope someone figures out what this is, but it likely isn’t from overfeeding calcium. Her tank I alway well misted and far wetter than the wild habitat she likely came from, so I can’t imagine dehydration. Possibly fungal? Hopefully someone figures this mystery out eventually.
Steven A. Nole
In the wild they drink dew drops, which is water that has been distilled naturally in the air and has condensed during the night.
Anoles aren’t designed to drink lime and fluoride ridden tap water. Please distill their water and store it in glassware, or buy it pre-distilled from the supermart.
Donna
They also drink rain, which is quite a bit less clean than dew. Given the amount of air pollution that winds up in rain these days, if that were really the cause of the problem, I think we’d see it in wild green anoles. But we don’t.
If you think fluoride, specifically, is the problem, I tend to doubt it, as a lot of keepers use distilled or purified water to minimize spots on the enclosure glass.
Steven A. Nole
True, but I was referring specifically to lime, ie calcium, which can exist in drinking water in amounts ranging from 7 to 75 mg per 8oz cup.
Anoles simply do not eat as much in the wild as they do in captivity, nor do they drink as much; and they certainly don’t consume dusted insects and chloramine, fluoride, and lime ridden tap water.
When times are good they feast, but when times are bad they fast; these cycles of feast and famine are coded into their dna and it would take years of actual selective breeding and animal husbandry to adapt them to captivity and its relative abundance; something anole breeders, who raise them mostly as feeder fodder, have little incentive for.
Donna
This is an interesting speculation, but there are keepers who have not given their anoles supplements, and some of the animals still developed this condition, despite being fed on crickets (which are excessively high in phosphorus, thus really need to be balanced with additional calcium). Whether calcium is supplemented or not does not seem to be a factor, at least anecdotally. Given that these are not calcium deposits, but are fluid-filled swellings, I find the idea that calcium is implicated to be relatively unlikely.
Steven A. Nole
The crickets used as lizard feed are nocturnal scavengers whom green anoles, being diurnal, will only consume occasionally in a wild setting.
Perhaps mimicking nature would be the best course of action and feeding them diurnal insects like grasshoppers and locusts, instead of nocturnal ones such as crickets.
Insects that are gut loaded with clean and living plant matter instead of the dead and decaying plant and animal matter that crickets eat.
Donna
One day when I’m in a more settled living situation, I would like to try raising green anoles again, but I think I’m going to switch them entirely over to Repashy crested gecko or day gecko diet, because green anoles do like sweets. So it should be easy to do.
I had superb success raising and breeding Lygodactylus williamsi on CGD. The young were started on flightless fruit flies, but rapidly switched to CGD. They had the same high hatchling mortality everyone was reporting, but the ones that made it to 1.4 inches were bullet-proof and grew up super healthy.
The diet’s balanced nutritionally so should rule out excess or lacking nutrients being the culprit in the condition. If it does not develop, that is at least an answer, if not the answer.
Donna
Oh, I also wanted to comment that anole breeders do not raise these animals as feeders. The anoles used as feeders are wild-caught animals. Breeding lizards as feeders would be ridiculously unprofitable.
Steven A. Nole
Perhaps, but they are sold at such low prices that many of them end up being taken home and fed to spiders, snakes, and bigger lizards.
The ones that aren’t often end up as impulse buys and suffer short lives in deplorable conditions.
They are treated as disposable commodities. They’re so cheap and abundant they’re even given away for free at fairs and carnivals.
Donna
I don’t believe that CBB green anoles are cheap enough to be purchased as feeders. As I said, it’s the wild-caught animals that are cheap and used as feeders. Market price for CBB green anoles seems to be $20.
Petra
Hi, this was one of my babies (accidental breeding at my house- 10 of them!) and she ended up having an aspirate which was inflammatory with some calcium crystals (“Many macrophages and fewer heterophils, basophils, basophils/mast cells, and small lymphocytes. Moderate number of polarized crystals are present”). She was 4 years then. 7 months later, it came back and it was completely removed at NCSU by Dr. Lewbart. It showed the same. She passed away a few months later.
Donna
Yes – there’s just no answer why it’s happening. Did it mention whether the crystals were calcium oxalate?
Steven A. Nole
Personally, I think the causes are rooted in diet and lack of downtime during winter.
Green anoles eat less during the winter in their wild state, which may give them time to rest and get rid of environmental toxins.
Ones in captivity, however, often stay completely active throughout the year with no periods of dormancy and no fasting.
I also speculate that feeding them cleaner insects such as grasshoppers(who eat only living plant matter), as opposed to less clean animals such as crickets and rolly pollies(who eat carrion, dung, and rotting vegetation), helps to keep them healthier overall.
Course, I’m no vet, but since even vets don’t know the causes, all any of us can do is speculate.
Donna
Crickets fed to lizards in captivity are captive-bred and fed by humans on specific diets. Same with grasshoppers. Feeding wild-caught insects would not be recommended, as it would introduce parasites, which can build to lethal levels in captivity.
So if you want “clean” crickets, gut-load them with whatever you want. But they’ll still be too high in phosphorus and need to be balanced with added calcium. I believe black soldier fly larvae are a more ideal food.
Steven A. Nole
I just want to add to a prior comment I made, unfortunately there is no edit button.
Green anoles eat less during the winter in their wild state and they slip in and out of dormancy depending on temperature and weather.
This may give them time to rest their metabolisms, use up fat reserves, and eliminate environmental toxins stored there.
Petra Vasilik
My anoles all ate a lot less in the winter in captivity. Also very sluggish and not green very often.
Donna
The main issue I have with this hypothesis is that I’ve never heard of a similar issue in any other anole species, or any other temperate lizard, in fact, despite the fact that all of them aren’t generally brumated in captivity. In some parts of their range, brumation for a green anole is less than 2 months, and somewhat intermittent at that. Plus, green anoles frequently live in places where insects are abundant year-round, and they’re always eating.
Donna
Also, environmental toxins stored in fat would be released to affect the animal when the fat is burned. It would only be eliminated in the sense that it’s no longer in the fat, but instead impacting the animal’s organs.
Steven A. Nole
Well, another possibility is a reptilian version of hygroma, a condition that afflicts sedentary dogs https://wagwalking.com/condition/hygroma .
Not likely, of course, but we should consider various possibilities.
Donna
No, the position of the swellings makes that impossible. Hygromas develop due to pressure. Plus, the condition with the swellings appears progressive and ultimately fatal.
Giftbearer
3 out of 4 of my anoles have this. Mine are wild caught and they developed it after a few months. I was hoping somebody new what this is. I’m surprised a zooloist or herpetologist wouldn’t know. I would think this probably happens to animals in zoos.