Spike came to me as a baby from a private keeper whose vivarium had a happy surprise: babies. He is named for the rows of pointed scales that armor his body, and he lives up to the other half of his name too. Spike moves like a green lightning bolt, here one blink and across the enclosure the next. He is an expert cricket hunter, which I dust with calcium before they meet their extremely brief destiny.
Emerald swifts (Sceloporus malachiticus) come from the cool, misty mountain forests of Central America, from southern Mexico down to Panama. Unlike most desert-dwelling spiny lizards, they live at high elevation, so they like it milder and more humid than you’d guess from their looks. Males are the showstoppers, wearing brilliant emerald green with metallic blue patches on the belly that they flash at rivals. They’re display-driven little athletes: males do push-ups to claim territory and impress females.
Fun fact: because their mountain home is too cool for eggs to incubate in the ground, emerald swifts skip eggs entirely and give birth to live young, sometimes more than a dozen at once. That’s how Spike’s story started, and why his old keeper suddenly had a vivarium full of tiny, very fast surprises.
