Neo's Blog

Well, supposedly, yes, iguanas are vegetarians! Apart from earlier yesterday when Neo displayed some rather interesting behaviour

I had let her out for a wander round the house while I cleaned out her vivarium. After I had finished, I made her food and put it in ready for her. I went upstairs to see what she was up to, and she was wandering about the landing towards the bathroom. I sat down and just watched her for a while, as she looked like she was going somewhere with a purpose

Neo wandered into the bathroom, licked the floor a few times, came back out, down the landing and went into my brother's room. She proceeded to lick the end of a rug and tried to eat part of it - she does that when she's a little peckish, as to her, the patterns on it must look like tasty fruits or flowers... lol

Anyway, realising it wasn't edible, and that nothing was appearing in her mouth after multiple tongue-flicks onto the patterned rug, she wandered off again. This time, she came into my room. Resting at a slight angle against the wall, I have a pair of flip-flops, which have a pattern of small brown geckos in a sinuous line on them. Now to Neo, I don't know if she would have 'seen' these as lizards, or as rather large ants... But in any case, she eyed one up and tried to bite it! She did this a couple of times, before again realising that she wasn't picking anything up. What was really interesting then, was that instead of giving up, as she had done with the patterned rug, she then shoved her head behind the flip-flops and began to dig at the floor where it meets the wall - as if she was attempting to excavate ants or termites from a nest, or perhaps even a (very slow moving!!) small lizard from a crevice or burrow. I was intrigued - obviously she was hungry, so trying to bite a smaller lizard, if she thought it was one, likely wasn't for territorial reasons. So I decided to do a little experiment... . I got a plain piece of white A4 paper, and drew a sinuous line of large, black ant shapes on it, borrowing the pattern Neo had taken an interest in on my flip-flop. I waited until she was out of sight, then placed the paper down in the middle of the landing so she'd be bound to see it when she walked past next time. I waited on the stairs to see her reaction... and sure enough, she spotted it, eyed up the 'ant line', and tried to tongue-flick one into her mouth! Hehe. She only did it once before realising it was some sort of trick... As far as I know, she's never tried this with 'normal' ants here... maybe they aren't big enough to bother with?!

...Interesting though