Common agama
Agama agama
— Where the name comes from
Agama is a word from the Caribbean languages that French naturalists used for certain American lizards, and which ended up by mistake naming an African genus: one of the many names that crossed the Atlantic in the wrong direction. The binomial repeats it twice, this being the type species of the group.
— Facts
- Group
- Reptiles · Reptilia
- Order
- Squamates
- Habitat
- Villages, walls, rocks, gardens, wooded savannah
- Range
- Western and central sub-Saharan Africa
- Size
- 25–40 cm including the tail, 60–110 g
- Diet
- Ants, grasshoppers, beetles, flowers
- Lifespan
- 8 years
— Characteristics
- 01
The dominant male has an orange head and a blue body; females are brown.
- 02
It does press-ups on its forelegs to mark territory.
- 03
It lives in groups of one male and several females on the same wall.
— What sets it apart
The colour is a scoreboard that updates in real time. The dominant male of a wall wears a bright orange head and a blue body; if he loses a fight he fades within minutes to the brown of the females, and the winner lights up in his place. The same individuals also change livery at night and in cold weather, which for decades led herpetologists to describe as separate species animals that were merely in a bad mood.
