The Mwanza flat-headed rock agama looks like it was drawn for a comic book. A scarlet head and shoulders melting into a deep electric blue body, worn by a lizard that spends its days basking on sun-warmed granite in Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya. Look at him once and the nickname explains itself.
Only the boss wears the suit
That color is a badge of rank. Researchers watching these lizards near Mwanza found that only the largest male in each group shows the full red and blue. Other males are allowed to stay in his territory as long as they keep to drab olive and grey-purple, the colors worn by the females and the young. When two bright males do square off, the bigger and brighter one wins.
The suit comes off, too. When he’s cold, threatened or beaten in a fight, the male fades to a dull grey-purple. He starts most mornings darker, which probably helps him soak up heat faster and makes him harder to spot while he’s still sluggish. Nobody has studied exactly how this species does it, but in a close relative, the southern rock agama, the quick change comes down to melanin spreading through the skin.
Who’s who on the rock
- 1 · The femaleGrey-brown with a blush of orange. Females never get the full suit.
- 2 · The bossThe biggest male in the group, and the only one allowed to wear red and blue.
- 3 · The kidA juvenile hitching a ride. Young males start out drab and color up as they grow.
More improbable creatures: sky puppies, the strange world of domesticated silk moths →
Ten lizards, one crack in the rock
These agamas live in tight groups of about ten, ruled by a single dominant male. Every night the whole group squeezes back into the same crevice, sometimes under the peeling skin of the granite itself, and in villages under corrugated iron roofs. At one crack near Mwanza, researchers counted up to 20 lizards filing out each morning.
The boss perches high and scans for rivals. Any bright male who wanders in gets a run of aggressive head bobs, which is a warning. If that doesn’t work, he charges. Smaller males usually take the hint before it comes to that.
From the Moss & Fog Shop
Colour Hexagon Enamel Tray
A Victorian colour hexagon on enamel, for anyone who loves a loud red and blue.
$17.50
Watercolour Swatches Memory Game
Hand-painted swatches from a 1692 color treatise, turned into a matching game.
$30
Complementary Color Grow Kits
Seeds packed in complementary-color tins, a small garden that refuses to blend in.
$9.99
Mostly they eat ants, picked off passing columns, with quick dashes after grasshoppers and flies. They’ll eat flowers and succulents too, and one male was seen climbing up to a swarm of bees to grab one for lunch. A big male runs 25 to 35 centimeters long, more than half of it tail.
That tail is a one-time deal. Unlike many lizards, this one can’t drop its tail or grow it back, so plenty of them walk around with stumps. They also carry a light-sensitive “third eye” in the crown of the head. And despite what some people believe locally, they aren’t poisonous.
Most lizards put their energy into not being eaten, which produces its own kind of spectacle: tails that drop off and keep wriggling, a gecko that sheds its skin in a predator’s mouth, a horned lizard that shoots blood from its eyes. We collected the strangest of them in The Most Extraordinary Defense Mechanisms in the Animal Kingdom. This one went the other way and decided to be seen.
Not the red-headed rock agama
The British herpetologist Arthur Loveridge described it in 1923, first as a variety of another East African agama, Agama lionotus. Later it was folded into the red-headed rock agama, Agama agama, and it has been a species in its own right, Agama mwanzae, since 1991. The name comes from where it was first collected, near Mwanza on the southern shore of Lake Victoria.
The two still get mixed up online, though they live nowhere near each other. The red-headed rock agama belongs to West and Central Africa. If you photograph a red and blue lizard on a rock in the Serengeti, it’s this one.
And the Serengeti is the place to look. Camera traps set up on the kopjes to watch lions and other big animals ended up logging 785 visits from basking agamas. The females basked more in the afternoon, when the rock had soaked up a whole day of sun. So next time you see a pride of lions sprawled on a kopje, look at the rock beside them!
Next: Rare footage of the incredible animals we’ve lost →
Photography by @hugo.sykes, @magdalena_manchee and John Mburu, plus Charles J. Sharp and Güldem Üstün as credited. H/T to Dina V. Sources: Yarnell and Jones, “Notes on the behaviour and morphology of Agama mwanzae in northern Tanzania,” African Herp News 33 (2001); Allain, “In the shadow of mammals,” Herpetological Bulletin 145 (2018); the Reptile Database; Nicolai et al., Molecular Ecology (2021).
