Animal · United Kingdom, France, Germany
Sand lizard
Lacerta agilis — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
In spring the male sand lizard turns bright green along his sides, as if somebody had painted him, while the female stays plain brown. The rest of the year both of them look like a striped piece of sandy ground.
Picture credit: Bouke ten Cate (CC BY 4.0) · Calistemon (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the sand lizard live?
Home: sunny heaths, dunes, embankments and forest edges.
In the wild it lives in these countries: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Austria, Sweden, Russia.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: up to about 20 cm including the tail. It weighs about 0 015 kilograms. On the menu: insects.
The story behind it
A sand lizard runs on sunshine: it only gets going once its body is warm, so the morning begins lying flat on a stone or a bare patch of sand. Then it hunts crickets, beetles, spiders and caterpillars, catching them with a short dash and a snap. In June the female digs a hole in loose, sunny sand and lays six to fifteen eggs, and the warm ground does the hatching for her. If a bird or a cat grabs its tail, the tail comes off at a built-in breaking point and keeps twitching while the lizard slips away; a shorter one grows back later. From about October it disappears into an old mouse hole or a hollow under roots and sleeps through the winter. It is still widespread from Britain to Siberia, yet many of its sandy places have been built over or grown shut, which is why heaths and old railway banks are deliberately kept open for it.
Find it on the globe
Sand lizard is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why does the male turn green in spring?
The green flanks are his mating outfit: they signal to females that he is fit and warn other males off his patch. The colour fades again in late summer, and the brighter he is, the more time he has spent basking.
Where can you meet a sand lizard?
On warm, open ground with loose sand: heathland, dunes, sunny railway banks, quarry edges and the sunny side of a woodland path. It lives from southern England across Europe to Lake Baikal in Siberia.
What happens when it loses its tail?
The tail breaks off at a point built for it and wriggles on its own for a while, so the attacker watches the tail instead of the lizard. A new tail grows back, but it stays shorter and is held up by gristle rather than proper bones, and growing it costs so much energy that the lizard only gives up its tail in real emergencies.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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