Why These Cute Little Lizards Are Changing Colors to Survive | National Geographic

[Music] We're interested in the big questions in [Music] biology. All of the animals that colonized this area had to go through an incredible amount of change in order to live in this unique environment.

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hang on, hang on! It's also exciting in this time when our world is changing really rapidly, and we want to know whether and how and when animals are going to be able to adapt to environmental changes.

You want to get a GPS point over here too? [Music] Yeah, some people just use a simple slip knot, but I like the slip knot in the slip knot.

What we see is that a lot of the animals have evolved a number of different adaptations to survive here. The most noticeable one is that they're all incredibly light in color, and you see that the White Sands one is a lot lighter in color than the one from down the road. You can also see that its stripes on its back are much fainter.

It's incredibly important for them to be camouflaged in their environment because they are out looking for their food, looking to find mates, and doing all the things that lizards do during the day. At the same time, their predators are out looking for food and all the things the predators do during the day.

We measure what color they are, we measure different aspects of their body size, and we measure what they're eating. The same gene that is involved in the color difference in these lizards is also a gene that's involved in color variation even in humans. Love you, puppy! [Music]