In pet stores, tiny little anole lizards sell for just a few dollars. I think I've seen them for maybe five or six bucks. It's so misleading, that price tag. It makes a person think that anoles are cheap pets. I have not found that to be true thus far. I was lucky that my daughter had a ten gallon fishtank she wasn't using when Accidental Agnes showed up unexpectedly at Smith Park West last November. I'm fairly certain that the tank is the last thing that I've been able to provide for free to my first reptile pet. She required a heat lamp, and now I have a halogen bulb on all day on a timer. Her environment needed to be warm, and I had to buy a stick-on glass heater that runs around the clock. She eats crickets, and ONLY crickets, so every few weeks, I go buy Ms Picky a new batch, and I turn them loose to roam. (Yes, I know, I'm supposed to keep them in a separate cricket growing cage, and drop one in at a time. This is way more work than I am prepared for, and an additional set of expenses.) Crickets need meal and hydration gel to keep them healthy (and chirping all night). All of these things are fairly reasonable, if slightly more high maintenance than I expected. If this were all I had to put into keeping Agnes happy, I'd be fine with it.
Anole care instruction cards suggest some lizards like to eat mealworms. When we first got Agnes, we tried filling a small dish with them, and just left them alone in her cage. She didn't seem all that interested in them. We found them oddly compelling to watch, like a tiny recreation of scenes from Dune, Tremors, or maybe Beetlejuice, as these striped worms occasionally surfaced in a sea of tiny grain flakes. Mr S-P kept buying more sets of them every couple months, when the ripples in the grain stopped. Somewhere in the spring, I started noticing these tiny black beetles roaming in the cage, and I thought something had crawled in from outside and found its way into Agnes' territory. It wasn't until right before Mr S-P moved out that I Googled and discovered that mealworms were actually the larval stage of these beetles. I didn't let it bother me, and I assumed it was possible that Agnes would eventually eat them.
Before Mr S-P left, he totally remodeled the cage setup, as he moved Agnes' habitat from the spare bedroom to my room, so that I would remember to water her every day. We covered the bottom of the cage in pebbles, then put in a layer of potting soil, and directly planted the arrowhead that had been in a pot in the cage since we first set it up. There were new sticks for her to climb on, and a new dish to fill with meal and worms. I kept adding meal, but no worms. It didn't matter. It was too late. Enough of the sets he kept buying had turned into adult beetles, and adult beetles kept turning into baby mealworms, over and over. A month or two ago, I watched the arrowhead plant start struggling to survive, and I saw that the roots kept getting exposed, no matter how many times I dumped in extra soil in a mound over it. Leaves started drooping, then turning brown and crunchy. By the middle of September, the entire plant was dead, and every night, all night, I had to listen to the giant swarm of black beetles munching and crunching through the leaf detritus. I had seen Agnes get increasingly stressed over the summer, and now I wonder whether she was miserable being overrun with beetles. I kept giving her crickets and water, but the beetles were monopolizing her space, spoiling her beautiful landscape as surely as the Orcs in the Lord of the Rings spread industrial decay.
I waffle between being a good gardener who likes to get her hands dirty, and a girly-girl who freaks out when she has to touch creepy crawlies. I have never actually touched Agnes, and I wondered whether I was brave enough to grab her and put her in a small container so that I could clean out her cage. I wasn't. I thought if I wore disposable gloves, I'd be able to control my revulsion enough to pick out beetles from the soil. I also failed there. But I was not without tools or innovation, so I went to find a small set of tongs, and a plastic container with a lid. I picked out as many beetles as I could (10 or 12 before I'd lost my nerve) and a few loose mealworms that I'd found under some dead leaves. I dumped them in the alley, at the base of some sunflowers that they are welcome to destroy before the first hard freeze comes. The cage already looks better, with crickets coming out of hiding to dance around happily in their less-crowded environs. If I do this regularly over the next several weeks, I may be able to get all of the beetles out, or at least enough to replant and restock the crickets.
Easy. They make anoles look like they are easy. I have not found this to be entirely accurate. Not yet.
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