Working at Boston’s Museum of Science sounds pretty cool. Unless you’re the poor soul who has to clean snot crystals off a lizard’s glass house. In a recently posted behind-the-scenes video, a worker at Boston’s Museum of Science lovingly wipes down Rocky the chuckwalla’s enclosure, scrubbing away what looks like crusty nasal gunk.
Except it’s not boogers. It’s salt. Because Rocky sneezes pure, weaponized salt that he, and all other chuckwalla, naturally create.
Posted by the Boston Museum of Science, and brought to our attention by Science Alert, the chuckwalla is a desert-dwelling, salt-sneezing reptile. They have developed and refined their survival instincts thanks to their tough life in the rocky deserts of North America, where summer temperatures reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit and water is scarce.
Meet the Chuckwalla: The Lizard That Literally Sneezes Salt
Because chuckwallas spend their days munching on briny desert greens and rarely drink water, they’ve developed one of evolution’s more disgusting powers. Chuckwallas are biological salt shakers because they sneeze out salt.
This isn’t table salt or kosher salt for sprinkling on your dinner. And it’s not even necessarily called salt. It’s called “snalt,” a gross, crusty mix of potassium and sodium bicarbonate. Knowing what it’s made of, you could, theoretically, if you were disgusting enough, use it to give yourself a tummy ache.
It is expelled through specialized nasal glands to keep the lizard from overdosing on its own electrolyte intake. Without the ability to expel all the salt it takes in, the chuckwalla would dehydrate from the inside out, effectively curing itself like a salami.
Chuckwallas aren’t the only animal that does this. Marine iguanas in the Galápagos and mangrove monitor lizards also propel salt from their snouts thanks to their high-sodium diets. The difference here is that the chuckwalla is not a marine creature. It gets its hydration exclusively from food.
As it hunts for food, it demonstrates another one of its bizarre superpowers: when threatened by another creature that wants to eat it, it can deflate and squeeze into a tight crack between rocks and then reinflate itself to take up as much space between those rocks as possible, firmly lodging itself that way no creature can get it out. It’s like caulking that expands to fill cracks in your bathroom grouting.
It’s a fascinating little creature with a few gross and spectacular abilities that are perfectly paired with its delightful name.
The post Meet the Chuckwalla: The Lizard That Sneezes Salt to Survive appeared first on VICE.
