Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter

from the May 19, 2008 Newsletter written in the community of 28 de Junio, in the Central Valley 8 kms west of Pujiltic, elev. ~700m (2300ft), ~N16.331°, ~W92.472°; southeastern Chiapas state, MÉXICO
A WHITE ANOLE DROWNS
Water from the community's spring has such a high carbonate content that the quarter-mile of rubbery tubing conducting water from the spring to the community clogs up every two or three days. Men have to walk the whole length, then, pounding the tubes with sticks, hoping that things will come unclogged. Sometimes days pass before water runs again.

Therefore when we have water I store buckets of it. It was in one of those buckets on my casita floor where this week I found what appears to be a White Anole, ANOLIS LAEVIVENTRIS, lying at the water's bottom. She's below:

White Anole, ANOLIS LAEVIVENTRIS

I felt awfully bad about her drowning. That anole had lived on my cement-block walls ever since I got here, always just minding her business and not even making loud croaks during the night the way my House Geckos do.

At first I thought she was a gecko because that's what I'm used to on house walls in this part of the world. But when I took a closer look I saw that her toes didn't bear rounded pads the way most gecko species do, plus the geckos I know aren't as long and slender as she. On the other hand, I remembered how Green Anoles used to populate my trailer's walls back during my Mississippi hermiting days so I figured she might be an anole. Jonathan Campbell's book, Amphibians and Reptiles of Northern Guatemala, the Yucatán and Belize, confirmed this.

White Anoles are distributed from the central Mexican Gulf Coast south through Central America and Panama.