If there is one thing that beaded lizards, and their cousins the Gila monsters, are most famous for, it's their venom. While the journey is still out on whether some other lizards, such as Komodo dragons, count as venomous or not, for many years the lizards of the genus Heloderma were regarded as the only venomous lizards in the worlds. Their venom may not rank that high as far as toxicity goes compared to many of the snakes species kept in zoos, but it still is nasty stuff. A curator I once worked with recounted a friend of his who had been bitten by one; he said, "It won't kill you, but it that moment you may wish it had."
Being venomous - whether (usually) lethally so or not - was enough to get the beaded lizards at our zoo placed on the "not for you to work with" list when I was a young keeper. So imagine my surprise and alarm when I was the first person to walk into a building one morning, only to find the floor covered (well, by covered I mean by five or six) large beaded lizards, sprawled about. Someone had left the lid of their tub off, and the lizards, displaying a previously undetected amount of ambition, had scuttled out.
I probably should have waited for my coworkers to get there, but I had no idea when they would arrive, and the floor contained all sorts of drains, pipes, etc - to say nothing of a few gaps in the walls - that could have provided excellent escape/hiding places for lizards. Looking back on it, I think that the timers had just turned on the heat lamps not long before I arrived, giving the lizards the push to start moving about out of their enclosure. As such, they were all still out in the open, having just escaped. Give them some time, and who knows where they'd go?
I decided to round them all up. My first thought was just to grab them. Venom aside, beaded lizards are very sluggish animals, and their jaws are powerful, but their teeth aren't very long. Besides, unlike snakes, they have a much more easily defined body plan, making easier to predict where they could be safely grabbed. There were some welding gloves handy - I felt sure that I could grab each lizard safely behind the head, plop it back in tub, and even if I got bitten, the gloves were sure to protect me.
I was about six inches away from grabbing my first fugitive, when I got cold feet about that plan. So I went to plan two.
Using a snake-stick and a broom handle, I carefully scooped up each lizard, one by one. It wasn't easy - they were short and they were fat, and they didn't sit easily on the hook. Plus, my dexterity was off, because I was still wearing the gloves, in case I had to grab someone before they made an escape. In that moment, it reminded my of trying to eat an entire kielbasa using a small pair of chopsticks. Slowly and carefully, I got each lizard back in the tub, then shut it carefully. Then, I put a cinderblock on top of the lid.
Even by their own standards, my colleagues were pretty late getting to work that morning. By that time I was worried about the possibility of getting in trouble for handling the situation on my own, so I told my boss that I'd found the animals in the act of crawling back and pushed them back, then replaced the lid. I'm just glad that I played it as safe as an inexperienced newbie keeper could have, and never had to explain to anyone that I got bitten by a venomous sausage.
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