A Telltale Tail

This is the tail of a veiled chameleon; it’s a prehensile tail, meaning it’s able to grasp and hold onto objects. In the wild, these lizards live most of their lives in the trees and use their tails to help them climb and maintain their balance while they’re walking on thin branches.

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A Telltale Tail

What am I looking at?

This is the curled tail of a veiled chameleon (Chamaeleo calyptratus), a species that is native to Yemen and Saudi Arabia and that is also often raised in captivity.

Biology in the Background

This lizard’s tail is a very versatile appendage – it aids in maintaining balance; serves as a propeller, a lure, and a mate-attractor; and can even signal emotions. Many arboreal – that is, tree-dwelling – animals evolved prehensile tails that play the role of a fifth limb. You can find this kind of tail in New World monkeys, opossums, anteaters, pangolins, harvest mice, tree porcupines, and tree monitors, as well as chameleons. Such a tail can be curled around a tree branch to give the animal more support while climbing or to help them position themselves in a good spot to ambush prey. When this chameleon’s tail isn’t in use, it generally remains curled up in an elegant spiral, as seen here, to keep it out of the way.

Like most chameleons, the veiled chameleon can change the color of its skin, including on its tail, for camouflage, thermoregulation, or communication with other chameleons. The most radical and permanent change in the coloration of a veiled chameleon happens when it starts puberty – when blue, yellow, and brown markings appear almost overnight against the plain green background.

In all tree-dwelling chameleons (there are some terrestrial species) the tail is longer than the body. The tail of a mature veiled chameleon can grow to about 30 centimeters long, or roughly a foot.

Technique

These images were created using macrophotography.