The Bubbles of Life

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Scientists recently discovered a small “scuba-diving” lizard species in Costa Rica’s jungles that can elude predators by diving underwater.

Meet the water anole, a semi-aquatic creature about the size of a pencil that can stay underwater for at least 20 minutes, according to a new study.

These lizards don’t have gills, but they can form a small air bubble on top of their heads to stay underwater to avoid becoming a snack.

“Anoles are kind of like the chicken nuggets of the forest,” researcher and study co-author Lindsey Swierk said in a statement. “Birds eat them, snakes eat them.”

Swierk and her colleagues described the lizard’s bubble-making mechanism and its functional role in a new paper – the lizard has special skin that allows air bubbles to form and remain in place.

They discovered this after experiments in which they took a group of anoles and separated them into two groups: One group was covered with a substance that prevented the formation of bubbles, while the control group was left untreated.

The team then tested how many bubbles each group would form and how long they could “rebreathe” underwater. Not surprisingly, the control group could stay below the surface 32 percent longer than the lizards with the anti-bubble coating.

“This is really significant because this is the first experiment that truly shows the adaptive significance of bubbles,” Swierk noted. “Rebreathing bubbles allows lizards to stay underwater longer.”

Researchers are now exploring whether the lizards are using the bubbles as a “physical gill” – to breathe underwater just like some insect species do.

In the future, the authors believe the study can shed more light on the bubble use in vertebrates and open the door to new bioinspired materials.

“Fundamental science is so important because that’s often where our really new discoveries come from that can impact humans, that can change the way we use materials, the way we change the way we engineer products,” Swierk told NPR.