Yet another in the ever-growing list of non-native reptiles that are established in southern Florida. The bright orange head on the adult male caught my eye, and after getting a few photos I looked around the area to see if I could find any others. Sure enough, I saw three or four more on nearby rocks, though the rest were all youngsters like the stump-legged fellow in the second photograph.

Thanks to Kevin M. Enge of the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission for identifying this subspecies as A. a. africana. A paper he cowrote and published in Florida Scientist, documenting populations of this lizard in Florida, is available online here.

I found a small colony of these wary lizards across the road from where I had seen them a couple of years earlier in Fairchild Tropical Gardens. In addition to the adult male and juvenile visible in this photo, there was also an adult female and at least one more juvenile spending their time in about a ten-foot sunny break in the hedges along Old Cutler Road. I saw them in this same spot nearly every time we walked or drove past this spot over the course of a week.

These agamas were probably the most visible lizards in Kenya, though some skinks and geckos may have been more common. They're a social species, often found in groups. This is a tiny little baby one that visited us on a lunch stop off the road between Nairobi and Tsavo.

A gregarious group of agamas held court at poolside at the Samburu Intrepids tented camp. The full-grown females are somewhat smaller than the males, and have light green flecks on their heads. Maybe you can get a hint of this from the foreground lizard. The males are often colored similarly to the females, though without the green flecks, such as the larger background lizard here.

I originally thought this agama might be a different species, since it didn't look like an adult male or an adult female. The red spots near the hind leg seemed a distinguishing mark. However, Dr. Robert Drewes identified it as Agama agama lionotus, probably a sub-dominant male.

These lizards are best known for the shockingly bright colors sometimes adopted by the dominant males. Remarkably, a brownish spotted male such as the poolside fellow from Samburu above can turn into one of these garish eyecatchers in just a few minutes.