Texas Spotted Whiptail

About the Texas Spotted Whiptail

The Texas Spotted Whiptail is the lizard you see moving - a slim, nervous racer of open ground that hunts in constant motion, jerky and quick, poking its snout under leaves and into burrow mouths, never still for more than a heartbeat. That perpetual motion, and the extravagantly long whip of a tail, mark a whiptail at any distance.

Up close it is a sharply dressed reptile: seven light stripes down a greenish-brown back with rows of pale spots between them; breeding males flush salmon-red on the throat and chest and blue-black on the belly.

Whiptails are heat lovers, running their errands in full mid-day sun that sends other lizards to cover, and when truly alarmed they can sprint on their hind legs like tiny theropods.

The Texas Spotted is the common whiptail across most of the state, at home in vacant lots, trail edges, and rocky slopes. Its family is famous for all-female cloning species; this one reproduces the ordinary way, but it shares the clan's signature style - all speed, all appetite, all day.