Lizard, Page Arizona                            click to enlarge

Ever since the popularity of Reality TV we’ve noticed an uptick on people wearing camouflage. You see it everywhere. There doesn’t seem to be a public place you can visit now where you won’t see someone, or a group of someone’s, wearing what is now known simply as Camo.

What all these people have to hide is beyond me. They can’t all be in witness protection. The varieties of Camo are also amazing. There are sports camo, fashion camo, swim camo, arctic camo, jungle camo, urban camo, camo specifically for Pennsylvania, army camo, Baptist camo, Specialty camo, like guys wear that hide in the grass and shoot other guys, Camo you wear fishing, camo lingerie, camo flavored pop tarts, camo wax, camo classes to learn how to speak camo, the variety seems endless.

What’s more, through some kind of osmosis, animals have begun picking up on this trend and many of them have developed their own specific kind of camo as you can see in the image above. That’s right camo wearing lizards for instance. I don’t know how they found out about it. Maybe through some kind of exposure to TV rays or something. This intrigued us here at the Institute and we decided to send one of our top herpetologists out in the field to bring back a report on this newest phenomenon.

We chose the one everyone calls Lizard boy since he was observed eating flies off the wall of his tent, to go to Page, Arizona where the barely noticed lizard was last seen. He was wearing camo after all, the lizard not the Lizard boy, wait, the Lizard boy was wearing camo too, anyway he was the only one available so off he went.

The reports we got back were scattered and somewhat fly-specked but it seems that this new lizard camo is so effective that our field agent couldn’t locate it. Neither the lizard nor the camo. There was no lizard to be found. There were places where a lizard might have been, which were identified by the lack of any insects within the effective tongue range of a lizard, (in this case we believe a zebra-tailed lizard) which in this species is 3.9cm, but it was hard to confirm that identification due to the fact that the lizard was camouflaged. This was disappointing as we had spent a lot of time and money on this research with absolutely nothing to show for it.

All in all this has been a compete bust, No lizard, no reports, no Lizard Boy, he’s gone, there’s no sign of him anywhere. Although come to think of it, if he was able to get a hold of some of that new lizard camo he could have  been standing right there and we’d never have noticed him.

Some of the conclusions we were able to come to, were, camo works, it’s popular, not just in the deep south like before but everywhere. It’s pervasive. It’s not unusual to see chic young women entering swanky Spas on Rodeo Drive wearing spa camo or dancing the Hollywood nights away in sultry disco camo. It’s a wonder that anyone can find anyone else nowadays.

We still have the problem of finding our herpetologist, Lizard Boy. We can’t just leave him out there, lying in the sun with his tongue out, stuffed to the gills with flies, so we’re sending one of our staff retrieval specialists out to bring him back. That is if we can locate any of our Institutes’ vehicles after we had them painted in the newest camo colors.