October 22, 2025
2 min read
Zoo Lunch Mishap Reveals Lizards’ Hidden Fire Detector
Australian “sleepy” lizards are not so sleepy when it comes to fire
The smell of smoke activates this otherwise “sleepy” lizard Tiliqua rugosa, also known as the shingleback skink or bobtail lizard.
A burned lunch at Audubon Zoo in New Orleans did more than just disappoint a hungry staffer. As soon as a smoke plume from the mishap drifted into their enclosure, Australian sleepy lizards suddenly stopped whatever they were doing—heads up, tongues flicking, bodies tense—and began pacing their enclosure’s edges and digging in the substrate, frantic to escape. Other reptile species in the same room didn’t flinch.
The incident sparked a scientific hunch: perhaps the lizards, which happen to be residents of particularly fire-prone regions, had evolved to recognize a blaze’s chemical cues.
To test this hypothesis, Chris Jolly, a conservation biologist at Macquarie University and Charles Darwin University in Australia, and his colleagues exposed 10 adult female sleepy lizards to individual puffs of smoke and water vapor and separately to recordings of crackling wildfires and white noise. The lizards fled in response to smoke but were unphased by water vapor, wildfire sounds or white noise. The findings, published in Biology Letters, suggest these lizards rely on smell—not hearing—to detect fire at long range, unlike some other lizards, frogs and bats.
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This aligns with Australian sleepy lizards’ known use of scent to recognize partners, with whom they form pair-bonds for life, and to find food and detect predators. “Smoke also tends to travel ahead of the flames and cuts through background noise,” Jolly says, “making smell a more reliable early warning than sound in open, windy, noisy environments.”
Many of the lizards tested had likely never experienced wildfire; their capture site hadn’t burned in more than 50 years. Yet they still bolted when they sensed smoke, suggesting an innate adaptation. (The strong response was particularly notable given the animals’ typical slow, deliberate movements, which Jolly assumes inspired the “sleepy lizard” designator: “They’re rarely in a rush to do anything, except, apparently, to escape from fire!”)
Juli Pausas, a research scientist at the Spanish National Research Council, who was not involved in the study, says that while the sleepy lizards’ reaction to smoke could indeed represent adaptation to fire—something also seen in some bat species, pygmy possums and Mediterranean lizards—future studies will have to rule out other explanations, such as a general aversion to smoke toxins.
“Nevertheless, the paper contributes to the emerging recognition that certain animal behaviors may represent fire adaptations, a topic that has been underexplored until recently,” Pausas says. As fires intensify amid climate change, the paper authors say, these sensory skills could mean the difference between survival and death.
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