Watch two goofy lizards try to fight each other — through a porch screen in Florida
Two of Florida’s least threatening reptiles are getting laughs on social media for a 30-minute brawl that ended without a single punch landing.
It happened on a porch in Lake Wales, and video of the match has become a source of fascination on TikTok and Facebook.
“These idiot brown anoles have been at this for half an hour. They’re on opposite sides of a screen,” Kelly Gailey Chandley wrote in a TiKTok post.
Sure enough, her video shows just that: Two very irritated lizards — one she calls Clyde — trying their best to clobber each other from different sides of a screened-in porch.
Adding to the humor, Chandley paired her video of the fight with George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone.”
“I sat down, looked up and there they were, circling each other,” she told McClatchy News.
“I was sitting about 3 feet from them, so it was pretty easy to tell they were in opposite sides. As they continued to ‘fight’ Clyde ‘pushed’ the other guy further and further away from the corner. ... The other guy jumped to the ground and ran off into the yard.”
Her video, shared Aug. 11, likely counts as one of the few times an anole dispute has been elevated to the level of social media entertainment.
“They ain’t real smart are they,” one commenter wrote.
“Laughing my head off,” another viewer said.
The Cuban brown anole is a species of lizard that poses no threat to humans and is not toxic to animals, according to the University of Florida Extension. They top out at 9 inches and are “accomplished climbers” that can prove to be nearly impossible to catch once inside the house, experts say.
Chandley says her anoles seem to prefer the porch, where a lizard version of “Game of Thrones” is playing out. Clyde won his place as “the Lizard King” by dispatching another lizard named Fred and it wasn’t pretty, she says.
“He’s been King about eight weeks,” she says. “He killed Fred in a fight for the throne.”
Lake Wales is about 60 miles east of Tampa.
Creatures are piling on beaches for awkward reason, Florida cops say. ‘Don’t call us’
Determined diver works to free large shark tangled in reef off Florida, video shows
Birthday celebration gets weird when dead alligator starts moving, Florida video shows
