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In 2021, Assistant Professor Lindsey Swierk discovered that the water anole can use a bubble to breathe underwater so they can escape predators. Water anoles are a brown lizard found in Costa Rica that spend time underwater and on land. 

Lots of invertebrates, such as beetles and spiders, use this bubble technique known as rebreathing which extends their time in the water. However, until recently, there have not been any examples of vertebrates – animals with backbones – that use this method.

Lindsey explains, “Anoles are kind of like the chicken nuggets of the forest. Birds eat them, snakes eat them. So, by jumping in the water, they can escape a lot of their predators. We know that they can stay underwater at least about 20 minutes, but probably longer.”

Lindsey wanted to figure out if the bubble, which sticks to the lizards’ skin around the top of the head, increased the time the lizards were able to stay underwater.  To test her idea, Lindsey put a substance on some lizards that made it harder for the bubbles to form. This was her “reduced-bubble” group. Then, she got a normal group of lizards that did not have the substance on them. Lindsey measured how long each group of lizards could stay underwater. She found that on average the normal lizards could hold their breath 32% longer than the reduced-bubble group.

“This is significant because this is the first experiment that truly shows adaptive significance of bubbles,” says Lindsey. “Rebreathing bubbles allow lizards to stay underwater longer. Before, we suspected it – we saw a pattern – but we didn’t actually test if it served a functional role.”

Gloria was an outstanding participant in Double Helix’s Young STEM Journalism Bootcamp. This year, Double Helix partnered with Letterly to launch the inaugural 4-week program, inviting students aged 8 to 18 to write science news articles on the topics that matter to them! This article went through multiple rounds of editing with 1-to-1 feedback from Letterly’s highly qualified and passionate writing coaches. Double Helix editors provided a final edit for accuracy and style.