Four new additions to the Mandurah Wildlife Rescue centre came as a surprise after a bobtail lizard injured by a dog bite turned out to be pregnant.
“She came in from a dog bite, but she didn’t get fat until a while later, and then it was like, hmm, have you been eating too much honey?” volunteer Emmy Charushenko said.
“Then I felt her stomach and I thought, that’s babies.”
Emmy said every day the lizard got fatter, and after two months, the first baby lizard arrived on Saturday, April 22.
“Bobtails have live births… they go through labor like humans do, you watch and they strain, the poor things,” Mandurah Wildlife Rescue founder Dot Terry said.
“It usually takes quite a few hours for each birth.”
Ms Terry said the mother was so big they were concerned they might have to get a C-section done.
“Last year we had one that was overdue and we had to get a cesarean done, and she only had three, this one’s had four,” she said.
The four lizards were delivered over a period of three days, and Emmy and her sister Ashley Carushenko named the four babies after Criminal Minds characters Aaron Hotchner, Spencer Reid, Derek Morgan and David Rossi.
The Mandurah Wildlife Rescue volunteers separated them from their mother soon after to be weighed, marked for identification, and prepared for eventual release.
“In the wild, mum will have them, and when she’s finished having them all, she takes off, so they’re self-sufficient,” Ms Terry said.
“They’ll be released, once they’ve put on some weight and they’re eating properly, what they’ve got to catch in the wild… it’ll probably be when the warmer weather comes.”
For now, Emmy and Ashley will make sure the lizards keep growing so they’re ready for release.
