Scientists have identified the world's shortest-lived four-legged animal.
Known as Furcifer labordi, the six-inch-long chameleon from Madagascar takes just one year to go from fertilized egg to fertilizer – and of that span, a full nine months is spent inside an egg.
Described yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, F. labordi's freakish life cycle was accidentally discovered by Oklahoma State University graduate student Kristopher Karsten.
"I showed up late in the season and found something weird," said Karsten in a press release. "There were no juveniles. But by February, I found carcasses all over with no signs of mutilation or predation. The population plummeted – we've never seen this with other lizards."
After hatching,* F. labordi* embarks on an accelerated burst of life. It grows a tenth of an inch each day, quadrupling its body size in just two months before reaching sexual maturity, mating and dying.
For much of the year, eggs buried underground are the species' only existing members.
Image: Christopher J. Raxworthy
*Note: When I read about F. labordi, my first thought went to Sheldon, the half-hatched chick from U.S. Acres, who upon poking out his legs decided that life was better inside a shell. *
My next thought was for Roy Batty**, one of the replicants from Bladerunner, engineered to be superhumanly strong but short-lived. "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain," said Roy; put those words in an animated chameleon and there's some definite crossover marketing potential, though for what I'm not sure.
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