Giant lizard and two squirrels happily share tasty snack together

Wilderness areas in Southern Africa are majority of the time extremely dry environments. Wildlife find themselves locked in a daily battle for survival, looking for food and water. On rare occasions, good rains come down and Mother Nature provides in abundance. These events bring about a total different behaviour in the majority of wildlife. Immediately after the rains, this giant plated lizard comes across an explosion of flying termites and instantly starts stuffing his face. Quickly he is joined by one and then two squirrels also making the most of this rare and tasty snack.

This abundance in flying termites only occur after a good drenching summer rainfall. Termites reproduce by establishing new colonies and the vectors for this task are the winged reproductive castes called alates. The worker termites open special guarded entrances allowing the fertile alates to exit the mound in an event known as the ‘nuptial flight’. This happens only once a year for each colony. These alates are highly nutritious and rich in protein and surprisingly tasty. They provide a major food source to many creatures as well as humans. When deep fried in oil, they have a distinctive peanut butter taste to them.

The giant plated lizard is the second largest lizard in Africa. They are predominantly carnivorous and very shy creatures. This healthy snack was more than enough to get this lizard out and into the open. Squirrels in the African wild are herbivores most of the time but they do not hesitate becoming little carnivores once an opportunity like this presents itself. In general, lizards and squirrels are never seen together or associated with one another in the wild. On this special day, all conventional behaviour disappeared and these two species had no problem with sharing this rare snack together. Both species rarely even look at one another. They were solely focussed on gorging themselves as quickly as possible.