Carolina Anole Part 1

Applause IconApr 24, 2025 • 5:37 PM UTC
Location IconUnited States
Applause Icon140x Magnification
Applause IconAnimals
Holly Stuart (Foldscope Team)

Education Specialist at Foldscope Instruments

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I found a Carolina anole on my deck. It was shedding its skin, so I took some of the skin and looked at it under my Foldscope. There were so many things I saw, and I will share my observations here!
First, the top of the skin vs the bottom of the skin looked different. You could tell that there were textural differences in the images below. These were taken with the Foldscope 2.0 at 50X magnification plus 5X digital zoom using the brightfield light setting on the LED light module.
Knowing that one of the cool things that anoles do is change color (they can go from green to brown), I wanted to look at the scales of the skin using different lighting techniques to see if I could detect a color change. And I did! Going from brightfield to darkfield changed the scales from gold to blue. These images are at 140X magnification.
I also wanted to try using a polarizing filter to see if there were additional colors I could coax out of the scales. The color change was still gold to blue, but you can watch it happen in this video! (the video was recorded using 140X magnification).
I found that reflective lighting did not produce a different color, but rather a different quality of blue. Rather than a sparkly blue color, the scales look more solidly opaque blue under reflective lighting. These images were captured using 50X magnification plus 5X digital zoom.
My next post will take a look at the skin shed from the anole's feet!

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