Alie Ward

And if you recall from our Mimicology episode with Dr. Terry McGlynn about ants, harvester ants, the juicy ones that used to roam untouched lands,

are struggling because of invasive ant colonies, which means horned lizards are going hungry.

But as for the blood, so these horned lizards are able to constrict some muscles around their eyes, which keeps the blood kind of shunted and dammed up in a few sinuses under the eyeball.

Then as it's ready, it's like building up, the lizard further constricts those muscles really quickly and the blood has nowhere to go but out and they can shoot it up to four feet away.

And this would be like you being able to say, like spit the entire length of a bowling lane.

How often can they do this?

Like if you were at a lizard party, just kind of goofing around.

So there's some research out there.

For example, the 2001 paper titled Blood Squirting Variability in Horned Lizards, which exposed horned lizards to the presence of dogs.

And they found that body mass of these lizards was positively correlated with the total number of squirts

and the number of days in a row a lizard could continue squirting from its eyeballs.

There's this other stellar paper, 2004's Banger, Responses of Kit Foxes to Anti-Predator Blood Squirting and Blood of Texas Horned Lizards.

And this study gave kit foxes some alive horned lizards to eat, during which the lizards squirted blood from the tissues around their eyes.

I'm guessing Jackson Pollocked the foxes in the face with their blood.

And then when the kit foxes were presented with more horned lizards to eat, the researchers say that the foxes displayed a learned aversion to them.

They were like, I'm good, dude.

Now, the study also suggested active anti-predator chemicals are carried in the circulating blood as well as in squirted blood and that the lizards can tell a fox wants to eat its ass and it's worth doing the blood squirt.

Now, fast forward a few decades to the October 2025 paper, Anti-Predator Blood Squirting and Seed Harvesting Ants in the Evolution of Mimicophagy or Ant Eating in Horned Lizards.

So scientists now know that during digestion of these harvester ants, a compound from their toxin enters horned lizard blood, becoming a circulating anti-predator deterrent, the study says.

Chemical warfare shot out your eyeballs.