BLACK AND WHITE TEGU |
 |
| A beautiful lizard from South America, the tegu is considered a very large lizard weighing more than 10 pounds. It is generally a hunter of small prey animals including snakes, lizards, frogs, young birds, mice and insects. But occasionally, perhaps bored with this meager sized diet the tegu hunts bigger prey, the 100 pound guinea pig relative, the capybara! Certainly the tegu could never eat the whole animal and there is no evidence that any tegu has ever killed one. Instead the tegu acts a parasite, it attacks the capy from the rear, launches itself up at the capy's back, sinks in it's teeth, tears our a lump of flesh and then retreats back into the forest. An animal that takes a meal from another without killing it, like a mosquito or a vampire bat is a parasite, not a predator. |