Lizards squirt blood from their eyeballs

It sounds weird, but this gross defense tactic actually works like a charm

By Smartasaurus· 2 min read Wild

Imagine a hungry coyote cornering a tiny lizard

Mechanism call

Take a position: what's actually doing the work here?

One of these is closer than the rest. Commit before you find out.

The short version

It sounds weird, but this gross defense tactic actually works like a charm
A coyote or bobcat that gets hit will spend the next fifteen minutes pawing at its mouth, trying to shake the taste.
Even more strange is that the lizard has a "third eye" on the top of its head, a translucent scale called a parietal eye that senses light and shad…

If you were to poke a Texas horned lizard, it wouldn't bite you. It would wait until the pressure in its head built to a breaking point, then rupture the thin capillaries in its eyelids to spray you with a direct stream of its own blood.

The lizard isn't just bleeding; it's aiming. These squirts can travel five feet, hitting a predator square in the face with a liquid that tastes like chemical poison.

This isn't a random biological malfunction. To pull this off, the lizard restricts the blood leaving its head while its heart keeps pumping it in. The resulting pressure swell is so intense that the vessels around the eye socket simply burst on command.

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