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What is a reptile?
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Green iguana (Iguana iguana).
Photo by H. Friedland.
Defining a reptile is difficult and complex. Reptiles are ectothermic (cold blooded) animals that are covered with scales and/or scutes. Reptiles are diverse. Some live in water and some on land. Some like dry and some like humid environments. Some reptiles lay eggs, other species have live births.
Cold blooded animals are not cold nor do they necessarily like the cold. It means that their bodies do not produce heat the way birds and mammals do. That also means that if you put a blanket over a reptile, it does not keep it warm. You would be surprised at how many people don’t understand that. Reptiles become the temperature of the environment. They can also thermoregulate to change their metabolism. That is why when you keep reptiles, you offer them a cooler area and a warmer area of the cage. The animal can decide for itself the temperature it wants to be.
Some reptiles, but not all, slow down during the winter. If you have a pet reptile that comes from a very warm part of the world such an African ball python (Python reguis), they never have an actual hibernation period. They can slow down during the colder months, but they do not hibernate in the wild and you should not attempt to hibernate them. Other animals, such as Eastern box turtles, come from places that have a very cold winter. They do hibernate in the wild, so you may choose to cool them down if you keep them as pets. A cool down period is absolutely necessary with some species if you want to breed them.
Liards are covered with snakes, but most have eyelids. Snakes are completely covered with scales including their eyes. They do not have eyelids and when they shed their skin, they also shed the scale that covers their eyes.
Turtles have something called scutes. They are the hard sections of their shell. In normally formed turtles, you can count 13 big scutes on their backs with smaller scutes going all around the perimeter of their shell. As the turtle grows, each individual scute grows outward. Sometimes if the incubation temperature is incorrect turtles can be born with broken or extra scutes. They can live normal and healthy lives with that imperfection.
There are some reptile species such as most chameleons, that live only a few years, but there are others like tortoises that can live over 100 years.
So while reptiles are quite diverse, they all have scales and/or scutes and they are all cold blooded. People often mistake them with amphibians which are also cold blooded, but that’s another story.
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