Texas Released 55 More Horned Lizards, and the Reason They Left Is Still in the Yard

Fifty-five lizards went into the grass on a Texas ranch on Monday, which is a small number until you put it next to the reason the release was necessary at all.

The animals came from the Center for Conservation and Research at San Antonio Zoo, working with Zoo Miami, as the latest installment of the Texas Horned Lizard Reintroduction Project the zoo's conservation center has run since 2017. Twenty-five of them were raised at Zoo Miami, twenty-eight had been rescued from a Texas ranch earlier this year, and two were hatched and raised in San Antonio. A release earlier in October added twenty-four more. The zoo puts the running total at 428 animals returned to the wild.

What makes the program unusual is the bookkeeping. Every hatchling gets genetically fingerprinted before it goes out, which lets researchers identify individual animals later instead of guessing at a population from tracks and scat. Dante Fenolio, who heads the program, told reporters the fingerprints are how the team tracks growth, mass and movement over time.

The early returns are the kind a reintroduction program needs. A female hatched at the zoo in 2024 turned up on a neighboring property nearly a third of a mile from where she was released, more than a year after the fact, at full adult size. A third lizard may be a wild-born offspring of previously released animals, though the zoo says genetic work to confirm that could take months.

Now the part that belongs in a pest control column. The Texas horned lizard has been the state's official reptile since 1993, and its range has been contracting since the late 1960s. The zoo's own accounting of why names habitat deterioration, fragmentation and outright loss, non-native grasses — and then two entries Texans have more control over than they usually admit: red imported fire ants, and pesticide use.

There is no separating those two. The horny toad is an ant eater, and the ants it evolved alongside are not the ants that now occupy most of the state. Fire ants are both a direct threat to a slow, ground-dwelling lizard and the single most common reason a Texas homeowner reaches for a broadcast bait. Every yard treated for fire ants is a decision made on the same ground where the lizard's food base lives, and the label on the bag rarely mentions that.

That is also why the release sites matter as much as the release. The zoo works with private landowners and screens candidate ground with remote habitat ranking before anyone walks it, then checks back for signs of activity. Ranchland in the right county with the right grass and the right ant community is a better bet than a subdivision greenbelt, which is an uncomfortable thing to say about a species most Texans remember from a childhood backyard.

The partners are not a single agency either. Fort Worth and Dallas zoos and Texas Christian University run their own programs, grouped with TPWD under the Texas Horned Lizard Coalition, and the coalition's published numbers have never quite matched. Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine reported 25 lizards believed to be offspring of zoo-raised hatchlings released in 2019; the Fort Worth Zoo's own account put it at 18. On the fall 2021 release, the magazine cited 263 captive-raised hatchlings, 159 of them from Fort Worth, while the zoo cited 204, 100 of them its own. Both figures may be right in their own frame, but the gap is a reminder that "428" is the San Antonio Zoo's running count, not an official statewide census.

For anyone with a fence line and a memory of these animals, the practical version is narrower than it sounds. Mounds that look like a mess in a pasture may be a native harvester ant colony, which is the pantry, not the problem. Fire ant treatment done as a blanket spring and fall broadcast covers the same acres. Spot treatment, bait placed where the imported colonies actually are, and a licensed applicator who will read the label with the ants in mind are the difference between managing one species and clearing out both.

The lizards let go Monday will be tracked for years before anyone calls the comeback real. In the meantime, the state reptile's fate is being decided on ground that is mostly private, in a state where the most common pest control product sold is aimed at its dinner.