College Takes Up Fight For The Striped Legless Lizard
The Age
Monday August 17, 1992
Rock stars and politicians have image consultants; why not a lizard? Footscray City Secondary College is giving the striped legless lizard a higher profile in the hope that greater public awareness will help protect it from extinction.
Taking a semi-commercial (but non-profit) approach, they are marketing the lizard as a ``total package", offering legless lizard T-shirts and utensil stands for sale at the school, designing posters and composing music about its plight. They are also making greeting cards, crossword puzzles and educational material for other schools. Some of their work counted towards assessment.
Money raised from the campaign will be divided between research based at the Melbourne zoo and books about endangered species for the school's own library.
Yesterday the director of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Ms Tricia Caswell, launched the school's campaign at the Melbourne zoo.
The lizard, whose survival is not helped by its resemblance to a snake, is veering closer to extinction as native grassland makes way for urban development at an alarming rate. Grasslands and grassy woodlands, the lizard's preferred habitat, once covered one-third of Victoria, but only 0.5 per cent remains.
Striped legless lizards have long tails, external ear openings and a broad flat tongue (not forked like a snake's). They are tan with dark parallel lines running the length of their bodies, which grow to about 22centimetres. The zoo's research group would be interested to hear from anyone who has seen one, and more information about lizard products is available from the Footscray City Secondary College, where students have already embarked on their second print run of T-shirts.
© 1992 The Age