When rainbow lizards at a seaside resort in Togo were offered two kinds of pizza, they rushed the four-cheese slices within 15 minutes and fought over them. The four-seasons pizza went untouched. The observation won the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition. The same lizard, however, carries a less charming distinction: a type of Salmonella was first identified in agama lizard droppings and named after the animal.
The pizza study, by Daniele Dendi, Gabriel H. Segniagbeto, Roger Meek and Luca Luiselli, appeared in 2023 as a short communication in the African Journal of Ecology. Its focus was the lizards' opportunistic foraging around people, a lighthearted finding that sits next to a more serious public health story about reptiles and germs.
