Western fence lizard

if you look close you can see an engorged tick a bit behind his ear - it's been determined that areas that have a lot of lizards have a lower incidence of Lyme disease- a protein in the lizards blood "cleans" the ticks of Lyme pathogen. The downside though.. there are more ticks when there are more lizards (the preferred food for young ticks) for them to feed on... so science is still on the fence (ha-ha) about whether it is good or bad to have a lot of these lizards around.