Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

I've known for a while that Nina changes color slightly during the course of the day, every day. For some reason, I was under the impression that I'd already talked about that, but apparently I haven't, so that's what we're discussing today. (And for once, no whining about the uncleanable terrarium! Everybody wins!)

For most of the day, she looks like this:


There's a light-colored, repeating diamond design down her back, with dark triangles to either side and a main body color that's kind of in-between.

In the mornings, though, she looks like this:


Much darker along the backbone, and in general.

I didn't find any websites that would confirm this for me, but I assume this is most likely a temperature-regulation thing, and she just wakes up dark because that's the best color for absorbing heat from the sun. Not that she actually sees the sun, but you know what I mean. I don't know what time of day she switches from one to the other, never having tried to find out, but on the day I wrote this she'd changed at some point between 9 and 11 AM.

Some species of anole are also able to change from brown to green, but Anolis sagrei (Cuban brown anole), which is Nina's species, doesn't do that: they're always a shade of brown.