IT’S been a long time since I wrote about geckos, so I am about to rectify that. Summer is finally here and with it the full onslaught of the dreaded geckos. This year, however, our friends have undergone a change of official status, they have been declared aliens. In the Staatskoerant (die Staatskoerant, nogal, so it must be true), of July 19 this year, under the heading, the Publication of the National List of Invasive Species, it states, ‘I, Boma Edith Edna Molewa, Minister of Water and Environmental Affairs, do declare….’ And she goes on to name our little critter by name: Hemidactylus mabouia, Moreau’s tropical house gecko, as an alien invasive species.
I wonder if all it will take is putting up a notice informing our geckos of their new status and indicating an early departure – somehow I doubt it. We don’t really mind, we find them an endless source of entertainment, both in The Hide, where we spend a lot of time in the evenings watching geckos hunt down their prey (and please note how many mosquitoes they will eat in an evening), and in the lounge.
Now the lounge is a slightly different story. Apart from chasing each other around the walls and the ceiling, getting into fearsome combat, with swishing tails and hunched backs (that’s how they get to have broken tails and to even lose them altogether), they also lurk in ambush behind pictures and bookcases, springing forth to surprise their prey and each other. In fact, so entertaining are they that we frequently switch off the television and watch them instead, far better value for money.
How do they manage to stick to the walls and the ceiling, you ask? According to Bill Branch in his Field Guide to Snakes and Other Reptiles of Southern Africa, ‘The toe-tips of many species have groups of scales with minute hairs. These unique scales are arranged in rows or paired pads called scansors that allow them to ‘stick’ to seemingly smooth surfaces’. Of course, they are not infallible. There are frequent dull ‘thuds’ as a gecko’s ceiling-sticking scansors fail him and he plummets earthwards, sometimes narrowly missing a gin’n’tonic.
Just in case we do get rid of all our geckos, there are more waiting in the wings. Scientists from an Australian university and a film crew from the National Geographic magazine have just returned from an expedition to the remote lost world of the Cape York Peninsula in far northern Australia, where they discovered no fewer than three new vertebrate species that have been living in isolation for millions of years. And one of them is a gecko (the other two are a skink and a frog). It is temporarily called a leaf-tail gecko, because although it looks remarkably like our friend, it has a fan or leaf-shaped tail that does give it a rather special look. So, there’s apparently no end to the geckos. On that note, cheers!
Sources: Die Staatskoerant (via Environmental Solutions) and News24.com.
