46 Fun Facts About Gecko

Which is the only continent with no native geckos?

Antarctica is simply too cold: geckos cannot make their own body heat, so they need warm surroundings to move, feed and breed.

Geckos of the genus Geckolepis escape a predator's grip by shedding what, leaving it with a useless mouthful?

Their scales, the largest of any gecko's, tear away at the lightest touch, so the attacker is left holding a mouthful of scales while the bare-skinned gecko slips off.

Geckos stand out among lizards for which ability?

Making vocalisations sets geckos apart: most lizards are silent, but geckos chirp, click and bark to one another. The word 'gecko' itself is said to imitate the cry of one Asian species.

Most geckos have no eyelids, just a fixed clear scale over each eye, a feature they share with which other reptiles?

Snakes have the same see-through 'spectacle' in place of eyelids, which is why neither animal can blink. A snake even sheds the scale along with the rest of its skin.

How do eyelid-less geckos keep their eyes clean and moist?

They lick them: the clear scale over each eye is really a pair of eyelids fused shut and turned transparent, so a gecko cannot blink and wipes its eyes with its tongue instead.

In 2014, Russia launched five geckos into orbit to study how weightlessness affects what?

Their mating was the subject, but the mission went wrong: ground control lost contact with the satellite for days, and all five geckos were found dead when it landed.

House geckos are welcome lodgers in many tropical homes because they eat what?

Insect pests are the rent they pay: house geckos wait near lamps at night and pick off the moths and mosquitoes that the light draws in.

The western banded gecko is native to the deserts of which country?

United States deserts, the Mojave and the Sonoran, are its home, along with north-west Mexico. It is an oddity among geckos: it has movable eyelids and can blink.

Which web browser runs on a rendering engine called Gecko?

Firefox inherited Gecko from Netscape, where work on the engine began in 1997. Netscape's own browser faded away, but its engine lives on inside Firefox.

What do many geckos do with their shed skin?

Eat it is exactly what they do: a shedding gecko tugs the loose skin off with its mouth and swallows it. In some species a hatchling will not touch other food until it has eaten its first shed.

Geckos' climbing grip arose separately in about eleven lineages, a textbook case of which process?

Convergent evolution means unrelated lineages arriving at the same solution. Geckos gained the grip about eleven times and, more surprisingly, lost it again about nine times.

Gecko adhesion was long credited to which weak intermolecular attraction?

Van der Waals forces are feeble pulls between molecules that almost touch. A gecko multiplies them across millions of microscopic contact points, though one 2014 study argued that static charge does more of the work.

To show off a new 'gecko tape' in 2003, scientists hung which superhero toy from a sheet of glass?

Spider-Man dangled by one hand coated in the tape, whose plastic pillars copied the structures on a gecko's foot. The team's leader, Andre Geim, later won a Nobel Prize for discovering graphene.

How does a gecko unstick its foot to take the next step?

It peels its toes backwards from the tips, the way you would peel off sticky tape. The grip lets go a little at a time, so very little force is needed.

A gecko clings to glass without suction, using millions of microscopic what on its feet?

Tiny hairs, each about a tenth the width of a human hair and split into hundreds of finer tips, cover the feet. Together they press so close to a surface that the molecules themselves attract.

What do tokay geckos do with their eggs until they hatch?

Stand guard over them: the female sticks her hard-shelled eggs to a solid base, and the adults keep watch beside them until the young hatch.

The mossy leaf-tailed gecko vanishes against a tree trunk by pressing what flat against the bark?

A fringe of skin runs along its head, body and legs. Pressed against the trunk by day, it wipes out the shadow that would otherwise give the gecko's outline away.

Geckos regrow each of their 100 or so teeth every few months, a trick also seen in which animals?

Sharks and geckos are both polyphyodonts, animals whose teeth are replaced again and again for life. Beside each working gecko tooth, a small spare is already growing.

The oldest known fossils of modern geckos are preserved in amber from which country?

Myanmar's amber is about 100 million years old, so geckos much like today's were already climbing trees while dinosaurs walked below. The same deposits have yielded fragments of dinosaurs themselves.

Pygopods, legless lizards that are geckos, live almost entirely in which country?

Australia's pygopods have lost their front legs entirely and kept only small flaps where the hind legs were, which is why they are also known as flap-footed lizards.

The most commonly kept pet gecko cannot climb vivarium glass because it lacks what?

Sticky toe pads are missing in the leopard gecko and in roughly four out of every ten gecko species. It is a ground-dweller from dry, rocky country, with no need to run up walls.

In Greek myth, Demeter turned the boy Ascalabus into a gecko for what offence?

Mocking her as she drank was the boy's mistake. The goddess, parched from searching for her lost daughter, was gulping down a drink when he laughed at her, and she flung the dregs over him.

The leopard gecko is sometimes described as the first lizard species to be what?

Domesticated is the claim: leopard geckos have been bred in captivity for so many generations that breeders now offer colours and patterns never seen in the wild.

The leopard gecko is native to dry regions of Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Nepal and which other country?

India's dry north-west completes the range. Winters there can fall below 10 °C, so wild leopard geckos retreat underground and sit out the cold in a dormancy called brumation.

In leopard geckos, what decides whether an egg hatches as a male or a female?

The temperature of the nest settles it in the first weeks: warm, middling temperatures produce mostly males, while cooler or very hot nests produce females.

A healthy leopard gecko has a thick tail because it uses the tail to store what?

Fat in the tail is an emergency larder that carries the gecko through lean spells. A gecko that loses its tail loses those savings too.

Why does a leopard gecko's dropped tail keep thrashing for up to half an hour?

To distract predators: while the attacker goes for the flipping, wriggling tail, the gecko slips away. Built-in fracture lines let the tail snap off cleanly with almost no bleeding.

Mourning geckos are almost all female; how do they produce young without males?

By cloning themselves: their eggs develop without being fertilised, a process called parthenogenesis, so each daughter is a near-copy of her mother.

In bright light, a tokay gecko's pupils narrow to which shape?

A vertical slit shields eyes that are built for the dark. In many geckos its edges are scalloped, so when the slit closes fully only a few pinpoints of light get through.

Tokay geckos are poached in large part for use in what?

Traditional medicine in China uses dried tokays under the name Ge Jie, although no medical benefit has been shown. The trade grew large enough for the species to be listed under the CITES wildlife treaty.

What temperament are tokay geckos known for among reptile keepers?

Aggressive and territorial tokays back up their temper with powerful jaws: a big one can bite hard enough to draw blood and hang on, so keepers rarely recommend them to beginners.

The tokay gecko has been introduced to which US state, among other places outside its native Asia?

Florida's tokays descend from animals that escaped or were released from the pet trade, and the warm, humid south suits them. They have also been reported in Hawaii and on Caribbean islands such as Martinique.

Which popular pet gecko was believed extinct until its rediscovery in 1994?

The crested gecko went from 'lost' to living-room favourite within a few decades: the animals collected after 1994 bred so readily that it is now one of the most widely kept geckos in the world.

Unlike most geckos, the crested gecko cannot do what after dropping its tail?

Regrow it is the one thing this gecko cannot do, so most wild adults go through life tailless. Blood vessels in the stump close almost at once, and the wound simply heals over.

How do a gecko's clinging feet stay free of dust and dirt?

They clean themselves as it walks: in experiments, geckos with dirty feet won back their grip within a few steps, because the dirt sticks to the wall more strongly than to the foot.

Geckos of the genus Phelsuma break the usual gecko rule by hunting at what time?

During the day is when Phelsuma geckos are out, and they dress for it: instead of the usual drab greys and browns, most are bright green, which has made them popular terrarium animals.

Besides its usual prey, the gold dust day gecko feeds on what?

Nectar and soft fruit round out the menu. These geckos have a sweet tooth, and many of them will crowd onto a single flowering plant to lap at its blossoms together.

The GEICO Gecko speaks in the accent of which city?

London gave the mascot both his Cockney accent and his voice, the EastEnders actor Jake Wood. Earlier ads had tried other voices, including that of Frasier star Kelsey Grammer.

The GEICO Gecko is modelled on which real species of gecko?

The gold dust day gecko, bright green with gold speckles on its neck and back, comes from islands off East Africa, but people have carried it to Hawaii and other Pacific islands, where it now runs wild.

The giant 'leachie', often ranked as the largest living gecko, is native to which Pacific islands?

New Caledonia's long isolation let its geckos grow enormous, a textbook case of island gigantism. The only bigger gecko known, a 60 cm giant, is now thought to have come from the same islands.

The Jaragua dwarf gecko, at about 16 mm one of the world's smallest reptiles, lives on which Caribbean island?

Hispaniola's dry south-western tip and the islet of Beata just offshore, in the Dominican Republic, are its only known home. It lives among fallen leaves on the forest floor and went unnoticed by science until 2001.

Leaf-tailed geckos of the genus Uroplatus are found only on which island and its coastal islets?

Madagascar is their only home, so the clearing of its forests threatens most of them. One of them, the satanic leaf-tailed gecko, has a body shaped like a withered leaf.

To escape danger, the Asian flat-tailed house gecko has been filmed doing what on ponds and puddles?

Sprinting across the surface takes several tricks at once: the gecko slaps the water with all four feet, leans on surface tension and wriggles its body and tail like a swimming lizard.

Gecko-inspired grippers have been tested in orbit as a way to catch what?

Space junk is hard to get hold of: suction cups need air to work, and ordinary tape fails in the extreme heat and cold of orbit. A gecko-style gripper needs neither, and lets go on command.

Geckos native to which cool-climate country give birth to live young, unlike their egg-laying relatives elsewhere?

New Zealand's geckos carry their young inside the body, and where summers are cool some breed only every second year. Nearly all other geckos lay one or two eggs at a time.

Nocturnal geckos evolved from day-active ancestors, so unlike most night animals they kept what?

Colour vision survives because those ancestors had lost the rod cells that most animals rely on at night. Geckos enlarged their colour-sensing cones instead, which are about 350 times more sensitive than ours.