A very cool lizard

 

As always, click the photo to enlarge

A Gold Dust Day Gecko (Phelsuma laticauda) peeks coyly at the photographer. Almost immediately upon arrival to our hosts' house on Maui in the little town of Paia, Shauna and I began to notice brown geckos in and around the gardens. While any gecko is cool - or any lizard at all - Marty and Eleanor told us to watch for a much flashier gecko and showed us where to keep an eye out for them.

It didn't take long to spot a GDDG, and we quickly wired up flashes and bolted on macro lenses to attempt imagery of the extraordinary beasts. The brilliantly hued geckos obliged, and I share a few of those photos here.

Like SO many organisms on Maui, the Gold Dust Day Gecko is not native. It hails from Madagascar and vicinity. As one might suspect from its appearance, this lizard is coveted in the pet trade and has been moved to many parts of the world. As usually happens with commonly kept reptiles, some escape, and where conditions are appropriate, they may flourish outside of captivity.

The Hawaiian Islands have no native terrestrial reptiles, although there are marine reptiles such as sea turtles and Yellow-bellied Sea Snakes. But now there are apparently eight species of established geckos, and at least nine other introduced reptile species. The much more frequent brown geckos that we saw may have been the Common House Gecko (Hemidactylus frenatus), although we did not capture images of those and attempt to verify its identity.

I don't know if geckos like the GDDG cause ecological issues, but I suspect not. At least where we saw them, and I suspect that this is true in most cases, they were inhabiting landscapes with nearly no native species - animals or plants. So, there is no native species for them to be competing with, by and large.

If the information that I found is correct, we can pinpoint the introduction of Gold Dust Day Gecko to Hawaii. A student at the University of Hawaii smuggled in eight of them in 1974 and released them near campus. It would seem likely that other independent releases also occurred, but whatever the case, the lizards stuck.