Okay, the field of study is actually called scatology, but I don’t mince words for my readers-we naturalists like turds. Like any self-respecting naturalist, I like turds. The property caretaker, Rene, had to convince us that they were gecko droppings.Įven this fascinated me. They only get about as long as your finger, but they leave huge droppings, and Susan and I thought we had rats in the house, which are not a part of the natural wonderland we wanted to invite into our living space. For Susan’s part, she loves that they eat mosquitos. They can eat a spider twice the size of their head, and I just love that about them. In Spanish, house geckos are called limpia casas-house cleaners. The reason people love them is that they eat bugs, and the bugs down here in the tropics are, well, let’s just say the potential subject of several future Ranger Randy articles. Which is probably the only reason I’m on the planet.Įveryone around here loves having a gecko in their house, and we are blessed with either a couple of them, or with one who is very mobile, I haven’t figured out which yet. You don’t want all your kids to be carbon copies of yourself, because if your environment throws you a curve ball, you want some of your kids to be weirdos, because there’s a chance the weirdo might be able to handle the change. Diversity is the only reason you have a sex life. In case you don’t remember your high school Darwinian evolution, or in case they’re not teaching it anymore, sex is all about diversity. That’s also a very cute trick, but actually she only does it in a pinch, because when you do that, genetic diversity suffers. The house gecko is parthenogenic, meaning that the female is capable of making babies without the help of a male. But something Susan found out in her research is that she doesn’t need a mate. It’s a female house gecko advertising for a mate. It took us forever to figure out what that sound was. If we’ve ID’d her correctly, she’s commonly called the house gecko ( Hemidactylus frenatus), and I call her a she because she barks at night. I knew that they do not do this with claws, they do not do it with suction cups, they do not do it with a goopy adhesive substance, and they are not affected by the smoothness or roughness of the surface. Like most times I’ve ended up reading something astonishing, the reason I wanted to know more was that I already knew a little. Just as soon as the temperature in here drops by twenty degrees. Okay, I said, still managing somehow to converse with myself. Losing her grip would have been a scene from a grade-B gecko gore movie, but she was nonchalantly confident, and scampered upside-down all the way across the painted concrete ceiling to the wall, then transitioned fluidly to the vertical surface, and disappeared into her hidey hole behind the valance of the window blind. The gecko above our ceiling fan (Sorry, not the greatest shot)īetween the gecko and my face whirled the scythe-like blades of a ceiling fan, in a sinister blur. With three margaritas in me and drenched in sweat, I burst into the bedroom and groped for the air conditioner like a poisoned man groping for the antidote, and then we both fell backwards onto the bed-and then this little gecko ran across the ceiling above my face. Susan and I had just watched a World Cup soccer match in a thatched palapa bar here in Akumal, Mexico, then walked a mile and a half home, and if the heat was an unprovoked assault, the humidity was a crime against humanity. What sort of surprised me was that I was saying anything to anyone at all, including myself. “That’s really a pretty cute trick,” I said to myself.
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