Butiki And Tuko Geckos Of The Philippines
One aspect which I really love about living in the tropics is the ubiquitous presence of geckos. Watching these unusual reptiles is better than TeeVee. Being around them every single day, and always having cameras within reach allowed me to get some unusual shots and videos of them over the years. I recently got new shots of these animals, so I thought I’d introduce the geckos of the Philippines in a new post.
There are mostly two species of geckos I observe, the larger toko (or tuko) geckos, Gecko gecko, and the smaller, more common butiki geckos, Hemidactylus frenatus. The toko geckos give off loud vocalizations, sounding like “toko! toko!”, hence their name.
Here two tokos are fighting:
Sometimes even a gecko dies, too. The ants usually quickly make a meal out of them.
This is a shot I just got today … a toko/tuko gecko eating a smaller botiki gecko. The butiki just got away, but with a severely injured leg.
This toko/tuko often rests below our electric kitchentop-oven. When I removed it briefly to clean the kitchen, the reptile didn’t move … a great opportunity to get a close-up shot.
This shot shows the adhesive gecko footpads, from below. True marvels of evolution!
Botiki geckos are small ..and their eggs are even smaller, naturally.
Finally, here is a blog post I wrote about the physics of gecko foot pad adhesion to smooth surfaces. Fascinating stuff, and there is still soem scientific debate going on what molecular forces exactly are allowing the geckos to run up the walls:
