Gecko Fight
I love the geckos which live in and around our house. We have two species of these small reptiles sharing our home with us, the common house gecko (Hemidactylus frenatus), and the tokay gecko (Gekko gecko). Not a day passes without me observing them, and our little son, at age 2, is also already fascinated by gecko watching.
A while ago I wrote an essay about the physics of the geckos’ ability to walk on flat surfaces vertically or even on ceilings. As in every good scientific field, there is some good discussion which explanations hold for this unusual ability. Are capillary forces involved, or Van Der Walls forces only? Read all the intriguing details of gecko wall-walking physics here:
Fight!
A few days ago my sweetheart alerted me to a really crass event happening on the ceiling of our upstairs bedroom: two of the tokay geckos, the larger of the two species, were fighting! The fight consisted of a neck-crank/choke, held by one of the two geckos, for a painfully long time. The losing gecko didn’t do much but shake its leg. See the violent encounter here:
If you’d like to see the high res version of the gecko fight close up shot, it’s on Flickr:
I hope you enjoyed this excursion into the world of small tropical reptiles,
Best Fishes,
Klaus
