Gold Dust Day Gecko

Beth and I are going to a white elephant gift exchange tomorrow with her coworkers.   Oh man, you better hope you get my present.  I could barely keep myself from taking it out of the box and playing with it last night. 

As promised:
The gecko I pictured back in "Back in business!" was misidentified.  It is actually a gold dust day gecko.  What a looker!  These guys are really cool looking, and all over the place, too.

As I'm not so hot with the ol picture machine, I'm going to continue to blatantly steal images from elsewhere on the web. I'll work on my citations. promise. this is from here.

These buggers are diurnal, or active during the day.  We see them sunning themselves on our stair railings and plant leaves all the time.  We're glad to have found them, becuase apparently, geckos mean good luck to some Hawaiians.  For us, the fact that they eat bugs is lucky enough.


They don't really like to be looked at, though.  When they catch you staring for too long or from too close, they use their amazing little gecko toes to scamper around to the underside of whatever they are laying on.  Geckos are able to walk on the underside of leaves, up walls, and on windows thanks to these amazing little gecko toes, which have around a million hairs on each toe pad.  I guess the tiny amount of friction, compounded over millions of hairs, is enough to hold the buggers up! Check out this website for more on geckos. They do a more comprehensive page on these guys.

The gold dust day gecko is a species introduced from Madagascar, but apparently only common in the "suburban" areas of Hawaii, Maui, and Oahu.  So maybe it's not as damaging to Hawaiian ecology as many of the other introduced species.
Do any bit of reading about plants and animals in Hawaii, and you will see what a comprehensive impact introduced species have had on the endemic species that evolved on these tranquil little islands. More on that later.