SLIDE 19 Submitted by Zach Barton
Newly discovered gecko has a quick-release mechanism for escaping predators
Lizards are famous for their ability to detach their tail when a predator grabs it, but a newfound species of gecko from Madagascar takes this ability to the extreme. When a predator goes to take a bite, Geckolepis megalepis gives it a mouthful of scales and flesh instead. If you think this sounds gruesome, you don’t know the half of it. G. megalepis is thought to have the largest body scales of any gecko, which means that even a relatively minor scuffle can result in major armor losses. The paper describing the new species, published Tuesday in the journal PeerJ, includes an image of one of these lizards with nearly every scale removed from its torso. The skin beneath is glistening and pink — like a fresh, uncooked sausage that is, for some reason, wet. Fortunately for the adorably weird-looking little critters, known as “fish-scale geckos,” their bodies can replace lost scales in a matter of weeks, a remarkable example of rapid and good-as-new regeneration. “This regeneration is, as far as we have been able to tell, scarless, and the resulting regenerated scales are indistinguishable from original ones,” said Mark Scherz, a herpetologist at the Bavarian State Collection for Zoology in Munich and lead author
- f the new paper. “That is not the case of many other geckos, in which the
regenerated scales have a distinctly different appearance to the original ones.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science /wp/2017/02/07/newly-discovered-gecko-has-a-quick-releas e-mechanism-for-escaping-predators/
