Geckos

A Gecko is a wide term used by many to describe a small lizard when you see them on holiday or around your house. Geckos belong to the infraorder Gekkota and are found across the world in warm climates. They come in many different colours and sizes ranging from 1.6 to 60cm in length when fully grown including the tail.

I will give you a bit more general background into geckos in a bit but the real reason I wanted to bring geckos to your attention is because of their amazing feet. It does not jump to the for front of most people minds but have you ever wondered how they are able to climb walls and glass without any signs of effort and hang from the ceiling stationary for hours? It’s a really cool answer but you have to look incredibly closely at their feet and know a tiny bit of physical chemistry.

When you look at their feet you’ll see that there are microscopic hairs like structures which are the secret to geckos amazing spiderman ability. These microscopic hairs are how the gecko ‘stick’ to the walls, using van der Waals forces which are also known as London forces. These forces are electrostatic interactions between the molecules making up the hairs on the feet and the molecules on the other surface. They occur because of the presence of either two permanent or instantaneously induced dipoles, dipoles are formed by the electron configuration of the molecules due to covalent and ionic bonds drawing electrons to ‘one’ side of the nucleus and uncovering the positively charged protons. The electrons of other molecules in this case the hairs on geckos feet are then attracted to the exposed positive charge nucleus.

This is not the only fact which is interesting with geckos, like many different lizards geckos will throw of their tails in an attempt to escape from predation. This process is not as easy as it sound however; the actual name of this defence mechanism is called autotomy. This defence mechanism is made possible thanks to the geckos tail containing ‘fracture planes’ which are areas within the tail either between the vertebrae or the centre of the vertebrae depending on the species. This is a last resort however because the loss of a tail is extremely costly as they contain the majority of a geckos fat reserves, so once lost juvenile geckos stop growing while a new tail develops and adults cease being reproductively active. The tail is so important in fact that some geckos will return to it after time and proceed to eat it so as to limit the resources lost.

Over a quarter of all known lizard species, 26.8% of the 5600 different species fall under the category of geckos. The majority of them are also nocturnal and have evolved to have specially shaped lenses which help magnify the little available light and allow them to see up to 350x better than a human eye in the dark. Sticking with the eyes no known species of geckos possess an eyelid, instead they has a thin transparent membrane which covers the eyes. This membrane is to help keep the eye clean aided by the tongue.

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