Whence
Leopard gecko
Animal

Where does Leopard gecko come from?

The leopard gecko comes from the dry, rocky country of the Indus valley in Pakistan. One of the world's most popular pet lizards, it reached the pet trade in the 1960s, and genetic tests show that pet leopard geckos descend from the geckos of the Indus region.

A lizard of rocks and dry grassland

Wild leopard geckos live in rocky, dry grassland and semi-desert with sparse plants, from Afghanistan and Iran across Pakistan to north-western India and western Nepal. They are generally considered nocturnal: they spend the day in burrows and crevices and come out at dusk to hunt insects and other small prey. When winter temperatures drop below 10 °C, they go underground and live on fat stored in their thick tails. The zoologist Edward Blyth first described the species in 1854.

From Karachi to pet shops

The leopard gecko first appeared as a pet in the 1960s, probably shipped from Karachi. It breeds easily in captivity, so most pets today are captive-bred, and it is sometimes called the first domesticated lizard. Breeding has produced colours and patterns unknown in the wild. A 2022 study that compared several dozen pet geckos with wild ones found that they belong to one lineage, which lives in southern and central Pakistan, around the Indus River.

Why people say Africa

Another popular pet lizard, the African fat-tailed gecko, is a close cousin from the same family of 'eyelid geckos'. It lives in West Africa, from Senegal to Nigeria, and it too stores fat in a thick tail. The leopard gecko, though, is South Asian. Like its relatives it can blink, because it has movable eyelids, which most geckos lack, and it has no sticky toe pads, so it cannot climb smooth walls.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Common leopard gecko ↗ · uniba.sk ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › African fat tailed gecko ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Eublepharidae ↗

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