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THE VISTA (University of Central Oklahoma) 22 June 06 Local lizard population subject of science study (Heather Warlick)
If you don’t like lizards, stay out of Howell Hall. Dr. Paul Stone, UCO biology professor, said there are currently about 1,000 Mediterranean Geckos who have made the Science Building home.
“We have known for a long time that there were geckos in the science building,” Stone said. “I think that originally, one of our professors brought them in from a field trip he took to Texas.”
The lizards, each of which is less than three inches long, have been lounging in the lab since they were introduced to UCO in the sixties. Stone has known about them for years, he said, but he was too busy with his own turtle study to pay much attention to them.
“I told a student that if he could catch 25 of the geckos, I might be interested,” he said. One night last fall, Ken Locey, a UCO biology junior, collected 25 geckos and brought them to Stone the following day.
“I just started asking questions and found myself doing research on them,” Locey said.
Since that evening in August of 2005, Locey has spent a few nights a week searching for geckos. Because geckos are nocturnal, his hunts usually begin at sundown and last until the early hours of the morning.
The geckos have spread from the science building to at least six surrounding buildings, Stone said, including Wantland Hall, Nigh University Center and the music and math buildings.
“We were surprised, because we expected them to be all over campus,” Stone said. “They have only traveled 200 meters in the last 40 years.”
Stone said he thinks the reason the geckos were brought to UCO originally was to help control a cockroach problem in the science building. He said that after the geckos showed up, the cockroaches have nearly disappeared.
The geckos have also been spotted at Edmond Medical Center. Locey recently collected several geckos from the hospital, but said he was quickly asked to leave by the hospital’s security staff.
In order to mark the geckos and count them, Locey clips a toe off each gecko he captures. Between 40 and 50 of the toes have been kept for the possibility of future genetic testing.
“You clip the tip of the toe right off,” Locey said. “It doesn’t significantly affect their ability to walk or to breed or anything. It is actually quite humane.”
Locey and Stone have written a research paper titled “Factors Affecting Range, Expansion in the Introduced Mediterranean Geckos, Hemidactylus turcicus” which they have submitted to the Journal of Herpetology for review.
Locey’s research documents the success of the gecko’s colonization at UCO. He is also interested in their survival rates during the winter months.
“We should be cautious,” Stone said. “But they don’t seem to be a problem.”
The first sighting of a gecko in America was in 1910, in Florida, Locey said. They are indigenous to Southern Europe and North Africa.
“We don’t advocate capturing any of these geckos, even if it is for the purpose of controlling pests,” Locey said. He hopes no one will handle the geckos if they come across them on campus, he said, because that will affect the outcome of the research.
Local lizard population subject of science study

I was fascinated & interested in this story until I read the toe clipping part... There's got to be a less painful (and disfiguring) way to mark the geckos he catches...
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0.0.2 Crested Gecko (Anton (or Angelina) & Harley)
1.1 Crazy dogs (Alex & Sadie)
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