An international team has found and identified eight new day gecko species from Madagascar, each of which is no longer than your pointer finger.

For decades, researchers in the rainforests of Madagascar have studied the tiny brown Lygodactylus geckos of the subgenus Domerguella.

They had been trying to figure out where they lived and how they changed for a long time, but they thought there were only five species.

Now, a multinational team has discovered that there may be as many as seventeen! They have published eight new species names in Zootaxa.

Some areas had three or four separate species. The first author of the study, Professor Miguel Vences of the Technische Universität Braunschweig in Germany, says, “this was a fantastic discovery.” 

“On Montagne d’Ambre in the north of Madagascar we thought we were collecting just one species, but now we find there are four. Four different, closely related species that are almost indistinguishable to us, occurring together in the same place, apparently without interbreeding—this is exceptional, even for Madagascar.”

In fact, Madagascar has a very high number of unique reptile species, and in the last thirty years, over 150 new species have been found and named.

According to Dr. Frank Glaw, Curator of Herpetology at the Zoologische Staatssammlung München in Munich, Germany, “these results highlight how important it is that we continue to collect samples across Madagascar, even of species we think we understand.”

Many of the newly described reptile and amphibian species from Madagascar in recent years have been tiny, and the latest species are no exception.

The length of a domerguella, from the tip of the nose to the end of the tail, is only five to seven centimeters (or around two inches). According to Dr. Mark D. Scherz, curator of herpetology at the Natural History Museum of Denmark and the study’s last author, “small animals are generally less able to move from one area to another and are more likely to get isolated by barriers like rivers cropping up between populations. We think that their small size may play a role in the way they speciate.”

The most recent findings demonstrate how endangered some Domerguella species were even before they were given formal names.

The eight new species are all either probably endangered or critically endangered, according to Dr. Fanomezana Ratsoavina, manager of the Unit for Zoology and Animal Biodiversity at the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar.

This demonstrates how crucial it is to keep exploring, describing, and evaluating the wildlife of Madagascar’s conservation status.

Source: 10.11646/zootaxa.5179.1.1

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