If you haven’t seen the new show on the Discovery channel (narrated by Oprah), “Life”, you need to fix that ASAP. It’s produced by the same people that made “Planet Earth”. The last episode I saw was on amphibians and reptiles, where I discovered a tiny lizard I now love. The Brazilian pygmy gecko (Coleodactylus amazonicus) is one of the smallest lizards on earth, at only about half an inch long. Evolution probably made these geckos small to protect them from predators and competition, but in doing so it opened them up to a whole new dilemma of survival: drowning.
The pygmy gecko can be found in the tropical rainforests of South America – not exactly the driest places in the world. One minute the gecko could be sitting on a leaf, just enjoying the warmth of the sun and, without warning, a raindrop can slam into that leaf and send the gecko plummeting towards the ground. Before the gecko even knows what happened, it finds itself in the middle of a puddle trying to stay above water. Let’s not forget that when you are 2 cm long, a puddle seems like one of the Great Lakes.
Many geckos must have drowned before evolution stepped in and solved this survival problem with a simple solution: waterproof skin. This gecko can float.
The skin of a pygmy gecko is highly hydrophobic (the scientific word for waterproof). This skin paired with the gecko’s tiny size and weight allows it to float on top of water. They are even able to walk on water. They are much faster on land, so jumping into a puddle is not the ideal way to escape a predator, but hey, at least they won’t drown.
OMG, the camera angles are SO freaking awesome.
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