In the 15th of August issue of the journal Salamandra, my colleagues and I published a new species of leaf-tailed gecko from northern Madagascar, Uroplatus garamaso! You can get the PDF of the description here.
In 2009, I was on a voluntourism trip to northern Madagascar. I was there to study the fauna of the island, and especially to look at the reptiles and amphibians. I was thrilled to see any species we found, but I was especially excited by one group in particular: leaf-tailed geckos, the genus Uroplatus.
A young specimen of the new species, Uroplatus garamaso
Uroplatus are some of the best-camouflaged four-legged vertebrates on earth. They come, essentially, in two flavours: dead-leaf-like species, and tree-bark-like species. Both groups have extremely modified anatomy to enhance the camouflage, and have in common a flattened tail with a wide fringe of skin around it.
Uroplatus are nocturnal hunters, but during the day, they rest in manners that maximise their camouflage. The leaf-like species rest along branches and among dead leaves, while the bark-like species rest head-down on tree trunks. One group of bark-like species, the Uroplatus fimbriatus species group, have extensive fringes of skin along the flanks and under the chin, which they unfurl as they rest head-down, obscuring their outline almost completely, and rendering them nearly invisible on the right substrate.
At night, these geckos prowl the twigs, branches, and trunks understory, hunting for their invertebrate prey. They are much, much easier to find at night, than they are during the day, as, like so many reptiles, they reflect torch light.
By the time I made it to Madagascar in 2009, I had learned all I could from books and internet forums about these geckos, but getting to see and study them in the wild was a hugely exciting prospect.
I got lucky: we found numerous specimens of one species of bark-like Uroplatus, which we thought was Uroplatus henkeli. But when I got back and shared some of my photos on GeckosUnlimited and Flickr, I learned that the species in that area was thought to be undescribed. It had been dubbed ‘Uroplatus henkeli “Diego”‘ by herpetoculturists, who had been keeping it in captivity for several years. It was also already well-known to the herpetologists working on Madagascar, chief among them Dr Frank Glaw and Professor Miguel Vences.
My co-author and colleague Jörn Köhler took this photo of Uroplatus garamaso in Ankarana National Park in 1995 already.
During her PhD supervised by Miguel Vences, Fano Ratsoavina worked on the diversity and systematics of all Uroplatus species, and published a summary of the state-of-the-art on the taxonomy of the genus in 2013. In that paper, this mysterious gecko was referred to as Uroplatus henkeli [Ca11], a candidate species. It was just one of many undescribed, putative species that were identified in that paper. Most of the rest belonged to the leaf-like Uroplatus ebenaui species group. In the intervening decade, eight species from that group have been described, but U. henkeli [Ca11] remained untouched.
The challenge was that, although there were some early indications of differences between U. henkeli [Ca11] and other, closely related species, we didn’t really have enough specimens, and struggled to find any reliable features. It took over 20 years, from the initial realisation that this was a new species, to yesterday (15 August 2023), for enough material and data to come together and allow us to describe the new species, Uroplatus garamaso. Specimens were collected on numerous expeditions, including my own in 2017–2018 to Montagne d’Ambre, where this species occurs in the lower reaches of the forests.
I collected this specimen on the never-before-surveyed west slope of Montagne d’Ambre in December 2017. It is now the holotype of Uroplatus garamaso.
Through careful analysis, we were able to identify a host of features that can allow for an identification of the new species. Chief among these are the colour of the tongue tip — pink, versus blackish in U. henkeli — and the colour of the eyes, which have a somewhat bloodshot appearance in the new species. We dubbed it Uroplatus garamaso; garamaso is a Malagasy word, referring to shiny or glossy eyes, which I think is a very fitting name.
It has been a huge pleasure to join in this work, led by Frank Glaw, to describe this exciting new gecko. It’s also great to know that its description is meaningful immediately, because of the community of dedicated herpetoculturists who have been working with this species under a variety of temporary names for decades. It will surely be of immediate interest for both CITES and the IUCN to know how to distinguish U. garamaso and U. henkeli, so that they can be managed individually. And I hope that you will agree that it is a truly striking, bizarre, and beautiful species.
Uroplatus garamaso are remarkable-looking geckos. It is no surprise they are popular in the pet trade.