11/20/2019
The Magic Gecko
🦎🦎🦎
In 1974, a 36 year-old Karl Heinz Switak bought a new car – a Chevy Blazer – and aimed it south. He’d requested a two-month leave from his job at the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco and, joined by his girlfriend Carol, brother Dirk, and life-long friend George, set sights on 1000 miles of new pavement on Baja California’s Highway 1. A cold and foggy Bay Area morning bid them farewell on June 16th, and just three days later the four would pull into the sleepy town of San Ignacio – a true desert oasis on the edge of a lagoon bordered by palm thickets where they made camp.
Their first night of searching produced just a handful of road-killed snakes: a couple rattlesnakes, a whipsnake and a banded sand snake. The next day, however, would be different: on Thursday, June 20th they’d make h**petological history.
It started relatively uneventfully, with the team spotting some introduced Bullfrogs (Rana catesbeianus) and a Two-Striped Garter Snake (Thamnophis hammondii). As night fell, Karl and George encountered an adult Baja California Rattlesnake (Crotalus enyo) followed by a subadult Mexican Rosy Boa (Lichanura trivirgata). A half-hour later, Karl saw what he thought to be a road-killed rodent and George stopped the car for a closer inspection. As he approached the unidentified object on the pavement, Karl realized it was a large gecko, but one unlike any he’d seen before. It was huge, and he jokingly referred to it as a leopard gecko. The pair returned to camp and showed off their finds.
The strange gecko accompanied the team alive for the remainder of their trip, following them to the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula and foregoing the specimen shipment in La Paz for fear it’d die or be lost in shipping. The gecko and team took the ferry to mainland Mexico and eventually the Big Bend area of Texas where the lizard was shipped from El Paso to gecko expert, Robert Murphy.
Murphy’s analysis concluded that not only was Karl’s gecko a new species, but it was so anatomically different that it warranted its own genus: Anarbylus, a latin term meaning “without shoes” and a reference to the lizards’ unique toes. In October of that same year, the world was introduced to Switaki’s Barefoot Gecko (Anarbylus switaki).
A specimen secured at an unknown time by Charles Shaw of the San Diego Zoo from near Borrego Springs was published just a year later in 1975 and was the first evidence of the species’ presence in the United States though it wasn’t officially recognized until 1982 when Fritts et. al. reported multiple records for San Diego and Imperial Counties. The decades that followed would produce multiple specimens along much of the northern half of the Peninsular Range and the species, though secretive, is now relatively well known.
The specimen shown here was photographed by the HERP.MX Field Team during a fall trip to Baja California.