How a western banded gecko eats a scorpion
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Loading... - Henry Williams
- 11 Apr 2022
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Western banded geckos don’t look like they’d win in a fight. Yet this unassuming predator dines on venomous scorpions, and a field study published in the March Biological Journal of the Linnean Society shows how the lizards take down such perilous prey.
Geckos bite the scorpion and thrash their heads and upper bodies back and forth, body-slamming the scorpion against the ground, new high-speed video reveals. “The behavior is so fast that you can’t see what’s actually happening,” says San Diego State University biologist Rulon Clark. “[You] see the gecko lunge and then see this crazy blur of motion … like trying to watch the wings of a hummingbird.”
Clark first noticed the behavior in the 1990s, during undergraduate fieldwork in the Sonoran Desert near Yuma, Ariz. When he returned with colleagues to study kangaroo rats and rattlesnakes, the team filmed geckos as well. The researchers captured western banded geckos (Coleonyx variegatus) and dune scorpions (Smeringurus mesaensis) in the desert at night (along with harmless arthropods, like field crickets and sand roaches, to compare), and documented the showdowns.
Normal gecko feeding behavior usually involves lunging out, grabbing prey with their mouth, and chomping it, says Clark. With scorpions, it’s totally different after the initial lunge. Such shake feeding is a known method for carnivores and adventurous eaters. For instance, dolphins shake (and toss) octopuses before eating. Read More...
