Common wall gecko
Tarentola mauritanica
— Where the name comes from
Tarentola comes from “tarantula”, and the loan records a confusion: in southern Italy the same name covered the spider of Taranto and this animal, both wrongly held to be venomous. Mauritanica is not today’s Mauritania but Roman Mauretania, that is Morocco and northern Algeria. Around half the Mediterranean it is the animal of summer evenings around the street lamps.
— Facts
- Group
- Reptiles · Reptilia
- Order
- Squamates
- Habitat
- Walls, ruins, trunks, sunlit rocks, houses
- Range
- The Mediterranean basin; introduced to the Americas and Asia
- Size
- 12–15 cm including the tail, 5–10 g
- Diet
- Moths, mosquitoes, spiders, beetles
- Lifespan
- 8 years
— Characteristics
- 01
It walks across ceilings and vertical glass without slowing down.
- 02
It gives a dry click to defend its territory against other males.
- 03
The shed tail keeps moving for minutes, distracting the predator.
— What sets it apart
It does not stick with glue or with suckers: it sticks with physics. Each toe carries lamellae covered in half a million setae, and each seta splits into hundreds of spatulas two hundred nanometres wide; at that scale van der Waals forces come into play — the very weak attraction between nearby molecules — which multiplied across billions of contact points holds many times the animal’s weight. A gecko could hang from glass by one toe, and to let go it has to curl its toes backwards.
