Occasionally you might be surprised to see redundant geckos or a frog running around this blog, perched enticingly on a headline or pointing to an ad. I thought I’d make a page about my reptile and amphibian flatmates, who sometimes escape their comfortable, humid and heated tanks, to sit on my walls or hide behind bookcases, or invade my blog! Right now I am accompanied in my redundant life by two species of day geckos (Phelsuma) and my faithful giant waxy monkey frog, Zoidberg.
I’ve used images of the frogs and geckos in my Zazzle store:
The first day geckos that arrived from dartfrog.com to share the flat with me were blue and yellow.. As you can see they have yellow heads, and a beautiful neon blue bar on the side of their little bodies. These turned out to be Phelsuma klemmeri from madagascar. A pair has set up a nest in an exoterra tank and regularly produces little gecko babies (which do help raise some money for the surviving redundancy project). The require a regularly feeding of crickets and are fanatical about fruit baby food.
Since my Finchley flat proved to be such a welcoming place for the klemmeri geckos, another species, phelsuma cepediana, an immigrant from Mauritius, moved in. First a female, and then a male came in and they too produce little cepediana geckos, at regular intervals.
Long before the geckos, Zoidberg, the giant waxy monkey tree frog took up habitat in a corner of my living room. Phyllomedusa bicolour belong to the waxy monkey family of tree frogs because they have hands that can grasp branches and climb trees like monkeys and because they spread a waxy secretion on their bodies to waterproof them, so they can sit out in the sun in their native Amazon forest without dehydrating. Unlike the day geckos, Zoidberg is nocturnal, spends his days sleeping on a branch and spends the nights catching crickets and trying to find a wife by emitting his very loud mating call into the cold night air of North London. So far his attempts to attract a companion female have been unsuccessfu