Rishi Valley Rock Gecko
On 24th July as we were watching birds, we came across this little gecko resting on the underside of a piece of loose rock close to the scrub jungles on the hill adjacent to the school campus. Instead of running away, the gecko took refuge under my shoe and after remaining still for a while, I slowly took out my camera, moved my leg and shot some photographs. I then sent the pictures to Ishan Agarwal, a former student of RV and an authority on geckos in India. He immediately responded and said this was the Rishi Valley Rock Gecko (Hemidactylus rishivalleyensis), a new species described by himself and his colleagues in 2020!
Apart from Rishi Valley, Ishan and colleagues have reported this species from the environs of Kaiwara, Chickballapur District, Karnataka; near Vellore, Vellore District, Tamil Nadu and Yelagiri, Tirupattur District, Tamil Nadu. According to their observations: : “The species has been observed on granite boulders at night and in crevices in the daytime. The species appears chiefly nocturnal and strongly rupicolous. Sympatric geckos at the type locality include Cnemaspis graniticola, C. rishivalleyensis sp. nov., Hemidactylus giganteus, H. triedrus, H. frenatus, H. Leschenaultii.”
Rishi Valley seems to be a biodiversity hotspot for geckos. In the paper cited below, the authors mention that “Four endemic geckos now have their type localities within 10 km of each other, Cnemaspis graniticola and Cyrtodactylus rishivalleyensis from Horsley Hills and the two new species from Rishi Valley” (viz. Cnemaspis rishivalleyensis and Hemidactylus rishivalleyensis).
Reference:
Ishan Agarwal, Tejas Thackeray and Akshay Khandekar. 2020. Geckos in the Granite: Two New Geckos (Squamata: Gekkonidae) from Rocky, Scrub Habitats in Rishi Valley, Andhra Pradesh, India. Zootaxa. 4838(4); 451–474. DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.4838.4.1
- V. Santharam