New gecko species discovered in Agasthyamalai hill range in Kanyakumari

THOOTHUKUDI: A new species of gecko has been discovered by biologists in the Agasthyamalai hill range of the southern Western Ghats in Kanyakumari district. Christened Cyrtodactylus aravindi , the species has been named after a Bengaluru-based malacologist Dr NA Aravind who is a Senior Fellow at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology (ATREE).

These nocturnal species were found at Muppandal near Aralvaimozhi pass and Thuckalay which are located 20 km from each other on the Agasthaymalai hill range. The study in this regard was published on August 19, 2022, and authored by Surya Narayanan, Sandeep Das, Amirtha Balan, Roshin Tom, Nitin Divakar, Rajkumar Kp, P Hopeland and V Deepak. It was published in Vertebrate Zoology, which is a German-based journal.

These geckos were first photographed by Hopeland at the Donavur fellowship campus in Muppandal in 2017, and later in 2021 by Roshin Tom at the rubber estate in Thuckalay in Kanyakumari.  There are at least 330 nominal species of geckos in the Cyrtodactylus genus and they are distributed largely in the south and southeast Asia as well as the Western Pacific Islands.