Eye of the Gecko
The evening becomes the night upon the first step under the canopy. The forest closes up like a street vendor stall, and vines criss-cross between the vastness between trunks. Headlamps throw a dim understanding against the nearest trees, but they do not go far. Luckily life presses right up against the trail. Walkers are rare finds in a forest of hoppers, shimmyers, perchers, beguilers, and flutterers.
Songbirds dwarfed by beacon-eyed moths huddle together: asleep on the thinnest of branches. Chameleons too, sleep from the ends of twigs, stock still in diorama poses. Mosquitoes crowd around their clamped shut mouths. The lizards don’t move when poked, except to crack open and swivel an indignant eye.
And on the white trees along the path, the bark begins to unstick and grow eyes.
Leaf tailed gecko
Our guide found the first leaf-tailed gecko. It was moving up a tree, in hot pursuit of dinner (breakfast?) when its white eyes were caught by the light. Of course, I’ve seen camouflaged animals before. Mama rabbits tucked into dry grass. A nightjar disguised as a rock on a wall. And the famous chameleons. But the leaf-tailed gecko makes other animals look like total poseurs.
Their strategy features several complimenting parts. First, of course, is the coloration, which splotches the exact same way as tree bark. Next comes the eyes. Like other members of the gecko family, leaf tailed geckos don’t have eyelids, and they actually lick their corneas to keep them moist. And what corneas! To match their skin, their eyes kaleidoscope with licheny flecks.
But the most important part of their camouflage is their jagged skin flaps. To find chameleons, Gene and I have learned to look for chameleon shaped lumps on branches. But that strategy fails with leaf tailed geckos because they have no solid outline. The best way to find them is at night, when they clamp their little pads to the tree and march up and down, looking for food.
Spot the gecko!
The guides here make most of their money showing around wealthy tourists. So, they have every motivation to spot and identify wildlife while out walking. The slightest glimmer at the top of the tree? Dwarf lemur eyes. A rustle in the bushes? Forest rat. Suspicious shape clinging to a bamboo stalk? Tree frog. On our night walk, the rate of discoveries was so rapid that I began to get impatient when we had gone more than five minutes without seeing something cool.
The guides of course, have anticipated this issue.
“Here, a medicinal plant!”
“These markings on the tree are from lemur claws!”
“Who knows what this is?”
I raised my hand.
“Um, that’s moss.”
“Great job!”
Clearly the knowledge expectations for visitors were a bit low, but I went along with it. I was there for the full rainforest experience, and at night all the critters were out. Our first visitor was a Scopes Eastern Rainforest Owl. I’m not sure who “Scopes” was, but I think he could’ve come up with a cuter name for an owl that could comfortably rest in a coffee mug.
Owl/Hibou/Vorondolo
The one thing I will say about the rainforest that did not reach expectations was the lighting. Like most people, my only prior experience with rainforests was BBC nature documentaries. Naturally, I expected some excellent lighting: sunlight beaming down through uncountable layers of bright green leaves, or else a mystical mist creeping along the ground. To my mild dismay, sunlight is not a higher quality here than it is in the US, and most days were blandly overcast.
A nice bit of sunlight in the jungle
The BBC must have chosen their filming times well, and they have filmed right where I was walking. Mostly, I think, they filmed the huge Indri Indri lemurs, but also two insect species of particular delight to me.
The Darwin’s spider weaves the longest webs out of any spider on earth. This chunky gray spider will fling herself into the breeze, tethered by a strand of silk, to hope to land across the river. Seeing long strands of silk across the rivers seemed normal until I stopped and thought about it. The physics of the filament is beyond me, but I encourage you to look up David Attenborough’s thoughts on the matter.
The other insect was the Borera Lava Tenda in Malagasy, or “Giraffe weevil” in English. Another physics head scratcher, this time regarding the impossibly long neck. Ostensibly the male giraffe beetles battle with their long necks. Personally, I think they’re an adaptation to the conspicuous shortage of charismatic insect species. I’m an advocate for these handsome fellows to replace the panda on the WWF logo.
Borera Lava Tenda
The next day after our night walk, Gene had the audacity to say, “Why do we care about biodiversity?”
The room full of environmental studies students and professors exchanged eye contact for a second before launching into combat mode.
Gene quickly backtracked to say that he, personally, cared about biodiversity, but he was struggling to find a logical argument to support his view.
“Aren’t we just working against evolution?” He asked.
“Well, the more species that survive, the higher the chances that life will be adapted to whatever future conditions Earth changes to,” I responded.
“But who are we to predict how the Earth is going to change? It seems counterintuitive.”
Which is true. We don’t know. Yes, the climate is getting warmer thanks to human caused climate change. It might get colder again in 100,000 years. It might keep getting warmer until the rivers crack and the sky turns Martian red. And so logical arguments spin in circles, bouncing off the scraps of information that we know about life and where it’s going. Eventually, it funnels down into one question: Why do we care about life on Earth?
It’s a question that can’t be answered with tidy graphs and points and counter points. But in the eyes of the leaf-tailed gecko, where the tree patterns swirl into nebulas, the answer flashes for a second, before being wiped away by a sticky pink gecko tongue.