Live-bearing lizards

Transcript

ASSOC PROF ALISON CREE What makes New Zealand geckos special is that they’re live-bearing lizards, so unlike almost all geckos elsewhere in the world – and here I'm talking about the, sort of, 950 other species of geckos in the world – almost all, all but one of those is an egg-laying lizard. All our geckos in New Zealand are live-bearing. They do not lay eggs. Instead, the embryos develop inside the mother, and so the mother plays a very important role in carrying her embryos around, and it turns out to be for very long periods. New Zealand Geckos have adapted to living in cold climates and particularly down here in the South we find that some of them have pregnancies that last over a year.

Acknowledgement: University of Waikato