How a Gecko From Africa Crossed the Atlantic Ocean

The African house gecko, one of the most widely distributed invasive reptiles in the world, may have moved with the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

If you see a gecko scampering up the side of a house in Florida or somewhere in Central or South America closer to the Equator, there is good chance it is an African house gecko, Hemidactylus mabouia. Little and brown, the African house gecko is now widespread in the Western Hemisphere. But the gecko originated in southeastern Africa, from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and nearby areas. So how did it cross an ocean and come here? In a paper published on Wednesday in Royal Society Open Science, researchers have reconstructed the evolutionary history of H. mabouia, revealing it to be a diverse collection of closely related species that include as many as 20 lineages across Africa. They show that only a single lineage — Hemidactylus mabouia sensu stricto — was able to spread successfully throughout Central and West Africa as well as in the Americas.