Scientists unveiled that some desert geckos from the Arabian Peninsula have a brilliant neon green glow under the moonlight, reported CNN.
Reason of the Glow
The reason behind this mechanism is the skin pigment cells that make them glow under the moonlight, according to a study published in Scientific Reports.
These geckos have prominent skin fluorescence only previously seen in geckos in the sprawling Namibia desert of Africa.
The function of the fluorescence is to enable the reptiles to see and meet other members of the same species.
“One night we were looking with the UV light, and we saw that actually these desert geckos were fluorescing. It was very surprising for us,” Dr Bernat Burriel-Carranza, of the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona and the first author of the study, said.
Humans can see the fluorescence of the geckos only by using UV lamps.
However, it is probably visible to geckos without UV illumination because their eyes detect light.
“As soon as we saw this fluorescence, we realized that the web-footed geckos must use a new mechanism. The bright, neon-green fluorescence patterns were clearly produced in the skin of the lizards,” said, David Prötzel, Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich in Germany.
Researchers found these dazzling geckos during a field trip to a desert area of Sharjah in the UAE in June 2022.
Subsequently, they observed these glowing geckos at Al-Ula region in Saudi Arabia in April 2023.
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