By Susan Milius
From Boise, Idaho, at a meeting of the Animal Behavior Society
The smell of one invading species of gecko has a mysterious influence on the activity of the defending species, but the voodoo doesn’t work on first exposure, reports a researcher in Hawaii.
The Hawaiian Islands and many other islands in the Pacific Ocean have long been home to Lepidodactylus lugubris, a species of unisexual lizards. These geckos, which are effective colonizers, probably reached Hawaii with the Polynesians. As more people moved around the Pacific during World War II, a bigger species (Hemidactylus frenatus) that has two sexes started spreading. When H. frenatus arrives on an island, the population of the unisexual species plummets. Susan Brown, a biologist at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, wonders why.