Critically Endangered
Southern Ghats slender gecko
Hemiphyllodactylus aurantiacus
Southern Ghats slender gecko is a gecko in the family Gekkonidae — Hemiphyllodactylus aurantiacus, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
Head oviform, longer than broad. Snout rounded, very convex, slightly shorter than, distance between eye and ear-opening, l.3 times the diameter of orbit; ear-opening very small, round. Back covered with very small granular scales, abdominal scales a little larger, flat, imbricate. Tail cylindrical, tapering, covered with small imbricated smooth scales, larger below.
From snout to vent 1.4 in (36 mm). Tail 1.25 in (32 mm).
Range and habitat
The type locality — the place tied to the name-bearing specimen — is "Shevaroys, under stones about Yercaud and elsewhere, at an elevation of 4,000 feet".
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Habits
Typical geckos hunt after dark on vertical surfaces. Day geckos in some genera are the exception — bright and diurnal.
In crisis
Southern Ghats slender gecko is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Southern Ghats slender gecko, Wikidata item Q3016394. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
