Rosa de Aguir's Seipp’s Day Gecko

For our animal pinch pot project, I chose the Seipp’s day gecko, a gecko native to the bamboo forests of northern Madagascar. In these forests, the SDG lives a treacherous life, since the bamboo forests have become extremely fragmented from deforestation.

This makes it difficult for the species to be one coherent group, and unfortunately the deforestation also has destroyed much of the SDG’s food sources. The SDG is currently under the Endangered classification of the IUCN Red List, due to the aforementioned deforestation and lack of food sources. I chose to research and model my pot after the SDG because I have always had an affinity for reptiles, and the gecko photographed for the Photo Ark project drew me in with how expressive it seemed to be. In addition, when I actually began researching it, there was so little information on the gecko itself that I figured it should have more people advocating for it. There, unfortunately, isn’t too much that the average person can do for the Seipp’s Day Gecko, since it largely comes down to corporations that are deforesting Madagascar. However, you can try to refrain from buying bamboo products if you see that the bamboo it was made from comes from Madagascar. My favorite part of the project was poring over the details of the gecko and trying to get them all right, and coming up with solutions, like Ms. Grunstein essentially inventing a new tool for me to get the scales on my gecko to look right. The most challenging part was getting its legs right as the real SDG has very thin legs and wide toes, which is difficult to replicate when you’re trying to get a heavy ceramic pot to be supported by these legs and not have them literally crack under the pressure. Unfortunately, this did mean that my gecko’s legs were a bit chunkier than they should be, but the toes look right! It’s our duty as humans and the primary destructors of our earth to keep other species alive and in good standing, whether or not they are helpful to us as humans. Don’t make scientists find a way for an endangered animal to be “useful” to us for you to care about it, when that animal deserves to exist even if it’s entirely UNHELPFUL to humans. The Seipp’s day gecko deserves to exist in its bamboo forests of Madagascar without fear of its species dying out, and the same goes for all of the other animals researched in this project.

References Encyclopedia of Life. (2019). Seipp's day gecko. Encyclopedia of Life. Retrieved January 11, 2022, from https://eol.org/pages/791139 National Geographic. (2018). Photo Ark Home Endangered Seipp's Day Gecko. National Geographic Society. Retrieved January 11, 2022, from https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/photo-ark/animal/phelsuma-seippi/