Researchers use tiny radio backpacks to track elusive gecko species

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Northern striped gecko.

Photo: Supplied/Sara Smerdon

Researchers are using tiny backpacks to keep track of New Zealand's most elusive gecko species.

The northern striped gecko live on Coromandel Peninsula and are so skilled at camouflage, they weren't discovered until 1997.

University of Otago zoologist Dr Jo Monks and masters student Harriet Wills have tracked them for the past few months, by attaching small radio transmitters to their backs.

"The goal was to really try and figure out objectively how these elusive northern striped geckos are using habitat, and therefore unlock a bit of their ecology, with some insights into management," Dr Monks said. "They camouflage extremely well with their environment and they're pretty cryptic in the way they behave.

"Particularly the extent of their distribution is one of the remaining mysteries. We're scratching the surface of understanding their ecology."

The researchers had attached tiny radio transmitters to the geckos as a way to keep track of their movements.

Northern striped gecko are skilled at camouflage.

Photo: Supplied/Sara Smerdon

"There's a tiny little radio transmitter that sits inside what kind of looks like a backpack, wrapped self-adhesive tape and we make a little harness out of it," Monks explained.

They discovered the gecko had used their camouflage to hide under foliage and in trees throughout the forests of the Coromandel Peninsula.

"We've found they use habitat in a way we previously didn't have insight into," she said. "If they're close to a forest edge during the day, they are pretty much hiding under leaf litter and that's somewhere we could never find them before.

"They're moving well into the forest and what they do when they're up in the dense forest is they spend a lot more time in the canopy, probably to gain the warmth of the sun.

"This really gives us some evidence that they're a lot more widely distributed across the Coromandel than where they've currently been found, which is only from a few locations."

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