Special ‘Guest’---稀客

From the back of the house my mother screamed for help. My brother and I rushed there and found this special ‘guest’ on the window’s door. It’s the first time ever I’ve seen this kind of creature. My mother told me that it’s called ‘Tok Ke’ in Khmer, and she is very afraid of it because of its disgusting look. I didn’t know how it is called in either English or Chinese; therefore, soon after that I checked on the internet to know more about it.

According to Baidu Baike（百度百科）, this little creature is normally called ‘Tokay Gecko’ in English and 大壁虎in Chinese. It’s also name in other ways such as 蛤(gé)蚧(jiè)，仙蟾(cán)，多格，蛤蟹，蛤蚧蛇and so on. It’s biggest kind of geckos, body length 12-16cm, tail length 10-14cm, and weight 50-100g.

It looks just like a gecko（壁虎）; however, it has got a bigger triangle head which is like that a toad’s head and big protruding eyes. It’s got a very big mouth and tiny teeth on both upper and lower jaws. Its skin is absolutely rough; we can see small roundish things all over its body. This creature varies in colors; basically, it’s in black, black brown, gray brown, dark grey, blue gray, red gray, black green, green blue, etc. It’s got stripes on its back. There are also six to seven horizontal rows of dots in white or red color on its head.
Tokay gecko likes living in between rocks, rock’s role or tree’s holes; sometimes it also stays on the balcony or wall in human’s house. Its hearing ability is very strong, but in daytime its visual ability is very weak. Being afraid of the light, it opens its eyes as small as possible in a small vertical line. It looks for food at night when it can open its eyes four times bigger than it can in daytime. It’s got a flexible tongue which it uses to catch preys which mainly are insects such as cockroaches, dragonflies, crickets, moth, ground beetle, and locust; however, once in a while, it also eats other lizards and small birds.