Confirming the presence of a fourth species of non-native house gecko of the genus Hemidactylus Oken, 1817 (Squamata, Gekkonidae) in Colombia

Abstract

The Indo-Pacific Gecko, Hemidactylus garnotii Duméril & Bibron, 1836, is a species of house gecko native to Southeast Asia and Pacific Islands. As with many of its congeners, this gecko species has been accidentally introduced to other parts of the world. In January 2018, several photographs of “H. frenatus” from Colombia posted in iNaturalist.org, were noticed to have some morphological features related to H. garnotii. This discrepancy led us to inspect museum specimens and to confirm the presence of H. garnotii for more than a decade in Colombia.