I love these little guys! One summer, in El Paso, one got in the house. They like to pretend to be scorpions to scare off predators, and Nova is a major scorpion killer. Once he realized it wasn't a scorpion (after breaking the tail off and bruising the little guy up a lot) he instead brought it to me as a present (like he did with the rare cricket, or other weird bugs that would come into the house). Despite having a fight with an 18lb Maine Coon mix, that gecko survived!
That summer our house had a small gecko infestation. And I loved every minute of it. Usually our house was overrun with fire ants, and they would seek me out, even in bed, and string the hell out of me. (I was able to determine that they were attracted to my heart medication for some weird reason, and it mad them angry.)
The geckos got the fire ants under control.
We only had a window AC unit in our bedroom, which is also where the ants liked to be, because it was cold in there. It was commonplace to look over at Nova or one of the other cats and to see geckos sleeping snuggled up to the warm kitties. I woke up with them snuggled up to me a few times, too! They also loved sleeping on and around the cable box, the gaming consoles, and my laptop, because they were all nice and warm.
Just about everyone else in our neighborhood seemed to dislike the house geckos. But they kept me (I was getting hundreds of fire ant stings a day) much safer, more comfortable, and also helped keep the ants off the cats, too.
It became normal to walk by Nova and see a gecko or two on top of his head or on his back. I started calling him the King of the Geckos.
I really miss all the lizards we had in S.C. Not that many lol, but I would see 20 a day most days. ours were green and some were a flat brown and we had 5 lined skinks that @papa-pepper just did a post about. those were my favorite.
What a cool story! I really like having them around, as i did in New Orleans. Some people actually spray insect killer on them, which I think is terrible.
It's definitely terrible!
In El Paso, kids would catch them in jars, shake the jars really hard to 'play' with them, and then leave the jars out in the hot sun for the poor little geckos to boil to death. (The sun in El Paso was intense even on cool days.
Some kids would fill the jars with water to see what the geckos to do. It was horrible. I rescued as many as I could, but I wasn't able to save many.
I hear kids and people in Florida are the same way with all the anoles.