Mo’o in the Vanillery

I see a lot of these guys in the vanillery. It must be a great envi­ron­ment for them, a mil­lion places to hide and hunt, with con­ve­nient walk­ways so you nev­er have to touch the ground. Mo’o is the Hawaiian word for lizard or reptile…it gets a lot of use since geck­os are so com­mon here.

Mostly the ones I see in the vanillery are the green anoles. They look like tiny drag­ons, and they have a lot of personality…certainly when com­pared to a gecko! Their typ­i­cal green col­or match­es the vanil­la foliage per­fect­ly. They can change col­or, so they’re often referred to as “chameleons” and though they do have eye­lids that are a bit like them, they aren’t chameleons.

I came across this one, stand­ing out quite obvi­ous­ly because he was a very dark brown col­or. He was look­ing at me defi­ant­ly, so I snapped a few shots. Later he showed me his impres­sive dewlap. I think he was try­ing to scare me.

This oth­er guy is a less com­mon sight in the vanillery, the gold dust day gecko blends in pret­ty good, despite some stun­ning col­or and over­all bejew­eled effect. (we jok­ing­ly call them “gay deck­os”) These ones have been slow­ly tak­ing over from the typ­i­cal lit­tle brown geck­os we’ve always had. I’m pret­ty sure these day geck­os are more aggres­sive and so have been edg­ing out the orig­i­nal population…seems like we see more and more of them every year. For some rea­son the vanillery is not a usu­al place to see them. These guys love fruit, so instead we see them in the bananas and where we bring in our fruit from the yard.