Mniarogekko chahoua

In 2021, an acquaintance of ours contacted us because he wanted to find a new home for one of his Mniarogekko chahoua. He sends us photos of his 2 couples and lets us choose one of the two (later the other couple also ended up in our facilities). Among the 4 photos he sends us, one of them is of Jalapeño, a male of M.chahoua mainland red base and with a unique feature, he had black eyes.

The eyes of M. chahoua are in our opinion the most beautiful of all New Caledonian geckos because of the complexity of the iris, which is usually silver-gray with dark brown veins and reddish tints. Gorgeous. But Jalapeno had black irises. Although the pupil is subtly visible under that dark color, the look is very striking.

We quickly began to think about the possibility that this is not an isolated trait and could be passed on to offspring. The offspring produced with Wasabi that year did not show any signs of dark eye. We sold most of them at 5-6 months, except for one. One of the animals that came out of that Jalapeño x Wasabi pair started at about 10 months to have something different in the eye. It was not as dark as the father's, but it was not the same as the siblings. Logically we kept him and followed his evolution very carefully. He turned out to be a male.

Alison, from Raw geckos in the UK, contacts us to tell us that she also has an animal with this unique characteristic, which is also male.

We will continue to update with any new discoveries we can make about this very special animal.