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I've loved animals ever since I can remember. When I was 10, I got my first gecko and it was just the coolest thing. I just started acquiring more and more, started collecting them. And I just love curating their ecosystems, learning more about them. Eventually, I outgrew my apartment bedroom and I decided to get a facility and it just took off from there. My name is Joseph Megerell and I am the co-founder of the Gecko Gallery NYC. The Gecko Gallery is a facility based on conservation. We have over 250 animals here, roughly about 60 species, most of which are endangered. This is the electric blue day gecko. This one is from Tanzania.
Their native range is smaller than the size of Central Park at this point, which just goes to show how important the conservation of animals like this is. We actively breed and produce these animals. So, here you can actually see eggs and babies as well as the parents and other animals we have here. We'll kind of lift this food ledge right here. If we look back here, we have the largest animal at the Gecko Gallery NYC.
This is the monkey-tailed skink. These guys are from the Solomon Islands. They are the largest skink species in the world and skinks are just another suborder of lizards, just like geckos are. Gecko is just a suborder of lizards, but they're one of the most primitive branches of lizards, evolving hundreds of millions of years ago. Uh that makes them really unique in the realm of lizards because they're so primitive. So, this guy is the infamous giant day gecko and they're very recognizable because they are what the Geico gecko is actually based off of. Oh, so many things are interesting about geckos. I mean, they're the only lizards that can vocalize through vocal cords.
They have toe pads, which lets them climb up walls and ceilings without effort. We see one of our resident uh giant leaf-tailed geckos of Madagascar. Now, these animals are bark mimicking animals. You could tell because of their flat like tail. They also have frills on the edges of their body that will fold over bark to omit any shadow that they would otherwise produce. And you'll notice their eyes are open. They're actually asleep. Most geckos don't have eyelids. Instead they have a clear scale protecting their eye over their eye that they will lick like windshield wipers to clean. But they are fast asleep. There are hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of species of these animals, but there are new ones being discovered to this day which I find
super fascinating as well. If we look in this enclosure we have the Australian leaf tailed geckos, completely unrelated from the Madagascan ones. If you look over here, that's actually his tail on the bark. He's probably one that most of our guests completely miss if we don't point them out. Geckos are found on every continent except Antarctica. So we have a lot of animals from Madagascar and Asia and Africa um and just some Caribbean animals as well here. Geckos are important for a variety of reasons. They're just part of the ecosystem. They're part of the food chain. Uh they're food for other predators and that's important. But then aside from that, many geckos control insect populations
and other invertebrate populations. And even more geckos are actually seed dispersers and pollinators and they're responsible for planting trees and fruits and other plants in their ecosystems. And we're over 20 to 25% of all reptiles including geckos are facing um endangerment extinction. Even more of those are moving closer towards being threatened now. This is happening all across the world because geckos are really good at what they do, but they suck at everything else. So naturally they're from very limited ranges. And so one forest fire, one deforestation event just takes an entire species out.
One question we get is do we bring these animals back to the wild? And the answer is unfortunately many cases there's just no wild for these animals to go back to. Um but even where there is, our focus is currently on breeding and sustaining these populations, making sure they're genetically stable and healthy. And then other peers of ours and colleagues of ours then are responsible for then utilizing those populations to eventually rehabilitate wild populations down the line. I think one thing that really entertains people, so to speak, is that they have personalities. So, this is Blue Bean. This is a Sri Lankan agama species, and this guy is actually one of our ambassador animals for good reason. Uh very comfortable
with people. We raised him since he was very young, and so he'll often actually sit uh kind of at the front of our exhibit, and he'll wait for guests. Um these guys are endangered from one mountain range in Sri Lanka. So, we're working very hard to work to produce these animals. We have several individuals of the species, so we're lucky to have those. Even though we love geckos and we talk about their conservation, they're just one uh form in which we can protect small animals. Uh so many people focus on the larger animals like the whales, the rhinos, the tigers. Uh people often forget about the smaller animals in the world and how important they are. And so, I think that if we can encourage people to see the
individuality and importance of these animals, uh we could just encourage open-heartedness towards smaller animals as a whole. For years, one of my questions to myself was how can I take my love for animals and spread that and expand that? And I think that I finally found the way to do that in the form of the Gecko Gallery NYC. Especially in a place like Brooklyn, uh it's hard to find such kind of slices of nature like this. So, we're happy to be providing that for the people here.
