Long-term Functional Sperm Storage by a Female Common House Gecko, Hemidactylus frenatus, from the Ryukyu Archipelago, Japan

Abstract

A female Hemidactylus frenatus, collected on 7 June 2004 and housed alone in a cage, produced a total of six clutches, each consisting of one or two eggs, until 24 June 2005. All eggs but one, including the one egg composing the last clutch, hatched to produce hatchlings that included a male. This indicates that females of this broadly distributed gecko can store functional sperms for more than one year. Such ability may have played an important role in the colonization by this gecko of tropical and particularly subtropical regions of Asia and the Pacific islands.