Repeated origin and loss of adhesive toepads in geckos

Geckos are well known for their extraordinary clinging abilities and many species easily scale vertical or even inverted surfaces. This ability is enabled by a complex digital adhesive mechanism (adhesive toepads) that employs van der Waals based adhesion, augmented by frictional forces. Numerous mo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2012-06, Vol.7 (6), p.e39429-e39429
Main Authors: Gamble, Tony, Greenbaum, Eli, Jackman, Todd R, Russell, Anthony P, Bauer, Aaron M
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adhesiveness
Adhesives
Animals
Biological Evolution
Biology
Ecology
Evolution
Geckos
Gekkonidae
Gekkota
Hypotheses
Lizards
Lizards - anatomy & histology
Lizards - physiology
Morphology
Pachydactylus
Phylogenetics
Phylogeny
Toes - anatomy & histology
Toes - physiology
Zoology
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Summary:Geckos are well known for their extraordinary clinging abilities and many species easily scale vertical or even inverted surfaces. This ability is enabled by a complex digital adhesive mechanism (adhesive toepads) that employs van der Waals based adhesion, augmented by frictional forces. Numerous morphological traits and behaviors have evolved to facilitate deployment of the adhesive mechanism, maximize adhesive force and enable release from the substrate. The complex digital morphologies that result allow geckos to interact with their environment in a novel fashion quite differently from most other lizards. Details of toepad morphology suggest multiple gains and losses of the adhesive mechanism, but lack of a comprehensive phylogeny has hindered efforts to determine how frequently adhesive toepads have been gained and lost. Here we present a multigene phylogeny of geckos, including 107 of 118 recognized genera, and determine that adhesive toepads have been gained and lost multiple times, and remarkably, with approximately equal frequency. The most likely hypothesis suggests that adhesive toepads evolved 11 times and were lost nine times. The overall external morphology of the toepad is strikingly similar in many lineages in which it is independently derived, but lineage-specific differences are evident, particularly regarding internal anatomy, with unique morphological patterns defining each independent derivation.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0039429