“We get more bites from the tokay than from any other lizard” during daily maintenance in Lizards and the Komodo King special exhibit, Clark says. “He’ll charge anything. And he has a strong bite. He draws blood.”
Despite that, tokays represent one side of one of the few mutually beneficial relationships between reptiles and humans.
In their native Southeast Asia, the foot-long lizards’ primary habitat is in and around houses, where their voracious appetites make them super-efficient exterminators of crickets, cockroaches, small rodents and even other gecko species. Once a tokay sets up housekeeping in a nook or cranny of the house, however, it will defend its space aggressively against trespassers, including the homeowner.
Happily, tokays are nocturnal, so a time-share arrangement usually works out.
