Critically Endangered
As you can probably imagine because of the bright blue colour, these are popular in the pet trade. They are also known as the Electric Blue Gecko and the Turquoise Dwarf Gecko. Often, sadly, wild ones are caught and sold as captive bred. They are not easy to breed in captivity it seems. Interestingly, what I learned while researching them, the temperature the eggs develop in determines the sex of the gecko. Apparently they tend to lay their eggs up higher, near the heat source, which means that most captive bred babies are male. It is rather shocking, but their wild population numbers went down by 15% or more over a 4 year stretch purely because of illegal pet trade. It is worse too than just finding a gecko wandering around or trapping them. In order to collect them the person cuts down a screwpine tree. Each tree generally would only contain one gecko as they are territorial. That means by collecting a single gecko, a whole tree is also destroyed, contributing in a large scale to the loss of habitat. The pet trade isn't their only threat though, there is mining, illegal logging, and at least one invasive tree threatening their screwpine trees. Only the dominant males are bright blue. The submissive males, females, and juveniles are a greenish gold to copper colour, though the males may be a more pale and dull blue. All of them have a yellow-orange ventral side though, or at least according to written descriptions, some of the photos I saw did not seem to show that. They live in a small area of Tanzania.
I don't like to say "as I get older" because I am still 28 and have been for years. Still, as I get older I've been finding I like sugar less and less. I don't know if that is a normal thing or not. I still love a good dark chocolate, but if I was offered a choice between what I'm craving right now which is this vegan bacon chipotle cashew dip thing. I think it is supposed to be a cheese substitute. It isn't really good as a fake cheese, but the vegans and non-vegans that I know who have tried it (when not expecting it to be like a cheese) absolutely love it. Alright, I'm not sure any of them liked it as much as I do. I absolutely adore the stuff. It is spicy, but not too much so, and most of the people in our family who have a hard time with spicy still like it. It has a faint bacon-y type flavour. I just like how creamy it is, and the depth of flavour it has. I really don't want to go to the only store in the area that has it right now. It is late enough, the store is half an hour away, and I'm feeling a bit on the lazy side at the moment. I am really really hoping I get some good sleep tonight because I am just beyond tired.
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