How predators get past the trickiest of defenses

When a western banded gecko wants to eat a defenseless cricket or worm, it just gulps it down. “Pretty boring,” says Malachi Whitford, an ecologist at Clovis Community College, in California. But if the same gecko goes after more dangerous prey, such as a dune scorpion, it uses a different strategy: It contorts its body as if building up spring-like tension before lunging at the arachnid, Whitford says. Then, as soon as it bites down, the lizard begins thrashing around like a concertgoer in a mosh pit. “Watching it with the naked eye, it almost looks like the gecko has some sort of medical problem,” says Whitford, who led a study describing the new behavior in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. “It’s just so fast and so violent.”