Sir

Being a herpetologist, I am excited to see a reptile or amphibian prominently displayed on the cover of Nature. Such was the case with the 19 July 2007 cover, featuring a Leopard Gecko (Eublepharis macularius) clinging to a mussel.

My excitement was tempered, however, when I realized that the wrong species of gecko had been used to draw readers' attention to a Letter describing a new reversible wet/dry adhesive (H. Lee, B. P. Lee and P. B. Messersmith Nature 448, 338–341; 2007).

This “hybrid biologically inspired adhesive” was developed by combining the adhesive properties of microscopic gecko-footpad hairs with wet adhesive proteins found in mussels. The large size of the Tokay Gecko (Gekko gecko) has made this species a model organism for most studies detailing the adhesive properties of the microscopic footpad setae in geckos. However, not all geckos are created equal. One clade of geckos, the Eublepharidae, lack these keratinous hairs (G. Underwood Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond. 124, 469–492; 1954) and, unfortunately, the Leopard Gecko used on the cover is a eublepharid.

The technological advances of this adhesive research were only possible following detailed descriptions of gecko and mussel morphology and physiology. This seemingly trivial case of transposed taxa on the Nature cover emphasizes the need for all of us to have a much better grasp of the biology and natural history of the animals we work with, rather than of a small portion, or in this case, a toe.