OLD TRICKS
In the year that man first set foot on the moon, a small brown gecko was born on Motunau Island in North Canterbury. This gecko, now known as Helen Houdini, was captured and individually marked by a young scientist in 1973, seen again in 1975, and then vanished.
Over the decades, scientists returned to the predator-free island to study the population of marked Waitaha geckos, recording their ages and population trends — at least of the ones they could find. Helen was
