Hemidactylus persicus Anderson, 1872

HOLOTYPE. ZSI 5961.

TYPE LOCALITY. Originally Persia; restricted to Shiraz, Fars Prov. by Smith (1935).

DISTRIBUTION. Countries by the Persian Gulf—from Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, Iran to Pakistan and India.

DISTRIBUTION IN IRAN. Fig. 45. About 300 km wide belt along the Persian Gulf coast in Ilam, Lorestan, Khuzestan, Fars, Bushehr, Hormozgan, and Sistan and Baluchistan Prov .

HABITAT. Inhabits trees, rocks and building wall in xerophytic areas. Anderson (1999) collected his specimens at night on surfaced roads. In Qatar found on the ground under wood, rocks and dry leaves (Castilla et al. 2013).

REMARKS. Deep intraspecific diversification within Iranian specimens of H. persicus (Šmíd et al. 2013a) and its close relation with an unidentified species from NW India (Bauer et al. 2010) indicate that H. persicus forms a complex of several cryptic species that needs to be revised with material from other parts of the species’ distribution.

REFERENCES. Anderson (1999); Gholamifard & Rastegar-Pouyani (2011); Heidari et al. (2011); Šmíd et al. (2013a).