The Harry Lineage
Text & Photos by Anthony Caponetto
Harry - 2004. This guy was, by far, the shaggiest crested gecko I had ever seen.
This pinstripe/crest structure has slowly been bred into countless projects here, and slowly improved upon, over the past 20+ years.
The Harry Story
Harry is an incredibly unique (and now somewhat legendary) gecko that I acquired as a young adult back in 2003 or 2004, and the above photos were taken in September of 2004. This shaggy crest/pinstripe structure that once made him a total outlier is now seen, in varying degrees, in many collections throughout the hobby today.
I stumbled upon Harry at a reptile store (online) that I got some of my supplies from. As soon as I got him and saw this craziness in person, the plan became to introduce that structure into all of my projects as quickly as possible (which turned out to be not all that quickly).
Harry and his original breeding group of three females, including the original female Soft Scale, started off as a pet project that I always intended that I would build off of, if it worked out - something that's so long-term, you just have it for fun and you don't expect it to yield much in the way of results. To be honest, neither Harry or the OG Soft Scale had color I liked, so it was just a structure "play" that I kept in my back pocket as outcrossing material, figuring I'd have my fun and stay at it until the structure was represented throughout my collection.
20 years later, we're pretty much there (although not everything has that structure!) , good old Harry is still breeding, still with the same three females, his offspring have been sold to breeders all over the world and I am still making a point of breeding his shaggy/spiny structure into every project I can. :-)
Harry in 2004
Added 2024 - Genetic Basis
While I've mostly worked on the theory that this structure was selectively bred, a lot of that is just because I never expected it to be an allelic mutation, and so I never treated it as such. That being said, there is now work being done by other breeders who are working with Harry line Soft Scale geckos, and that work may indicate Harry's shaggy structure is the result of a genetic mutation, either incomplete dominant or recessive (same thing, just a matter of whether or not the heterozygous form is visually distinct). This is a newer development (2024), so I'm sure we'll hear more on this in the coming years.
