The type species of the genus was not nominated by the author, but this was assigned to Ablepharus poecilipleurus Wiegmann, 1834 in a revision by Leonhard Stejneger published in 1899.

Females may share a site to deposit their eggs, the species returning annually to lay a small clutch.

The species may be locally common to abundant, in numbers up to twenty or thirty at a cliff, rock pile or other favoured site.

The ability to occupy vertical environs is favoured by the fences and brick walls of urbanisation, where clusters of eggs have also occasionally been discovered within the cavities, and glimpses of them basking in the sun are frequently made before they rapidly flee any disturbance.

[7] A revision of Australasian species, published in two papers in 2007, compared morphological and molecular phylogenies and concluded that there was unrecognised diversity within the genus.

[8] The author, Paul Horner of the Northern Territory Museum, published revised systematics that sampled widely distributed populations in the Australian region, with small samples of taxa from other regions, to identify twenty five taxa in Australia, another thirteen in the southwest of the Indian oceanic area, and a further twenty four in the Indo-Pacific, listing 62 taxonomic descriptions of the genus in total.