This species is captured as bycatch, but does not appear to be threatened by fishery activities at present and has been assessed as Least Concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

[2] The first known specimen of the gecko catshark, a 35 cm (14 in) long female caught off the Izu Peninsula of Japan, was presented to American ichthyologists David Starr Jordan and John Otterbein Snyder by Alan Owston, a shipmaster from Yokohama.

Jordan and Snyder described the species as Pristiurus eastmani in a 1904 volume of the scientific journal Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections.

[4] A 2005 phylogenetic analysis, based on mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, found that this species, G. gracilis, and G. sauteri form a clade apart from G. melastomus and G.

[5] The range of the gecko catshark extends from southern Japan, where it occurs off the Shizuoka and Mie Prefectures of Honshu and the main islands of Shikoku and Kyushu, to the East China Sea including Taiwan.

The eyes are large and horizontally oval, with rudimentary nictitating membranes (protective third eyelids) and indistinct ridges underneath.

The skin is covered by small, overlapping dermal denticles; each has a leaf-shaped crown with a horizontal ridge and three marginal teeth.

[4][6] One study in Suruga Bay recorded females with large yolked ova inside the ovary year-round, but females in the western part of the bay were only found to carry egg cases from October to January, suggesting that the interval between egg depositions is shorter at that time.

As the gecko catshark remains common off Japan and may be protected from fishing in the deeper parts of its range, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has assessed it as of Least Concern.