Sources said that most of the CHCs do not have anti-venom vaccine. As a result, doctors have to refer patients to district hospital. "If the course is not started timely, the patient dies a painful death within three hours of the bite," added.

In the last 24 hours, around four cases of snake-bite were reported from Akbarpur, Derapur and Rura areas. Soni, wife of Kallu of Nariha village, was admitted to the district hospital on Tuesday. The incident occurred while she had gone to fetch something inside her room on Tuesday evening. The doctors stated her condition to be critical.

[...]

A doctor at the CHC said that there is shortage of anti-venom vaccines and that they have been facing hardships while treating patients. "If not treated timely, the snake bite can be fatal" he said. The market price of an anti-snake venom is around Rs 1,000, it is given free of cost at the hospital to urban as well as rural patients.

On an average, two to three patients of snake-bite visit Kanpur Dehat district hospital daily. Since July, the doctors at most of the CHC's have been referring patients to district hospital.

The ecologist will carry tools including a stopwatch and oxygen meter as she seeks frog habitats, collects water samples and records the abundance of northern leopard frogs across a 90,000-square-kilometre area south of Drumheller.

Randall recently embarked on six weeks of summer field research as part of a study launched in 2009 by the Calgary Zoo’s Centre for Conservation Research.

Through intensive fieldwork and mathematical modelling, the six-year project aims to gain a better understanding of northern leopard frog population dynamics.

The handsome and charismatic spotted amphibian, which can grow to the size of a human fist, is considered a threatened species in Alberta and an endangered species in B.C., said Randall.

[...]

“People have advocated that amphibians act a bit like the canary in the coal mine. Whatever is affecting them now, as those changes become more drastic and abundant, they will affect other things,” Russell said.

Kris Kendell, a senior biologist with the Alberta Conservation Association, is the co-ordinator of the Alberta Volunteer Amphibian Monitoring Program, which encourages “an army of citizen scientists” to submit their observations.

Nicholas Hillier, 23, was arrested Saturday afternoon on charges of burglary of a residence and grand theft, Alachua County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Art Forgey said.

Hillier and victim Charlotte Felner previously had met when they traded a pair of snakes. Felner said Hillier showed an “unusual amount of interest” in her blue iguana, deputies said, and told her he sold iguanas to vendors because they are easy money.

At around 9 a.m. on Friday, Felner called the Sheriff’s Office to report that her reptiles, estimated to be worth a total of $1,100, had gone missing overnight.

“I woke up that morning, and one of my roommates said, ‘Didn’t you have more cages out on the porch?’” Felner told The Sun. “I ran outside and saw my cage wasn’t out there.

In the past 20 years, frogs and other amphibians have been dying in alarming numbers. More than 40 percent of amphibian species are threatened with extinction, according to the most recent IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The main causes are habitat destruction, climate change, and a sinister new fungal disease called chytridiomycosis. But despite this, or perhaps because of it, there’s been a surge in discoveries of new species in recent years.

“Once it became apparent that amphibians were declining, there was a great interest in amphibians,” said biologist David Wake of the University of California, Berkeley, who founded Amphibiaweb, a database to catalog new amphibian species. ”When we started it in 2000, we thought that the age of amphibian discovery was pretty well done,” said Wake. But now, about 2.5 new species are added every week.

Researchers at James Cook University in Cairns are to study the medicinal properties of funnel-web spider and tarantula venom, in particular its influence on breast cancer cells.

Queensland Science Minister Ros Bates said the research was on the back of international studies that suggested certain toxins in spider venom could block cancer-causing enzymes. This information first came to light with the publication of a paper in 2007 in the journal DNA and Cell Biology.

"They are looking at ways in which the venom may be able to block or kill breast cancer cells - so it could actually lead to a cure," Bates told reporters on Friday. "It's very early days, but it's fairly ground-breaking research."

The research is being jointly funded by the Queensland state government, the National Health and Medical Research Council and funding from a Novel Concept Award from the Breast Cancer Foundation. It is expected to cost $200,000 AUD ($209,000 USD) over two years.

Chanelle Wright of Oceanside, Calif., discovered the turtle taped to the green and blue balloons Sunday, and immediately called the Humane Society.

“We look up and there are green and blue balloons up there,” Wright told ABC News affiliate 10 News. “He was just swinging his arms trying to get out of it. Somebody had taped him to the balloons.”

Wright rang up the Humane Society, who sent the fire department an hour later to try to free the turtle. But just as the fire officials were about to cut the turtle loose, a gust of wind blew it safely down to earth.

A Humane Society employee on the scene said it was a box turtle.

Joel Rabago, another Oceanside resident, said his mother began to film the turtle’s plight. “When something like this happens, she always takes the video camera, no matter what it is,” Rabago told 10 News.

Rabago said that although the turtle escaped unscathed from its misadventure, he’s still outraged.

“What were you thinking? I mean, a turtle is still life. There’s no reason to be putting him up in a balloon and sending him off,” Rabago said.

More than 30 juvenile western swamp tortoises were released into Twin Swamps Nature Reserve in Perth’s northern suburbs in a conservation milestone.

Environment Minister Bill Marmion said the release of 34 tortoises was part of the State’s recovery plan to increase the chance of survival for Australia’s most endangered reptile.

“The plan has exceeded all expectations with more than 570 captive-bred tortoises released since the recovery program commenced in 1990,” he said.

When a California woman named Taryn Hook brought Larry — all 7 feet (2 meters) of him — to the vet a few years ago, she never imagined that the trip would one day lead to such a remarkable discovery, which was announced today (Aug. 14) in the journal mBio.

IBD afflicts pythons and boa constrictors, causing a host of strange symptoms. The snakes tie themselves in knots, they projectile vomit and engage in an eerie behavior called stargazing; the snakes raise their heads over and over, stare into thin air, and sway drunkenly from side to side.

Biopsies from animals with the disease show their cells filled up with globules of proteins called inclusions, which may be responsible for the odd behaviors.

There's no cure for the disease. It moves swiftly in pythons, and can progress slowly in boa constrictors, but it is always fatal. And it's infectious, moving from snake to snake, though the mechanism of transmission isn't entirely clear. If one animal in a collection gets IBD, typically all the animals are euthanized.

Blood tests had suggested Larry, a Dumeril's boa constrictor, might have IBD. Wanting to know what could be done to save the beloved snake, Hook contacted Joseph DeRisi at the University of California, San Francisco, a virologist known for his work deciphering another mysterious virus, this one affecting macaws and parrots.

Her plea for help led DeRisi's lab to take on IBD. The scientists put out a call for samples of diseased and nondiseased snakes. Perhaps luckily, the Steinhart Aquarium at the California Academy of Sciences, just a few miles away, had a sudden outbreak of IBD.

The new study, published in Wednesday’s online edition of Nature, focuses on remains of the snake species Coniophis precedens, which lived roughly 70 million years ago during the late cretaceous period. While the snake had been described in the scientific literature and remains had previously been collected, those studies had only looked at vertebrae.

In the new report, researchers from Yale and Harvard analyzed the upper and lower jawbones of the snake as well as its vertebrae, and came to the conclusion that the snake was transitional because its head was more similar to a lizard’s than a snake. In particular, this snake lacks the ability to open its jaw wide and swallow prey whole, one of the hallmarks of modern snakes. The ancient snake likely ate small vertebrate animals.

Because the snake’s fossils are from the plains of Montana, the scientists argue that the remains provide strong evidence that modern snakes evolved on land. They suggest that the lizard-like head and long body indicate that early snakes evolved as burrowers.

In antiquity snakes were revered for their ability to rejuvenate themselves by shedding their skin. One serpent seems to have done just that and returned from extinction on a tiny island near Saint Lucia in the Caribbean.

The Saint Lucia racer was declared extinct in 1936 but was sighted again in 1973. Non-native mongoose, introduced to the Santa Lucia islands by humans, were believed to have driven the snake back into oblivion after that.

The harmless snake recently slithered back from the abyss of extinction when a team of conservationists identified 11 individuals on a small mongoose-free island near the main island of Saint Lucia, reported Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and Miami Herald.

In June Captain Wallace Weatherholt, 63, who works at Captain Doug's Small Airport Tours, was out with six tourists when the attack occurred.

The Indiana family onboard said that Weatherholt held a fish out above the water's surface just before a gator leapt up and bit off his hand.

Weatherholt was able to drive himself back to the docks. Meanwhile wildlife officers tracked down the gator and killed it before retrieving the captain's hand from its stomach.

However doctors were unable to reattach Weatherholt's lost limb.

Feeding gators is a second-degree misdemeanor in Florida. Weatherholt was held in Collier County Jail on $1,000 bond but has since posted out.

Ecuadoran authorities arrested a German man on Sunday for allegedly attempting to pilfer four land-dwelling iguanas from the Galapagos Islands, according to the director of park services.

A judge sent Dirk Bender to jail to prevent him from leaving the country while he awaits trial, EFE reports. If convicted of “environmental crime,” Bender could face a prison sentence of up to three years.

Bender was arrested in the airport on the island of Baltra when guards detected something unusual in his luggage after passing it through an X-ray machine. When they opened it, they found two iguanas wrapped in cloth.

The reptiles were illegally imported to Hong Kong and intercepted at the arrival hall at the Hong Kong International Airport on June 14, 2012. They were found in a passenger's luggage. A 22-year-old man was prosecuted by the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD) and sentenced to imprisonment for six weeks.

All the seized species are listed in Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which protects endangered species from over-exploitation through international trade restrictions.

At present, 175 countries are parties to CITES.

The Philippine pond turtles and the Mindanao water monitor lizards are endemic species that can only be found in the Philippines.

The thieves struck sometime between 6 p.m. Saturday and 7 a.m. Sunday, taking 14 tortoises and one turtle, Moorten Botanical Garden owner Clark Moorten told the Desert Sun.

"I came out and looked at the little water pond and wow, there were no turtles in there," Moorten told the newspaper. "It's sad, maddening and disappointing."

The list of missing reptiles includes four babies and a 10-year-old, 35-pound African sulcata, Moorten said. The oldest tortoise taken is 40 years old; the largest measures about 16 inches in diameter.

Two baby tortoises were likely in burrows when the thieves struck and were overlooked, Moorten said.

The claw is about seven centimetres long and was found at the Alcoota Scientific Reserve, about 160 kilometres north east of Alice Springs.

The reserve is home to the largest and most concentrated fossil deposit of its kind in Australia and scientists say bones at the site could be millions of years old.

Dr Adam Yates from the Museum of Central Australia has told the ABC's Country Hour the claw may belong to a reptile.
"We don't know what animal this comes from," he said.

"Similar claws have been found in the past and they've been suggested to have come from a large goanna.
"That's a pretty big goanna.

"We're looking at something much bigger than a modern komodo dragon, so a really giant goanna.

"But we haven't found any other bones that we can attribute to a goanna of that size, so really we're scratching our heads."

Samantha Hicks, one of the distraught volunteers at the Blue Iguana Recovery Program (BIRP), spoke with Cayman Net News about the incident. “We’ve never seen anything like this before, it was a sustained and brutal attack,” she said, adding: “We are heartbroken and devastated; just absolutely furious.”

The six killed ranged from 18 to 23 years old and were among the friendliest iguanas at the facility, making them easy targets, Mrs Hicks said, but added that they would not have gone down without a fight.
“The big ones would have fought back with every ounce invested in them; the people who did this are more than likely covered with very deep scratches,” she said.

Mrs Hicks, who assists BIRP Director Fred Burton on a volunteer basis, said that police have launched a forensic investigation into the slaughter, recovering evidence that might lead them to the perpetrators.

A group of recently released Blue Iguanas are missing and presumed dead after an attack by a pack of stray dogs.
The reptiles were placed in special wooded boxes and left out in the eastern side of the reserve to integrate into the wild. However when workers at the recovery program returned they discovered the boxes shattered and covered with bite marks.

The quest to identify the new virus started as an investigation of the cause of a 2008 disease outbreak in a privately owned Australian collection of 70 pythons. As more and more animals became sick, showing signs of pneumonia, depression, lethargy and abnormal behavior such as “star gazing” — staring up at things — they were all eventually euthanized. The researchers had great difficulty detecting the elusive virus and struggled to identify the category in which it belonged. “We screened more than 450 samples, including swabs, tissues and blood for snake viruses,” said lead author Timothy Hyndman, a lecturer and graduate student at Murdoch University in Australia. “It was very frustrating. After two and a half years, we finally isolated something. A year later, we figured out what it was.”

[...]

“This virus was invisible to prior technologies,” said Eric Delwart, director of molecular virology at the Blood Systems Research Institute and an adjunct professor of laboratory medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. “Besides providing assays to help track and control outbreaks of this new snake virus, the study highlights the enhanced ability of scientists to rapidly identify novel pathogens.”