It's disturbing news for an admittedly ugly creature, which has a slimy tail, plumage-like gills and mouth that curls into an odd smile.

The axolotl is known as the "water monster" and the "Mexican walking fish." Its only natural habitat is the Xochimilco network of lakes and canals — the "floating gardens" of earth piled on reed mats that the Aztecs built to grow crops but are now suffering from pollution and urban sprawl.

Biologist Armando Tovar Garza of Mexico's National Autonomous University said Tuesday that the creature "is in serious risk of disappearing" from the wild.

Describing an effort last year by researchers in skiffs to try to net axolotls in the shallow, muddy waters of Xochimilco, Tovar Garza summed up the results as "four months of sampling — zero axolotls."

State police, who operate the Sands Casino Station inside the South Side Bethlehem facility, report "absolutely zero snakes in this place," Trooper William Ortiz said.

The rumor, as passed on to The Express-Times, indicates someone went to the doctor with what was believed to be a bite; the doctor said it's a snakebite and asked immediately whether the patient had been to the Bethlehem casino.

Sands Bethlehem, owned by Las Vegas Sands Corp., issued a statement today saying, "There have been no reported incidents of snakes on our property. We do not allow any animals on property with the exception of service animals."

The findings prompted a larger 2008 expedition, in which teams sampled 1,669 individuals, drawing blood, noting the locations, and marking the tortoises so they could be monitored after analysis. The work found 84 hybrids of Floreana ancestry — of which 30 were less than 15 years old — and 17 with Pinta ancestry. A follow-up expedition is planned for next year to search the area where those populations were concentrated, hoping to find pureblood individuals and bring them to a captive breeding center on Santa Cruz Island. If all goes well, those individuals will serve as founders of a restored population.

"Human activity may have led to the preservation of lineages of species thought extinct," Russello said.

"When the Fibropapilloma virus shows as tumors on the eyes, if it grows over the cornea on both eyes, the turtle has no vision and has no chance of survival," said Bette Zirckelbach, manager of the Turtle Hospital in the Florida Keys.

Zirckelbach and others from the Turtle Hospital transported the animals in their 'turtle ambulance' to Pinecrest Veterinary Hospital for care with Dr. Lorraine Karpinski.

An international team of researchers has made important progress in understanding the distribution of the deadly amphibian chytrid pathogen. In some regions, the deadly impact of the pathogen appears to be hampered by small predators, naturally occurring in freshwater bodies. These micropredators may efficiently reduce the number of free-swimming infectious stages (zoospores) by consuming them. This natural behavior will reduce the infection pressure on potential amphibian hosts and a goes a long way towards explaining the occurrence of chytridiomycosis, at least in temporal climatic regions. These results were published in the renowned scientific journal Current Biology. The team of researchers state that their results raise the hope of successfully fighting chytridiomycosis, nowadays one of the most deadly wildlife diseases.

The booming illegal international wildlife trade forced conservationists to do the unthinkable Tuesday: Brand the golden domes of two of the rarest tortoises on Earth to reduce their black market value by making it easier for authorities to trace them if stolen.

"It's heartbreaking that it's come to this, but it's the right thing to do," Paul Gibbons, managing director of the nonprofit Turtle Conservancy's Behler Chelonian Center in Ventura County, said as he gently placed a 30-pound adult female ploughshare tortoise on a small table.

With a steady hand and an electric engraving tool, he carved an identification code on the high, rounded shell as the creature with weary eyes and gleaming carapace peered calmly into the distance. The tortoise was branded for life, which in her case would be roughly 160 years.

Ballen and her colleagues staged interactions between pairs of chameleons when the animals were two months old. The researchers found the two groups didn’t differ in aggression, but chameleons raised in isolation were more submissive than their siblings raised in groups. The isolation-reared chameleons tended to flee or curl into a ball during confrontations with other chameleons, and they adopted darker and less green colors than the group-reared chameleons. The researchers also tested the foraging ability of the animals, and found that group-reared chameleons seized their prey (crickets) faster than isolation-reared chameleons.

Studies like this add to an increasing appreciation of the flexibility and complexity of reptile behavior.