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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced it's placing the Georgetown and Salado salamanders on the threatened species list, despite ongoing opposition from pro-development forces in Texas.

From the Austin Business Journal:

The salamanders have been a contentious issue for both environmentalists and some community officials, who have struggled over how to protect the animals while preserving development opportunities. The full impact of the decision won't be clear until the Fish and Wildlife service sets rules for how the salamanders will be protected, according to a report in the Austin American-Statesman.

In the case of the Georgetown salamander, the agency may allow local Georgetown's local protections to remain in place. Those regulations prevent development within 80 meters of a salamander site and within 50 meters of a spring as well as limited development up to 300 meters upstream. The city passed those rules in December hoping to fend off federal protection, the Statesman report said. If the federal agency decides the local ordinances are sufficient, local developers won't need a federal permit for building.

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Photo: Texas Parks and Wildlife

A Missouri car accident involved some unusal cargo: Four alligators.

From KMBC.com:

KFVS-TV reports two crashes happened in the southbound lanes of Interstate 55 in the southeast Missouri community around 7 p.m. Saturday.

Four alligators ranging from 3 feet to 5 feet long were being hauled in a small trailer behind one of the cars.

A man and his wife who were in the car pulling the alligators were injured in the wreck. Police say the animals remained inside.

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Danville, Virg., fisherman Morris Lawson took photos of dead turtles on the banks of the Dan River, and shared them online. They've raised a lot of attention to the possible impact of the coal ash spill on wildlife in the area.

From WGHP Fox 8:

“One turtle was at the dam up on the bank about two feet out of the water. And the other turtle was located about where that tree is [by the boat ramp] about two feet up out of the water on the bank. And he was on his back. The other one was on his belly,” explained Lawson.

Jenny Edwards is a program manager with the Dan River Basin Association.

“We have heard some reports that turtles appear to be crawling up on the banks and dying,” she told FOX8.

Edwards added, “Turtles should be hibernating this time of year. It’s cold. They hibernate down in the mud. The fact that they’re crawling up on the bank and dying, even if it’s not in mass numbers… It’s highly unusual.”

She emphasized, “Even though we can’t directly link it to coal ash, this is exactly the sort of thing we expected to start seeing.”

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Residents can report dead wildlife in and near the river at this link; more information here.

Photo: Morris Lawson

Check out this video "Arizona Field Herping," submitted by kingsnake.com user smetlogik.
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Peru’s treasured Manu National Park is the world’s top biodiversity hotspot for reptiles and amphibians, according to a new survey published last week by biologists from the University of California, Berkeley, Southern Illinois University in Carbondale (SIU-Carbondale) and Illinois Wesleyan University.



The park, which encompasses lowland Amazonian rain forest, high-altitude cloud forest and Andean grassland east of Cuzco, is well known for its huge variety of bird life, which attracts ecotourists from around the globe. More than 1,000 species of birds, about 10 percent of the world’s bird species; more than 1,200 species of butterflies; and now 287 reptiles and amphibians have been recorded in the park.



“For reptiles and amphibians, Manu and its buffer zone now stands out as the most diverse protected area anywhere,” said study coauthor Rudolf von May, a postdoctoral researcher in UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.

Despite the park’s abundant and diverse animal life, von May said, not all is well in the preserve. The devastating chytrid fungus has caused a decline in the number of frogs there, as it has elsewhere around the world, while deforestation for subsistence living, gold mining and oil and gas drilling are encroaching on the buffer zones around the park.

“All of this is threatening the biodiversity in the park and the native peoples who live in settlements in the park,” von May said. At least four Amazonian tribes and a nomadic group of hunter-gatherers known as Mashco-Piro live within the confines of Manu National Park and its buffer zone.

Von May, a native of Peru, and coauthor Alessandro Catenazzi, an assistant professor of zoology at SIU-Carbondale, have spent more than 15 years each scouring the park and its surrounding areas for frogs, toads, salamanders and caecilians – all amphibians – as well as for reptiles such as snakes, lizards, turtles and caimans. The field work in the park and its buffer zone, augmented by other, more limited surveys published previously, allowed the team to compile a list of 155 amphibian and 132 reptile species, including a handful of species new to science. Taxonomist and coauthor Edgar Lehr, assistant professor of biology at Illinois Wesleyan University, collaborates frequently with von May and Catenazzi on frog taxonomy and studies of amphibian declines and conservation.

New research at the University of Sydney may give conservation of crocodiles a boost by examining how their tough lives have given their immune systems an evolutionary advantage.

From Phys.org:

The MHC is a group of genes that help the immune system identify microbes and parasites. They play an important role in disease resistance, as diverse genes allow animals to resist a wider range of diseases. The research published this week in the journals PLOS ONE and Immunogenetics shows that some of the genes involved in the fight against viruses, bacteria and parasites have remained the same across all crocodilian species while other immune genes seem to have diversified in crocodiles.

"The diverse environments occupied by many crocodilians, whether saltwater crocs in the Northern Territory or alligators in Florida, appear to have exposed crocodilians immune genes to a wide range of germs," Dr Gongora said.

Researchers found multiple instances of crocodilians losing and/or duplicating genes showing that their immune system is still responsive to evolutionary changes.

"We now have a genetic resource to understand the immune system in crocodilians, thanks to this research. It will enable genetic investigations of how these animals respond to local conditions including susceptibility to disease," said lead author of the article Weerachai Jaratlerdsiri, who recently completed his PhD at the University of Sydney.

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Looks like ancient reptiles got deliveries from the stork. That's an amazingly inaccurate paraphrase of a recent study published on the journal PLOS ONE, which analyzed an ichthyosaur fossil.

From National Geographic:

The 248-million-year-old fossil from the Mesozoic era (252 to 66 million years ago) reveals an ichthyosaur baby inside its mother (orange) and another stuck in her pelvis (yellow). A third embryo discovered nearby suggests it was stillborn; scientists believe the mother died during a difficult labor.



The narrow, eel-like ichthyosaur belongs to the genus Chaohusaurus and is the oldest known species of the group.

[...]

It's not just the age of the Mesozoic-era discovery that is surprising; it's the shattering of the belief that ichthyosaurs—also dubbed sea monsters—gave birth in water, not on land.

The scientists reached their conclusion because the fossil showed the offspring emerging head-first—a behavior found only in animals that give birth on land.

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Developers or snakes? You decide.

From the Kansas City Star:

Barely a half-foot long without a drop of venom, the redbelly snake hardly seems a threat.

Unless you’re a developer or public official in Johnson County.

Listed by Kansas as a threatened species, the reddish brown reptile with the orange belly is complicating growth in Johnson County.

County leaders are reluctant to dip into taxpayers’ wallets to preserve a snake habitat disrupted by new development. So they are waging a battle with the seldom-seen snake that’s not much longer than a typical worm.

They’re asking the Kansas Legislature to remove the redbelly and the comparable smooth earth snake from the state’s threatened species list.

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Photo: Suzanne L. Collins/Kansas City Star

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When the male túngara frog whispers sweet nothings into his loved one's ear, it's not a private conversation.

From Wired:

Male túngara frogs, native to Central and South America, gather at night in shallow ponds and call to attract females. They space themselves out carefully, each male defending a small calling site. Competition for females is serious business, and males will fight if one horns in on another’s chosen calling site.

A new study shows how the male túngara frog’s call inadvertently creates a multisensory message that can be exploited by both rivals and predators.

[...]

But these courtship signals meant for females aren’t just overheard by rival male frogs. They also provide frog-eating bats (Trachops cirrhosus) with a way to pinpoint the location of their next meal. The frog-eating bat specializes in túngara frogs, using a combination of echolocation and eavesdropping to detect them. A frog will stop calling if it sees a bat flying overhead, but ripples continue to move through the water for several seconds after the call ceases, leaving a “footprint” of the frog’s presence.

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Photo: Ryan Taylor/Salisbury University