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Who wouldn't want to see snake venom turn a dish of blood to jelly? Fortunately io9.com has you covered:



See it here...

Would you find it a relaxing experience to have pythons crawl all over you? That's the latest spa treatment at the Cebu City Zoo in the Philippines.



Read about it here...

South Dakota's Reptile Gardens has made the big time: The Guiness Book of World Records has named it the world's largest collection of reptiles.



From The Rapid City Journal:

Years ago, Reptile Gardens Public Relations Director Johnny Brockelsby, son of the founder, sent documentation to Guinness of the more than 200 species housed at the attraction. But he never heard a word.

This month, someone mentioned that the 260-page 2014 edition of the venerable record book featured Reptile Gardens and Brockelsby immediately ran out and bought a copy.

“I was shocked but absolutely thrilled,” Brockelsby said Thursday. “We have always claimed we were the world’s largest, but everybody claims they are the biggest this or the biggest that. But when the new book came out naming us the largest reptile collection in the world, it immediately gave us credibility.”

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Photo of Reptile Gardens' Peni the perentie monitor, taken by Cindy Steinle

In memory of all who served, from all of us at kingsnake.com.

Check out this video "Cute Frog," submitted by kingsnake.com user PH FasDog.
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The Clarion night snake, Hypsiglena unaocularis, hasn't been spotted in 80 years. Its only known sighting, in 1936, was a single preserved specimen brought to the U.S. by naturalist William Beebe. That just changed, as the species was spotted on Mexico's Revillagigedo Islands.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

The existing dead sample was assumed to be a labelling error and the snake was largely struck from taxonomic registries.

But Daniel Mulcahy, a researcher for the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, suspected it might still exist. He and Juan Martinez Gomez of Mexico's Ecology Institute set out to find it.

Martinez Gomez, an expert on the Revillagigedo Islands, noted the islands change a lot from season to season, so they timed the expedition last May to replicate Beebe's steps as they looked for the snake, which blends in with the island's rock formations and is largely active at night. And they used Beebe's original field notes as a guide.

"Basically, following those directions, we essentially put ourselves in his place," Martinez Gomez said.

One of his graduate students, Juan Alberto Cervantes, was the first to spot one of the snakes for the first time since 1936.

The researchers performed DNA analysis to establish the long, dark spotted snake as its own species and see where it had come from.

Read more...

Photo: Juan Martinez-INECOL/AP

There's a happy ending, and a new beginning, in store for Tinkerbell and Wendy, two juvenile sea turtles who have been returned to the wild after being cared for by the Walton Beach, Fla., Gulfarium Sea Turtle C.A.R.E. Program.

From the Pensacola News Journal:

As beachgoers watched in awe at Langdon Beach on Gulf Islands National Seashore, two Gulfarium specialists carefully removed Tinkerbell, a 20-pound green sea turtle, and Wendy, a 14-inch Kemp's ridley, from large plastic containers and carried them to an inviting, calm and azure Gulf.

The turtles flapped their flippers furiously in anticipation of freedom as Rachel Cain and Samantha Fuentes carried them to the edge of the surf. Then with a splash punctuated by cheers from the crowd of onlookers, the two turtles swam with purpose toward open water, their shadowy shapes darting here and there under the clear sea.

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A pilot refused to take off at San Francisco International Airport until a garter snake was moved from the runway to safety, prompting a flurry of Tweets from passengers:

Flight delayed briefly at SFO due to a SNAKE ON THE RUNWAY! Airport security is attempting to bag the snake and take it to a snake sanctuary

— Charlie Knights (@knightc3) May 16, 2014

From the New York Post:

A JFK-bound flight was delayed at the San Francisco airport Friday by a pilot who refused to squish a six-inch garter snake on the runway, officials said.

The Delta Air Lines pilot had announced a delay in takeoff to waiting passengers, explaining that a worker had been dispatched to snatch a wayward reptile off the runway, according to fliers tweeting from the plane.

A spokesman for San Francisco International Airport later said the snake was caught and set free in a “grassy area.”

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A sea turtle named Hofesh was badly injured in 2009. Now, thanks to Jerusalem industrial design student Shlomi Gez, he's cruising around with a prosthetic based a Lockheed Martin Corp.'s F-22 Raptor warplane.



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Fourteen new species of dancing frog have been identified in India.



From Scientific American:

The 14 new species were described last week in the Ceylon Journal of Science, bringing the total number of known dancing frog species in India to 24. All of the tiny frogs, the largest of which measure just 35 millimeters, come from the genus Micrixalus, which can only be found in the Western Ghats.

Unfortunately, none of these tiny frogs may be around much longer. According to the research by University of Delhi biologist S. D. Biju and colleagues, Micrixalus frogs already suffer from a 100 to 1 male-to-female sex ratio. (That’s another reason for the “dancing”—the males also kick away potential mating competitors.) The frogs only breed after monsoon season when water in their habitats is moving swiftly. On top of that, the Western Ghats are expected to experience much lower rainfall levels in the coming years due to climate change. In fact, the rivers already appear to be drying up and the number of frogs observed in the wild has dropped by 80 percent since 2006, the researchers report.

Read more and watch video here...

The Turtle Survival Alliance (TSA) is caring for 521 tortoises seized at Ivato Airport in Madagascar.



From the TSA website:

On Sunday, May 11, 521 tortoises – all juveniles - were seized prior to being loaded on a Kenya Aiways flight to Nairobi; the smuggler ran away when his name was called by the information desk and was not apprehended. The shipment included 512 Radiated Tortoises (Astrochelys radiata) and nine Ploughshare Tortoises (Astrochelys yniphora) that were placed with the Turtle Survival Alliance (TSA) for initial care and safe keeping.

Read the full story...

Photo: TSA

Of course you like snakes. But do you want a snake robot slithering its way into your heart?

That's just what the Modsnake does -- as well as crawl around inside pipes and similar systems looking for damage, and just about anywhere else you'd like to send a snake cam.

Watch below:

The media usually doesn't do a very good job with its coverage of snake stories, so when it does, we take notice.

Compare these two articles: One uses science to tell its story, and one uses media panic.

London's Camden New Journal gives an overview of the discovery of a colony of around 30 Aesculapian snakes living nearby:

But the "non-native species" has been ranked "of high concern" by the London Invasive Species Initiative (LISI), a government advisory quango which has called for the "foreign" family of snakes to be eradicated. It claims, if not stopped, the snakes could spread, causing "serious negative impact" on the eco-system.

This tough-line stance was this week disputed by Dr Wolfgang Wuster, a snake venom expert and senior lecturer of the School of Biological

Science in Bangor University, who told the New Journal: "Any attempt to eradicate the Aesculapian snake would require justification of resources to be devoted to an almost certainly non-problematic introduced species with little prospects of spread, as opposed to the many far more damaging species already out there."

Sane. Balanced. Investigative, even.

Then there's the Daily Mail, whose coverage can be well-summed up by the headline: "Colony of killer snakes 'capable of crushing small children to death' on loose in London."

Of course we all know the Aesculapian snake (now Zamenis longissimus, previously Elaphe longissima, is built much like our native bull snakes. and obviously not large enough to kill a child. But why should that get in the way of some sleezy tabloid clickbait?

Photo: kingsnake.com user nechushtan

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While dad's out screwing around, glass frog (Hyalinobatrachium fleischmanni) embryos have to take care of themselves -- and they do.

From Discovery News:

(S)cientists discovered that glass-frog eggs hatched about 21 percent earlier on average when the fathers were removed. They hatched up to about 34 percent earlier when conditions were drier, suggesting that dehydration was the cue the eggs relied on to hatch early.

"Embryos can cope with delinquent dads," Delia said.

The researchers suggest this kind of embryo behavior may be common among species that provide care to eggs, such as insects, bony fishes and amphibians. "Variation in parental care seems to be the norm rather than the exception," Delia said.

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Photo: kingsnake.com user rockrox83

Fines from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill are being used to help save the lives of sea turtle hatchlings.

Disoriented by the lights of civilization, the newly-hatched turtles often blunder into traffic instead of the sea. By retrofitting nearby homes and businesses with LED lights, however, the risk to the baby tutles is dramatically reduced, because they operate on a frequency the hatchlings can't see.

From Scientific American:

A lot of the money to fund these retrofits comes out of criminal penalties from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which killed or otherwise affected an estimated 100,000 sea turtles. The first two years of the STC’s retrofit efforts were financed by the Recovered Oil Fund for Wildlife (which itself was created with money from Deepwater owner British Petroleum); the organization just received additional funding from the similar Gulf Environmental Benefit Fund, both of which are administered by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

This restitution money, Godfrey says, "has allowed us to actually work with private property owners to go ahead and convert their lights, to work with them, to supplement the money they’re spending. We match money they put in. In some cases where the problem is particularly heinous and the property owners just don’t have the money to fix the problem, we can actually go in and do it for them. That funding mechanism, which has been made available following the spill, has allowed a lot of major progress on this issue."

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In case you ever wax nostalgic for the age of the giant reptiles, a quick read of The Paleoart of Julius Csotonyi will probably change your mind.

In this image, for instance, the artist has depicted the events that must have led to a block of fossils found in Utah. Not exactly anyone's idea of a good time.



See more over on Wired Science.

Christian Dior fine jewelry creative director Victoire de Castellane likes snakes. If you like her beautiful designs, however, be prepared to bring a bucket of money -- prices start at $150,000 per piece.

Fortunately, looking is free.



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