Reptile & Amphibian News Blog
Keep up with news and features of interest to the reptile and amphibian community on the kingsnake.com blog. We cover breaking stories from the mainstream and scientific media, user-submitted photos and videos, and feature articles and photos by Jeff Barringer, Richard Bartlett, and other herpetologists and herpetoculturists.
Tuesday, April 22 2014
A fire in a Savannah Reptiles Planet warehouse in France killed between 20,000 and 30,000 reptiles and another animals.
From Prensa Latina:
The flames destroyed around 4,000 square meters of the facility and killed a large number of snakes, iguanas, chameleons, lizards, amphibians, rabbits, rats, and insects.
Only eight turtles, between 60 and 100 kilograms, were saved, when rescuers poured water on their shells.
Read more...
Image: France TV
This image of a Chondro, uploaded by kingsnake.com user NYCMedic, is our herp photo of the day!
Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!
Monday, April 21 2014
There's a pretty flipping cool photo spread of crocs in nature in the UK's Metro. See it here.
You're welcome.
This image of a Leaf-Tailed Gecko, uploaded by kingsnake.com user zmarchetti, is our herp photo of the day!
Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!
Friday, April 18 2014
Check out this video "Bearded Dragon VS Superworms," submitted by kingsnake.com user Minuet.
Submit your own reptile & amphibian videos at http://www.kingsnake.com/video/ and you could see them featured here or check out all the videos submitted by other users!
This image of a Scarlet King, uploaded by kingsnake.com user caecilianman02, is our herp photo of the day!
Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!
Thursday, April 17 2014
We've heard of snow days... but snake days?
A high school in Kyrgyzstan was closed down after they found at least 30 snakes in the building every day this spring. No ID was made of the types of snake, but media speculation has ranged all over the place, including the Caspian cobra, Naja oxiana.
Read more...
Photo: Omid Mozaffari, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
This image of Bearded Dragons, uploaded by kingsnake.com user dedragons, is our herp photo of the day!
Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!
Wednesday, April 16 2014
What if there was a disease that killed or crippled hundreds of thousands of people every year, but no one seemed to care?
It's not a disease, but as Dr. Matthew Lewin wrote in the New York Times Sunday Review last weekend, snakebites kill 94,000 people and cripple 400,000, mostly in impoverished parts of the world.
So where are the telethons, the philanthropic dollars? Where are new developments other than costly, mostly unavailable anitvenin? How about drugs, or a snakebite EpiPen?
Find out...
Photo: Naja annulifera by kingsnake.com user Neverscared
This image of a Garter Snake, uploaded by kingsnake.com user clayemt, is our herp photo of the day!
Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!
Tuesday, April 15 2014
There are times that things are not at all as they initially seem. For example, there was that night when I was moving slowly from bridge to bridge along a small creek on Madre Selva Preserve in Amazonian Per looking intently for aquatic coral snakes. Usually common, this coral was proving difficult to find on this trip.
While I was studying the bottom of a shallow pool, a large fallen leaf began moving slowly away. My interest quickly changed from coral snake to the "moving leaf." The water was silted and the moving object was further obscured by fallen leaves. But it took only a few moments for recognition to occur.
Well-camouflaged though it was, I was looking at a common Suriname toad, Pipa pipa. And that one sighting had turned what had been a rather slow herping trek into a memorable stroll.
Suriname toad facts:
This anuran is a member of the family Pipidae, the tongueless frogs.
The eyes are small and lidless.
The fingers are tipped with tactile skin flanges and prey is literally shoveled into the tongueless mouth with the forefeet.
After a complex breeding sequence the eggs are placed on the female's back and are soon covered by skin.
The eggs undergo full development while being carried by the female. At hatching the toadlets are fully metamorphosed miniatures of the adult.
This species is fully aquatic.
More photos under the jump...
Continue reading "An Aquatic Wonder: The Suriname toad"
Did you hear the one about the man who got out of his car to get a closer look at an alligator... and got bitten by a water moccasin?
No, it's not a joke. It's a true story from WTSP in Tampa. Read it here.
This image of a Dumeril Boa, uploaded by kingsnake.com user biophiliacs, is our herp photo of the day!
Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!
Monday, April 14 2014
Some people in a Mississippi town might have had turtle soup on their minds when they rescued a huge snapping turtle from a storm drain, but they quickly changed their minds and decided to save him, instead.
Read the story at KPTV.com.
This image of an Emerald Tree Boa, uploaded by kingsnake.com user snakedawg81, is our herp photo of the day!
Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!
Sunday, April 13 2014
Are poachers stealing and selling the golden lancehead pit viper ( Bothrops insularis) from an island off the coast of Brazil?
That was the topic of last night's Nightline Prime:
One poisonous bite from the Golden Lancehead pit viper is enough to kill a grown man within a few hours. It’s fast-acting venom will burn through flesh and cause its victim to bleed to death.
Rogerio Zacariotti, a researcher with the Cruzeiro Do Sul University in Brazil, travels to “Snake Island” regularly to monitor the Gloden Lancehead population. He is convinced poachers are stealing the snakes from the island and selling them on the black market.
Zacariotti allowed "Nightline Prime" to accompany him and his team on one of his research trips to "Snake Island," where ABC’s Dan Harris had some too-close encounters with the deadly snakes.
Read more and watch the video...
Friday, April 11 2014
For several years I traveled the USA extensively from border to border and from coast to coast, gathering photos and bits of information for our planned herpetological field guides. Always, at some point during my western jaunts, the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, Gambelia sila, came to mind.
This lizard was, I knew, a very localized federally endangered California endemic, and to have even a chance at seeing it I would have to travel to one of several areas where it still existed. So on one hot summer day I decided to visit the almost perpetually dry Carrizo Plains in search of the lizard.
By the time I arrived at this amazing and vast arid region and had bypassed the sentinel burrowing owls, had marveled at a Northern Pacific rattlesnake coiled tightly in the shade of a roadside creosote bush, and stopped to look at a Botta's pocket gopher as it trundled along, it was early afternoon. The sun beat down from a cloudless sky and the heat was so intense that I doubted I would succeed in my quest.
Actually, I had no trouble at all. As I drove slowly along, I startled a small whiptail that darted up and over the low berm. Deciding that I wanted to photograph the lizard if possible, I bolted from the car, the lizard camera in hand. The whiptail stopped for a moment beneath a creosote bush, began to move off again but was almost instantly seized by a large lizard that had appeared as if by magic at the mouth of a burrow.
The aggressor was a blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the very lizard that had drawn me to the Carrizo Plains. Success!
More photos under the jump...
Continue reading "The Blunt-nosed Leopard Lizard: An Endangered Predatory Species"
This image of a Western Hognose, uploaded by kingsnake.com user DianaFarnsworth, is our herp photo of the day!
Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!
Check out this video "Elvis the croaking frog," submitted by kingsnake.com user Minuet.
Submit your own reptile & amphibian videos at http://www.kingsnake.com/video/ and you could see them featured here or check out all the videos submitted by other users!
Thursday, April 10 2014
Will the 'family fun' that is the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Round-Up in Sweetwater, Texas, ever be stopped?
From CNN:
The Jaycees, short for the U.S. Junior Chamber, bills itself as a group that gives young people "the tools they need to build the bridges of success." The Sweetwater branch has been holding what it calls "The World's Largest Rattlesnake Round-Up" for 56 years on the first weekend in March, and the tool for success that it teaches young people is that it's fun to kill and torture animals.
For weeks or even months, rattlesnakes are stored in crowded barrels until it's roundup time. The snakes that have not suffocated under their kin arrive hungry, dehydrated, and sick from gasoline that was sprayed into their burrows to flush them out.
After a tour of the roundup, Michael Smith wrote an article for "Cross Timbers Herpetologist" in which he recalls noticing "...an unusual smell ... like bad cologne and also like something gone bad." Throughout the tour the smell keeps coming back to him, he writes, until he realizes what it is: "...the musk, feces, and blood of a thousand terrified snakes, half-covered with sprays of deodorant from Jaycees working the pits."
Read more...
This image of a Knobtailed Gecko, uploaded by kingsnake.com user f4n4tic, is our herp photo of the day!
Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!
Wednesday, April 9 2014
Can the conservationist and the cowman be friends? Not if you're Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who posted a challenge to the BLM on his ranch's website protesting efforts to save the desert tortoise ( Gopherus agassizii), saying, "They have my cattle and now they have one of my boys. Range War begins tomorrow."
From ABC News:
Bundy's beef with federal land management officials dates back to 1993, according to federal officials, when Bundy's allotment for grazing his cattle on public land was modified to include protections for the desert tortoise. Bundy, who told the Associated Press his family has been ranching this part of Nevada since the 1870s, did not accept the modified terms, and continued to let his cattle graze anyway.
After legal maneuverings on both sides, a Nevada district court judge in 2013 permanently enjoined Bundy's cattle (some 900, by the government's count) from grazing on public property. The judge reiterated that decision in 2013 and authorized the U.S. government to impound the cattle.
The first phase of that impoundment started Saturday, with 58 head of cattle being removed from BLM land, federal officials said in an online statement. As of Monday afternoon, that number had risen to 134, BLM spokeswoman Kirsten Cannon told ABC News. Removing the rest of the trespassing cattle should take another 21 to 30 days, she said.
Bundy disputes the federal government's authority to take such action. The Nevada Sheriff's Office, he contends, is the only entity empowered to impound his cattle. The Bundy Ranch website calls the federal agents "cattle thieves."
Read more...
This image of a Garter Snake, uploaded by kingsnake.com user boxienuts, is our herp photo of the day!
Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!
Tuesday, April 8 2014
A South Carolina community is feeling the fear after shed snake skins found near an apartment complex were identified as coming from the Gaboon viper, a venomous snake from Africa.
From ABC News:
When a pest control company came last week to do a regular checkup on the bait boxes at the complex, the exterminator found snake skins nearby, took a picture, and reported it to the management office.
“The skin was still moist, indicating it was freshly shed,” Jennifer Bailey, an employee at the Harbor Pointe Apartments, told ABC News today.
To identify the snake, the office contacted a snake expert hours later who came in and said that the skin came from a Gaboon viper, an exotic snake not indigenous to the U.S. Another local herpetologist confirmed the identity through a photograph the pest control took, Bailey said.
Read more...
"Dick," Ken said,"I've decided to part with my puff adder ( Bitis arietans). Would you want it?"
I knew this to be a beautiful snake that was in perfect health so, although I had no experience with anything more sinister than a northern copperhead, after an impassioned plea to my mother (I was still living at home then), the answer was yes, yes indeed, I did want the snake.
And thus began the first of my many experiences with the variable and hardy puff adder. I had read of their proclivity for burrowing and within a few days I had watched this heavy bodied snake shuffle its way beneath leafy litter and well down into its sandy substrate. I had learned that it was an accomplished ambush predator, the venom of which could kill a food rodent within seconds. I was certain that it was not a snake that would want to run afoul of. I watched it strike forward from a lateral "S," and I found that it could strike quickly and accurately to either side and occasionally for a few inches straight up.
That was my first puff adder, but certainly not my last. And from that snake my interest burgeoned to the numerous congenerics, to Gaboon vipers, rhinoceros vipers, horned adders, and more, all subjects of future posts!
More photos under the jump...
Continue reading "So, you want a puff adder?"
This image of a White Jelly Brooksi, uploaded by kingsnake.com user Doublehet, is our herp photo of the day!
Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!
Monday, April 7 2014
A San Antonio TV station is questioning whether the rattlesnake in a field of bluebonnets featured in a viral Facebook photo is alive, or a taxidermied and posed dead snake.
Given that the topic "snake in bluebonnets" has its own section on hoax debunker website Snopes.com, and it wouldn't be the first time a taxidermist has claimed to play this particular prank. it's a valid question.
From KSAT:
The picture, submitted to a news station’s Facebook page in Austin, shows a rattlesnake coiled among bluebonnets.
The picture has many reconsidering their annual trip to take pictures in the bluebonnets, believing it may be too dangerous.
Some experts, however, are questioning the validity of the picture.
"It’s a real picture,” said Blaine Easton, a snake expert with the South Texas Herpetology Society. “I'm not sure that snake is alive. I think the snake is dead and mounted by a taxidermist."
According to Easton, it is the snake’s neck position that causes him to question the picture. Easton said it did raise a valid concern.
"I have found in the middle of bluebonnets, on some ranches, rattlesnakes sitting there,” said Easton.
After all, Texas is home to 113 species of snakes. The moral, according to experts, is to just be cautious.
Watch their report...
This image of a Blue Day Gecko, uploaded by kingsnake.com user rmgarabedian, is our herp photo of the day!
Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!
Friday, April 4 2014
This image of a Salmander, uploaded by kingsnake.com user cochran, is our herp photo of the day!
Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!
Check out this video "Turtle Cam," submitted by kingsnake.com user JoJoMang.
Submit your own reptile & amphibian videos at http://www.kingsnake.com/video/ and you could see them featured here or check out all the videos submitted by other users!
|