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, January 13 2015
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user vinniem1210!
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Monday, January 12 2015
By
Mon, January 12 2015 at 06:11
As I was preparing for my new year, I received a call from an unknown number, requesting me for a rescue for an unidentified snake.
Based on the area and the weather I presumed it was a Russell’s viper, but according to the description of the person who called me, it was a rat snake or a grass snake. I called up my friend and picked him up on the way as I never go alone on rescue calls, so there will be someone who can drive me to hospital in case any accident occurs.
![](/blog/uploads/Sachin_Russells1.jpg) When I reached the spot it was in the downtown area. The snake was coiled up in a corner surrounded by 20-25 people. As I started the onerous task of rescue, the crowd panicked and took a step or two back. I shined the flash light toward the snake; it was a Russell’s viper indeed.
My friend kept an eye on the snake till the time I arranged a snake sack. The viper was around 5 ft. in length, a good sized snake. I directed the snake toward the sack with the help of my snake stick and tied the mouth of the sack.
The rescue was successfully completed. I was, however, disturbed that the people who had surrounded the viper were not at all aware it is one of the deadliest creatures on the earth and that it could be fatal if the viper had bitten any one of them. So after the rescue I took 20 minutes to make the people aware, as I always do.
The feeling was so good after rescuing the snake, and I really want to thank that viper for maintaining a cool temper even after he was surrounded and disturbed by huge number of people.
![](/blog/uploads/TinyKD.jpg) A fraction of the size of its cousin the Komodo dragon, a recently identified Australian goanna could fit in your hand.
From the Scientific American
Lizards don’t get much bigger than the Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis), which can reach three meters in length and may weigh as much as 70 kilograms. But not every member of the Varanus genus is a giant. Scientists in Australia last month unveiled the newest Varanus species and it’s as small as the Komodo is large. The newly discovered Dampier Peninsula goanna (V. sparnus) is just 23 centimeters long and 16 grams in weight. That’s about the size of a human hand, which would barely count as a nibble for a hungry Komodo dragon.
Read more here.
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user BoaZilla!
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Sunday, January 11 2015
![](/blog/uploads/jimdixon.jpg) Legendary Texas herpetologist and naturalist James R. (Jim) Dixon passed away yesterday, January 10, 2015, leaving a legacy in Texas herpetology and herpetoculture that will be hard to match.
Dr. Dixon never met a snake he didn't like. Professor Emeritus and Curator Emeritus of amphibians and reptiles at the Texas Cooperative Wildlife Collection at Texas A&M University, in his long, distinguished career Dr. Dixon described hundreds of new species of reptiles and amphibians worldwide, with a special emphasis on the herpetofauna of Texas, Mexico, Central America, and South America.
Born in 1928 in Houston, Dr. Dixon first obtained his bachelor of science from Howard Payne University in 1950 before serving in the Korean War. Working as Curator of Reptiles at the Ross Allen Reptile Institute before earning his masters degree (1957) and PhD in (1961) from Texas A&M University, he was an Associate Professor of Veterinary Medicine at Texas A&M from 1959 until 1961.
As an Associate Professor of Wildlife Management at New Mexico State University from 1961 until 1965, he served as a consultant to the New Mexico Game and Fisheries department until leaving for the University of Southern California, where from 1965 until 1967 he was Curator of Herpetology at the Los Angeles County Museum.
In 1971 he returned to his Texas roots, becoming a professor at Texas A&M University, where he taught Wildlife and Fisheries Science and became Curator of the Texas Cooperative Wildlife Collection. Dr. Dixon also served as president of several herpetological and naturalist societies including The Herpetologist League, Texas Herpetological Society, Texas Academy of Science, Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles, Southwestern Association of Naturalists. He also served on the Board of Directors of the Texas Systems of Natural Laboratories and the faculty of Stephen F. Austin State University.
Author and co-author of numerous books, book chapters, and hundreds of peer reviewed notes and articles, Dr. Dixon was one of the most prominent herpetologists of the latter 20th century, and over the years numerous species have been named in his honor by some of his thousands of students and admirers.
Friday, January 9 2015
![](/blog/uploads/Boa1.8.14.jpg) It may sound like an urban legend, but one woman got the surprise of her life after finding a boa in her bathroom.
From the L.A. Times:
"I thought my eyes were deceiving me," Lasca said. When she saw the flicker of the snake's tongue, she knew it was a snake.
She screamed and ran from the bathroom, slamming the door and calling the county Department of Animal Services.
The snake, identified as a Colombian rainbow boa, was curled up behind the toilet when an animal services employee arrived at the office in a building at 5th and G in downtown San Diego, which was once city hall.
Read more here.
Related links:
Rainbow Boa Forum, Rainbow Boa Classifieds
Check out this video "B & W Argentine Tegus Nap Time in Bed" submitted by kingsnake.com user reptilemomof3.
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It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user amazonreptile!
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Thursday, January 8 2015
![](/blog/uploads/fraudalert1.jpg)
Kevin Murphy
7025 Aetna ct
Wauwatosa, WI
53213 US
414-412-1034
Kmurphy2233@gmail.com
Fraud Alert: Kevin Murphy - Wauwatosa, WI
Fraudulent Use of Credit Card; Theft of Service
On January 8, 2015, kingsnake.com received a chargeback notice from our credit card processor that the classified account purchase made on September 27, 2014, by the individual listed above was made with a stolen or unauthorized credit card.
If you were defrauded by this or any other individual through our classified advertising system, please file a formal complaint with our classified advertising department. For more information please visit; http://market.kingsnake.com/complaint.php.
Dan and I had been dipping for dwarf siren and then road hunting for several hours. At 4:00PM, we found ourselves on a sand road south of the "Big Lake" (Lake Okeechobee) and we were about ready to call it a day. Dan had to drive back to Miami and I to Gainesville. Fair distances, both.
We were on what we decided would be our last drive of the day along the long dirt road. The drive northward had been uneventful and we were almost to the end of our southward return.
Snake!
A fair-sized, heavy-bodied snake was crawling slowly onto the road. From a distance we had thought it to be a cottonmouth. No great prize, but when herping is slow any and all herps are a welcome sighting. As we neared and the snake crawled farther on to the road it became apparent that it wasn't a cottonmouth - it was an eastern hog-nose.
This made what had been a rather blah day a really nice one. But it was about to get even better. As we photographed the female that was now almost across the road, an adult male crawled out of the edging grasses about 6 inches from where we first saw the female.
Bingo. Breeding time! And then from about 20 feet farther down road a second male was sighted. Dan and I spent considerable time taking photos and when we left we were both smiling.
Continue reading "The hog-nose trio"
![](/blog/uploads/Snorkle1.7.15.jpg) The Orianne Society knows that herpetological conservation is just as important as other wildlife efforts, and plans to step up for herps.
From Online Athens:
“We are trying to develop a university-based nonprofit that’s a global leader for reptilian and amphibian conservation and herpetology,” said Chris Jenkins, chief executive officer of The Orianne Society and an adjunct faculty member at The Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources. “If you look at different types of mammals and birds you’ll find that the entities working to provide conservation and manage those populations is numerous, but there’s nowhere near as many working for reptiles and amphibians.”
The Orianne Society approaches conservation in three ways — research, conservation and boots-on-the-ground work such as purchasing land, managing and restoring habitats, conducting inventories of animals and reintroducing rare reptiles and amphibians into habitats where they have become extinct.
Read more here.
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user mizzy!
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Wednesday, January 7 2015
This year will be a defining year for British reptile keepers.
This year the UK will see the publication of the list of species to be banned from private ownership under the EU Invasive Alien Species Regulations. This is a defining moment in history. Never before has the UK banned the private ownership of any animal. The number of species affected is initially likely to very small, but there will be the inevitably push from the "antis" have more and more species added.
The EU is also the source of a debate to implement a positive list of approved reptile species. Keepers in Belgium and the Netherlands are very much at the forefront of this insidious push by the antis to ban keeping of non-approved species. There’s nothing positive about a positive list.
2015 will also finally answer a argument that has been raging for more than 20 years - are UK reptile shows are legal or not. The question will finally be answered this year by the British High Court.
Despite these threats, our hobby continues to grow. 2014 saw more reptiles and amphibians kept in the UK than ever before. There was also an increase in the number of pet shops licensed to sell reptiles, and this growth is set to continue and 2015. Although business has been tough, we're bucking the trend of many other sectors. Growth was strongest in the frozen food sector (rodents) with an increase of about 11 percent, and live foods by about 7 percent.
A belated happy New Year to everyone and I hope it is a prosperous time for everyone.
Photo: 1999 International Herp Society Fall Expo, Walsall, U.K. - courtesy Jeff Barringer
![](/blog/uploads/DZoo.jpg) Several lizards who survived illegal shipment to the U.S. have found a permanent new home with the Detroit Zoo.
From mlive.com:
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 200 of the lizards died within a few weeks of being seized due to the "inhumane methods used to ship the animals and the conditions they were held in prior to their arrival in the United States..."
The Detroit Zoological society said in a statement that the lizards are representations of a global wildlife trafficking crisis.
"Many individual animals die in situations like this, and the impacts on wild populations can be catastrophic," Scott Carter, Detroit Zoological Society chief life sciences officer, said in a release. "We are happy to be able to provide great care and permanent sanctuary for these lizards, and to help bring attention to this important wildlife issue."
Read more here.
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user charlescory!
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Tuesday, January 6 2015
![](/blog/uploads/NewPitV.jpg) A new type of pit viper has been identified.
From the Epoch Times:
“It’s a surprising finding,” Dr. Vogel told mongabay.com, “as [the new species] is a large viper, very colorful and superficially different.” It inhabits forested areas between 1,500 and 2,000 meters (5,000 to 6,500 feet) in elevation. This is an important difference from T. sumatranus, which lives on lower, hilly areas rarely above 950 meters (3,000 feet).The difficulty in accessing these high mountain areas, as well as lack of economic interest in developing them, has preserved them from deforestation, according to a 2011 study in Global Change Biology.
“This is a highland species and in Sumatra there is little infrastructure in the higher mountain areas, so I feel it might be safe in the near future,” Vogel said. However, he cautioned its safety is far from secure, saying that its distribution should be more thoroughly studied to help further understanding of the species and its long-term prognosis. He added the region itself deserves more attention, with more endemics possibly awaiting scientific discovery. Vogel, who has discovered other reptile species, is a freelance herpetologist as well as a chemist whose research is self-funded and not tied to any particular institution. For their study, the researchers inspected 53 specimens of T. sumatranus and Trimeresurus hageni, with the primary objective of establishing the differences between them and amend the historical confusion of these two species.
Read more here.
Letters (remember the days when correspondence was via written letters?) were zipping back and forth from Tampa to Karachi. Jerry mentioned having just collected a "nice" half grown whiskered viper (also known as the McMahon's or leaf-nosed viper), Eristicophis mcmahoni from Balochistan.
Since he was going to ship me a couple of hundred leopard geckos in a week, he was wondering whether I might want the snake as well. My answer was "yes, you bet I want it." About two weeks later, I was settling a whiskered viper into a sandy terrarium. And to say I was enamored with the beast would be a monumental understatement.
Whiskered vipers are not colorful but what they lack in that respect is more than made up for by their impressively defensive attitude. Until recently, when I decided to not keep "hots" any longer, whenever possible I had an Eristicophis or two in the collection. Although I have never succeeded in breeding this taxon, I have found them hardy and very responsive - the kind of snake that will meet you at the top of its terrarium to accept food from long forceps.
If startled this snake will inflate its body and exhale loudly and/or assume an "S" position and rub the scales together producing a very audible rasping sound.
Like many desert or savannah snakes, the whiskered viper is an ambush hunter that sinks all but its eyes and nostrils just below the surface of loose sand. From this position they are able to strike and envenomate their prey of unwary lizards or rodents .
Males, the smaller sex, are adult at less than a foot and a half. Females may near thirty inches in length but are usually only about two feet long.
Continue reading "Whiskered vipers in the sand"
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user mesozoic!
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Monday, January 5 2015
By
Mon, January 5 2015 at 11:35
If you’re a snake lover in India and you wish to do something for the welfare of these reptilian friends, one of the best ways to do so is to become a snake rescuer.
However, should you undertake this difficult ordeal, realize it’s not what you do but why you do it that counts. It’s a journey, like the one that married couples take, to understand and empathize with these wonderful creatures.
Indian culture and snakes are made for each other. There are certain popular myths that have existed for over thousands of years that have caused a great deal of destruction of snake habitats. Some common mis-beliefs include that snakes drink milk and snakes are vengeful by nature. Having said that, I would like to add these myths are also among the reasons snakes have been protected to certain extent. For example, snakes are worshiped to prevent their malevolent behavior or responses.
![](/blog/uploads/india2.jpg) Until recently, snake rescue culture grew slowly in India. Today, one can find snake rescuers in every part of India. However, you will rarely come across a full-time snake rescuer as there is little scope for herpetology and for most population it's inaccessible.
One would discover, like I did, that most snake rescuers are hobbyists or affiliated with non-governmental organizations. This calls for a great deal of effort to gain the required knowledge and skill to handle snakes properly. For examples, you'll only find snake shelters in urban areas. Usually,most snake rescuers free the snake back to nature in forested areas.
Mostly, snake calls in India are distress calls. For example, recently one of my friends called me up on a holiday. He was panicking after he found a snake at his place. Over the years, it's become almost predictable as to which snakes are found in certain areas in different seasons. However, they never seem to stop surprising me.
Snake rescuing culture in India is still developing. Although it has gained some momentum, it still has a long way to go.
![](/blog/uploads/TurtleH.png) Stuck in the middle of a drought that may last years, endangered turtles in California were given a roof-top reprieve.
From CBS:
With so much of the fresh water lost to evaporation, what's left is highly concentrated with minerals and very salty. And that has left the turtles in bad shape.
The USGS researchers called Shaffer when they noticed that not only were the turtles lethargic, but some of their heads, feet and shells were coated in a thick white crust of mineral deposits.
"Some of them looked like ceramic turtles," Shaffer said. "Between the biologists who were out there and me, we have a hundred years of turtle experience and we had never seen turtles look like this."
So they mobilized, collecting 60 turtles from the arid lakebed and transporting half to the Turtle Conservancy's captive breeding facility in Ojai, and the other half to UCLA, where Shaffer and his team set up a reptile refugee camp on the roof of the botany building.
Read more here.
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user PH FasDog!
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Friday, January 2 2015
Check out this video "Perfect Striped Boa" submitted by kingsnake.com user Boazucht.
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It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user rudyruebens!
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Thursday, January 1 2015
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user Tanguy6!
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We present to you a clutch of what appear to be maternally incubated ball pythons in our Herp Photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user morton ! Be sure to tell them you liked it here! We wish a happy, safe and prosperous new year for all our friends and family.
![](http://gallery.kingsnake.com/data/3383P1010404-med.JPG)
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Wednesday, December 31 2014
![](/blog/uploads/Oilspill.jpg) An oil spill in the world's largest mangrove forest has killed many animals, and will have an impact for years to come.
From the Daily Star:
Animals have started to die. The water hyacinths on the two rivers have turned black. Some Golpata trees have gone under heavy layers of oil.
One local, Abu Jafar, spotted two animals -- a monitor lizard and an otter -- dead and smeared with oil along the banks of the Shela.
Meanwhile, the authorities pulled the sunken oil tanker ashore around 11:00am yesterday, some 30 hours after the accident. But all the 3.58 lakh litres of furnace oil the tanker had been carrying already spilled into the rivers and the adjacent cannels.
Read more here.
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user jcherry!
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Tuesday, December 30 2014
"Corn snake!"
"Where?"
"My side about 3 feet off the road"
I slammed on the brakes and Jake, piling out of the car, ran back about 40 feet and stooped to pick up a 30" long corn that I would never have seen. Young eyes are good! And Jake's eyes, having the image of a snake burned time again on the retina are super in seeing off-the-road serpents.
Actually, neither Jake nor I had any particular need for a corn snake, Pantherophis guttatus guttatus. We just happened to be in Levy County hoping to hear ornate chorus frogs (a species that is becoming difficult to find). Having arrived an hour or so before dusk, and since temperatures were still fairly warm, we decided to roadhunt for a while before heading for the swamps and marshes.
So far we had seen 2 crossing garter snakes of the blue-striped variety, a cottonmouth, and now this corn snake. We always enjoy taking photos, so a few minutes were spent doing so.
The corn snakes of western Levy County are rather distinctive, very pretty, and well worth photographing. The ground color is cinnamon, the saddles are crimson and are accentuated fore, aft, and on the sides by a few black scales that are themselves preceded by a variable number of white scales.
Did we need them? No. But they are just too pretty to pass by without at least a second glance. We could only hope that the hunt for chorus frogs would be this successful.
Continue reading "The cinnamon corns of Levy County"
![](/blog/uploads/Turtlebreather.jpg) A turtle with an unusual breathing method faces extinction.
From the Scientific American:
Few reptiles can breathe underwater. Australia is home to one of the exceptions, the white-throated snapping turtle (Elseya albagula), which can extract oxygen from water through its backside via a process called cloacal respiration. This unusual technique, shared by a handful of other turtle and fish species, gave the turtles an evolutionary advantage for millennia, allowing them to hide from predators underwater for days at a time.
Unfortunately, breathing out of your butt requires very specific conditions that no longer exist in the turtles’ only habitat, Queensland’s Connors River and three nearby catchments. Dams, weirs, agriculture and mining have left the water sluggish and full of sediment. That makes it significantly harder for the turtles—especially vulnerable juveniles—to stay underwater. As a result, predation has increased to the point where populations have crashed. The problem has gotten so bad that less than 1 percent of eggs and young turtles survive to adulthood and the species has now been declared critically endangered by the Australian government
Read more here.
"As three-time Soapbox Derby Champ Ronnie Beck says, 'Unguarded construction sites are a gold mine.'" -Bart Simpson
While my days of pirating materials from construction sites to build skate ramps and bike jumps are way, way behind me, my urge to re-use old building materials from my own scrap pile continues to fuel many of my reptile projects.
My pile contains all sorts of fencing, screen wire, unused materials, and wood scraps from 10 years of projects around the house, and it's always the first place I look when I have something that needs to be built.
Thus it was I found myself scanning the detritus of a hundred different tasks, looking for bits and pieces that would help me in my next reptile project: a tortoise tractor!
What is a tortoise tractor? It's a tortoise cage or pen on wheels that can be shuffled around the yard as needed to different spots, such as areas where the grass or weeds are greenest.
The term "tractor" here comes from the use of wheels to make the unit more mobile, from the poultry world where chicken tractors are used by many home breeders to house their small flocks. Tractors like this can be as simple or as advanced as you have the need, desire, and budget. Some are tall with fancy coops or hides at one end, others not so much.
Continue reading "Building your own tortoise tractor "
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