If you ever needed proof that no good deed goes unpunished, just read this story of a Florida man bitten by a rattlesnake while helping a turtle get out of traffic.

From the Sun-Sentinel:

The 24-year-old man, whose name was not immediately released, and a friend were driving on Interstate 75 in west Broward County when they saw a turtle crossing the highway.

At a point west of the interchange, where I-75 meets Interstate 595, they pulled over. The man got out, grabbed the turtle and carried it to a grassy area on the side of the highway.

"When he reached down to put the turtle in the grass, that's when the snake bit him," said Capt. Jeff Fobb, of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Venom Response Team.

Read the full story here.

Photo: Miami-Dade Fire Rescue

For 50 years, the Pinocchio anole, Anolis proboscis, was believed to be extinct. Now researchers have confirmed the species still exists in the forests of Ecuador.

From Mother Nature News:

After searching for the long-nosed animal for three years, a team of photographers and researchers found the lizard recently in a stretch of pristine cloud forest in the northwest part of the country, said Alejandro Arteaga, a co-founder of the educational and ecotourism company Tropical Herping, which conducted the search for the lizard.

Also called the Pinocchio anole (an anole is a type of lizard), the animal is named after a certain dishonest wooden puppet and was first discovered in 1953, Arteaga said. But wasn't seen between the 1960s and 2005, when an ornithologist saw one crossing a road in the same remote area in northwest Ecuador. This is only the third time scientists have spotted it since 2005, Arteaga added.

Read the rest here.

Photo: Alejandro Arteaga/Tropical Herping

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When we talk about "snake handling" here on kingsnake.com, we're not talking about religion. But today on National Public Radio, they are.

From NPR:

Worshiping with snakes dates back more than 100 years, but today, the major Pentecostal denominations denounce the practice.

There are an estimated 125 snake-handling churches scattered across Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas and Appalachia, where the tradition is strongest. Snakes in church are against the law everywhere but West Virginia, though in most states it's a misdemeanor offense the authorities don't bother with.

[...]

There are the five signs often practiced in snake handling churches, including the sipping of poison such as strychnine or lye as a test of their faith.

[Pastor Jamie] Coots has been bitten nine times by venomous snakes. Each time he refused medical attention. Half of his right middle finger is gone as a result of a fang from a yellow rattler. In 1995, a woman who was bit in his church refused to go to the hospital; she died on Coots' couch while they prayed over her.

Such is the conviction of his belief that Coots has agreed not to call EMS if [his son] Little Cody is bitten. "He has been bit five times by cottonmouths, and he has already told me, 'Dad, I'll never go to a doctor,' " says his father.

Read and listen to the rest of the story here.

Photo: NPR

Nine baby ocellate mountain vipers (Vipera wagneri) are helping their species stay off the brink of extinction, thanks to the efforts of the St. Louis Zoo.



From Scientific American:

In 2009, with populations down at least 80 percent and a new dam on the Aras River threatening to destroy a large portion of the snake’s habitat, the International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the ocellate mountain viper as “critically endangered.”

[...] The Saint Louis Zoo coordinates a Species Survival Plan (based on the programs created by the American Association of Zoos and Aquariums) for the ocellate mountain viper, which includes a cooperative breeding program among several zoos. There aren’t many zoos that hold these snakes, though. Saint Louis is one of only three in the U.S. with the species in their collections, and they have the majority: Including the nine snakes born on August 16, Saint Louis Zoo has 23 of the 28 ocellate mountain vipers in the U.S.

The snakes are considered critically endangered in the wild. Read the full story here.

Photo: Mark Wanner, Saint Louis Zoo

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This image of a Chameleon, uploaded by kingsnake.com user ToucanJungle, is our herp photo of the day!



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Before the age of the dinosaurs, a mass extinction event occurred that destroyed 70 percent of all terrestrial vertebrate species and almost all aquatic species. It took as long as 10 million years for life on earth to recover from what is now known as the end-Permian extinction event.

After that recovery but before the rise of the dinosaurs, the ancestors of modern lizards and snakes emerged.

From the University College London:

Two new fossil jaws discovered in Vellberg, Germany provide the first direct evidence that the ancestors of lizards, snakes and tuatara (known collectively as lepidosaurs), were alive during the Middle Triassic period – around 240 million years ago.

The new fossil finds predate all other lepidosaur records by 12 million years. The findings are published in BMC Evolutionary Biology.

The international team of scientists who dated the fossil jaws have provided evidence that lepidosaurs first appeared after the end-Permian mass extinction event, a period when fauna began to recover and thrive in the more humid climate.



Lead author Dr Marc Jones, who conducted the research at UCL, explained: "The Middle Triassic represents a time when the world has recovered from the Permian mass extinction but is not yet dominated by dinosaurs. This is also when familiar groups, such as frogs and lizards, may have first appeared."

The small teeth and lightly built jaws suggest that the extinct animal preyed on small insects. The new fossils are most closely related to the tuatara, a lizard-like reptile.

[...]

The new fossil jaws can improve molecular dating estimates of when reptiles began to diversify into snakes, lizard and tuatara, and when the first modern lizards inhabited the earth. Previous estimates have varied over a range of 64 million years and the team are keen to help narrow this down.

"Some previous estimates based on molecular data suggested that lizards first evolved 290 million years ago," said second author Cajsa Lisa Anderson, University of Gothenburg. "To a palaeontologist this seems way too old and our revised molecular analysis agrees with the fossils."

Revised molecular dating in light of this new fossil find now suggests lizards began to diversify into most of the modern groups we recognise today, such as geckos and skinks, less than 150 million years ago in the Cretaceous period, following continental fragmentation.

Read more here.

Photos: Marc Jones/UCL

Some programs to help troubled young people have seen improvement in school and interpersonal relationships after the children and teens have worked with dogs or horses. Now snakes and other "misunderstood animals" can be added to that list.

From Trails Carolina:

Studies have shown that animal assisted therapy and relationships with animal companions in general provide an improvement in physical, emotional and psychological well-being. Trails advanced this research by building a curriculum where students interact and engage with misunderstood animals and parallel this experience to their own.

“We learned as children to hate snakes, turtles, possums and the like and we’ve been taught that they’re bad,” says Steve O’Neil, Trails’ Ecology Expert. “Most of our students come in with a lot of fear and within minutes they’re holding a snake. Overcoming their fear and misconceptions about these animals also helps our students see themselves in a different light.”

Similar to these animals, the troubled youth of Trails are facing their own misunderstandings of the world and how people perceive them. By gaining a better understanding of the ecological value of these misunderstood animals students gain a better understanding of their own value and how their behaviors and actions are often misunderstood. This curriculum helps students build confidence in themselves and better understand how to communicate with others.

Read more here.

A teeny tiny little Mandarin rat snake grounded a Qantas Boeing 747 in Sydney last weekend.

From ABC News:

Staff found the 20-centimeter (8-inch) Mandarin Rat Snake in the passenger cabin near the door late Sunday before passengers were due to board the flight bound for Tokyo from Sydney International Airport, Qantas said in a statement.

Australia's flagship airline said passengers were given hotel rooms overnight and left Sydney on a replacement plane Monday morning. Qantas said the original jet would be fumigated before returning to service in case there were other snakes on board.

The snake was taken by quarantine officials for analysis.

The Agriculture Department said the snake, a species that grows to an average 1.2 meters (4 feet), had been euthanized, "as exotic reptiles of this kind can harbor pests and diseases not present in Australia."

Read the full story here.

Photo: kingsnake.com user mattroconnor

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It's not often a veterinarian who writes about pets for a mainstream newspaper devotes an entire column not just to a pet snake, but a species that's not kept as a pet all that often. But Modesto, Calif., veterinarian Dr. Jeff Kahler did just that in a recent piece in the Modesto Bee, where he recounted the story of a wart snake brought to his practice because his eyes had clouded over.

From the article:

Bando is a 3-year-old, 6 1/2-foot snake - and not just any kind of snake. He is a wart snake or sometimes called elephant trunk snake. Bando's caretaker, Randy, has had Bando for two years, having purchased him from a California reptile dealer.

He is housed in an aquarium that is temperature-controlled and aquatic. Bando spends almost all of his time in the water, including feeding time. His diet consists of goldfish and he is feed once a week. Randy reports that Bando has had no problems in the past two years but recently appears to have developed an issue with his eyes.

Over the past few weeks, Bando's eyes have become more and more opaque. They are now to the point where Randy suspects Bando cannot see.

Initially Randy thought Bando's eyes were clouding over as they normally do right before he sheds his skin but even after a shed occurred, the opacity in Bando's eyes remained. Randy has yet to find a veterinarian to examine Bando so he took to the internet and eventually got me involved.

To understand what might be going on with Bando's eyes, it helps to understand a bit about the natural history of his species. For you aficionados, wart snakes belong to the genus Acrochordus, which includes three species of snakes. I suspect Bando is a Java wart snake because of his large size.

These snakes are native to parts of southeast Asia and spend most of their time in water. Their diet consists of aquatic life --- especially fish --- and they have a rough scale pattern, which aids in gripping fish as they coil around them when eating. In my clinical experience, these are very rare snakes in captivity. I personally have only worked with them in zoo collections.

There are many possibilities that could cause Bando's eye issues. But it is my suspicion that Bando's eye problem is directly related to his captive environment and, more specifically, the water he is kept in.

Click here to find out what's wrong with Bando!

Photo: Smacdonald at en.wikipedia, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Four new species of legless lizards have been added to the one previously known member of the group Anniella, reports the journal Breviora.

From the LA Times:

Anniella are pretty small animals, about as thick as a pencil and rarely more than 8 inches long. They spend their lives wiggling beneath loose, sandy soil, snacking on bugs and larvae.

They don't move fast or far, and the researchers say they may spend their whole lives in an area about the size of your dining room table.

Aside from that, scientists still don't know much about them.

"They are one of the most poorly studied reptiles in California," [Cal State Fullerton researcher James] Parham said. "Because they live under the sand, you can't see what they are doing, and you can't even do a mark-and-recapture because you can't reliably capture these things."

Parham and his coauthor Theodore Papenfuss, a herpetologist with the UC Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, have been scouring the state for legless lizards for 15 years. When they began their research, only one type of legless lizard was known to live in California.

One of the four newly identified species of Anniella, the Southern California legless lizard, was found under some dead leaves in dunes at the west end of Los Angeles International Airport.

The Bakersfield legless lizard was found in three vacant lots in downtown Bakersfield.

The southern Sierra legless lizard was spotted in three dry canyons on the edge of the Mojave Desert, and the Temblor legless lizard was found in the oil fields around the city of Taft, on the southwestern edge of the San Joaquin Valley.

To find these lizards, the scientists scattered 2,000 pieces of cardboard and plywood throughout the state to create moist, cool areas, which appeal to the lizards. Then they returned months later to see if any of the lizards had shown up.

Read the full story here.