The Sands Casino Resort in Bethlehem, Penn., is adamant that there are not now and have never been any snakes in their casino. Any rumors to the contrary, said a spokesperson, are just the result of a Facebook rumor related to the just-ending Chinese Year of the Snake; the only snake eyes at Sands are on the dice.

From LeighValleyLive.com:

State police, who operate the Sands Casino Station inside the South Side Bethlehem facility, report "absolutely zero snakes in this place," Trooper William Ortiz said.

The rumor, as passed on to The Express-Times, indicates someone went to the doctor with what was believed to be a bite; the doctor said it's a snakebite and asked immediately whether the patient had been to the Bethlehem casino.

Sands Bethlehem, owned by Las Vegas Sands Corp., issued a statement today saying, "There have been no reported incidents of snakes on our property. We do not allow any animals on property with the exception of service animals."

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A good Samaritan in Brooklyn thought he'd found an abandoned baby in a duffel bag in a trash can. Turned out to be three boa constrictors.

Maybe if New York City wasn't such an inhospitable place for herps and other "non-fluffy" pets, things like this wouldn't happen.

The good news: A home is being sought for the snakes, instead of the usual deadly solution.

Photo (not of snake in story): kingsnake.com user minicopilot

After the death of Lonesome George, the last known Pinta Island Galapagos tortoise, the extinction toll on the species seemed irreversible. That may not be the case, however, says Michael Russello, an associate professor of biology at the University of British Columbia.

From the Harvard Gazette:

The findings prompted a larger 2008 expedition, in which teams sampled 1,669 individuals, drawing blood, noting the locations, and marking the tortoises so they could be monitored after analysis. The work found 84 hybrids of Floreana ancestry — of which 30 were less than 15 years old — and 17 with Pinta ancestry. A follow-up expedition is planned for next year to search the area where those populations were concentrated, hoping to find pureblood individuals and bring them to a captive breeding center on Santa Cruz Island. If all goes well, those individuals will serve as founders of a restored population.

"Human activity may have led to the preservation of lineages of species thought extinct," Russello said.

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Six endangered green sea turtles are being treated for the fibropapilloma virus, which has left them blind and unable to survive in the wild.

From NBC Miami:

"When the Fibropapilloma virus shows as tumors on the eyes, if it grows over the cornea on both eyes, the turtle has no vision and has no chance of survival," said Bette Zirckelbach, manager of the Turtle Hospital in the Florida Keys.

Zirckelbach and others from the Turtle Hospital transported the animals in their 'turtle ambulance' to Pinecrest Veterinary Hospital for care with Dr. Lorraine Karpinski.

Read more here...

A new study suggests microscopic organisms may help amphibians fight off chytridiomycosis.

From Phys.org:

An international team of researchers has made important progress in understanding the distribution of the deadly amphibian chytrid pathogen. In some regions, the deadly impact of the pathogen appears to be hampered by small predators, naturally occurring in freshwater bodies. These micropredators may efficiently reduce the number of free-swimming infectious stages (zoospores) by consuming them. This natural behavior will reduce the infection pressure on potential amphibian hosts and a goes a long way towards explaining the occurrence of chytridiomycosis, at least in temporal climatic regions. These results were published in the renowned scientific journal Current Biology. The team of researchers state that their results raise the hope of successfully fighting chytridiomycosis, nowadays one of the most deadly wildlife diseases.

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Photo: kingsnake.com user trinacliff

In an effort to deter poaching, conservations are permanently marking the shells of the rare ploughshare tortoise. Their goal is to brand every captive breeding animal, plus the estimated 300 wild members of the species.

From the LA Times:

The booming illegal international wildlife trade forced conservationists to do the unthinkable Tuesday: Brand the golden domes of two of the rarest tortoises on Earth to reduce their black market value by making it easier for authorities to trace them if stolen.

"It's heartbreaking that it's come to this, but it's the right thing to do," Paul Gibbons, managing director of the nonprofit Turtle Conservancy's Behler Chelonian Center in Ventura County, said as he gently placed a 30-pound adult female ploughshare tortoise on a small table.

With a steady hand and an electric engraving tool, he carved an identification code on the high, rounded shell as the creature with weary eyes and gleaming carapace peered calmly into the distance. The tortoise was branded for life, which in her case would be roughly 160 years.

Read the full story here.

Two tortoises, named Samson and Goliath, went on the lam from their Arizona home last year. One was found right away, but the other stayed missing for six months, until his new family, 30 miles away, ran an ad looking for his original owners.

Now he's back home thanks to a microchip, and his family is trying to figure out what kind of enclosure they need to keep Samson and Goliath from hitting the road again.

Read the whole story on ABC News.

Photo: ABC News

This image of a Leaf-Tailed Gecko, uploaded by kingsnake.com user crestedman, is our herp photo of the day!



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Scientists have long believed lizards are asocial, but research by Cissy Ballen, Richard Shine, and Mats Olsson of the University of Sydney using veiled chameleons suggests the lizards are a fairly social species after all.



From Wired Science:

Ballen and her colleagues staged interactions between pairs of chameleons when the animals were two months old. The researchers found the two groups didn’t differ in aggression, but chameleons raised in isolation were more submissive than their siblings raised in groups. The isolation-reared chameleons tended to flee or curl into a ball during confrontations with other chameleons, and they adopted darker and less green colors than the group-reared chameleons. The researchers also tested the foraging ability of the animals, and found that group-reared chameleons seized their prey (crickets) faster than isolation-reared chameleons.

Studies like this add to an increasing appreciation of the flexibility and complexity of reptile behavior.

Read more here.

Photo: kingsnake.com user 1sun

What's beautiful? The sweet sounds of the Harding University choir as heard in the Reptile House at the Cincinnati Zoo.

Watch below:

It's hard to know how we missed this froggy story from last fall, but we did.

From the Atlantic:

NASA's Minotaur V rocket blasted off from its launchpad at a spaceport in Virginia, carrying the LADEE spacecraft on the first leg of its trip from Earth to the moon. The scene that resulted was beautiful. It was inspiring. It was epic.

It was also not without its casualties.

The picture above, snapped on Friday by one of the remote cameras NASA had set up for the big launch, captured a creature that found itself, alas, caught in the crossfire of humanity's drive to explore: a frog. A possibly very large, and certainly very surprised, frog. The launch setting, NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, is located on an island that is essentially a six-mile-long salt marsh; this little guy, it seems, happened to be in the wrong place at the wrongest possible time.

Read the rest here.

Photo: NASA/Wallops/Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport with Chris Heller

Texas is considering banning the gassing of rattlesnakes and other animals in the state, but the Texas Parks and Wildlife Dept. doesn't think a ban will impact the barbaric "rattslesnake round-ups," which torture and kill rattlesnakes, but rarely use gas.

From NPR:

Pouring gasoline or other noxious chemicals into the earth to force rattlesnakes and other animals from their underground homes has been a tactic of some hunters and snake wranglers for years. But it has a harmful effect on the environment and wildlife. Now, Texas Parks and Wildlife (TPWD) is considering following in the path of 30 other states and banning the practice in most circumstances.

The technique, known as "gassing" is used to capture and/or kill many different types of animals, including prairie dogs. But its greatest defenders appear to be those involved in "rattlesnake roundups" that are a tradition in parts of the state.

[....]

As far as the prospect that banning the practice will end the "rattlesnake roundup" tradition in Texas, TPWD says that's overblown.

"Many rattlesnake events currently discourage the collection of snakes by gassing," says the Department.

Read more here.

Photo: kingsnake.com user kevinjudd

This image of a Frilled Dragon, uploaded by kingsnake.com user rumor150, is our herp photo of the day!



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The LA Times has the scoop on a new study from Nature on the coloration of ancient reptiles:

Ancient leatherback turtles, ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs were a rather staid and formal black, maybe with some gray, according to a study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.



The study offers the first direct chemical evidence of pigmentation in the three species, and illustrates an example of convergent evolution, when animals separately develop the same adaptive features.

Read the rest here.

Artist's rendering: Stefan Solberg/LA Times