Almost 200 sea turtles suffering from hypothermia were removed from chilly Massachusetts Bay and flown to warmer waters.

From the Orlando Sentinel:

Turtle rescues happen every year in late fall in the Northeast, but for reasons not yet known what's happening this year is "epic," said one of the nearly two dozen volunteers passing boxes of turtles like a bucket brigade.

"Statistically, I feel like we are out on Pluto," said Tony LaCasse, spokesman for the New England Aquarium's marine-animal hospital in Quincy, Mass., who fears the number of cold-stunned turtles could quadruple.

"We've been rescuing sea turtles for 25 years, and we are just absolutely shocked," LaCasse said.

Read more here.

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The snot otter, or eastern hellbender salamander, may get special protection in New York.

From Tech Times:

To achieve their goal, the environmentalists filed a petition with the Department of Environmental Conservation, citing several reasons why the eastern hellbender should be provided protection allocated for other endangered species.

"Hellbenders face numerous threats in New York, including sedimentation, low water quality, lack of habitat, and disease. Significant declines in hellbender populations in both the Allegheny and Susquehanna watersheds suggest that this species, without protection, could become extirpated in the near future in the Susquehanna drainage, and may also disappear from the Allegheny drainage," summarized the petition.

Endemic to New York, the eastern hellbender was given the "special concern species" status by the state's conservation officials back in 1983.

Read more here.

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One lucky animal narrowly escaped being a meal for a hungry crocodile.

From the Express:

The tiny turtle was thrown into the air by the predator, but managed to slip from its mouth and back into the water thanks to the wet surface of its shell.

Later, the lucky terrapin was spotted chilling out on a nearby rock after its near miss.

South African safari guide Mario Moreno, 49, snapped the exhilarating incident when visiting Lake Panic in Kruger National Park.

Read more here.

Western pond turtles have great friends at Sonoma State.

From the Record Searchlight:

Every year as a part of what’s called a “Head Start Program,” a team of researchers from Sonoma State collect turtle eggs from a pond, hatch the babies and send them to Turtle Bay, the San Francisco Zoo and the Oakland Zoo. Crews care for the babies until they’re big enough to avoid becoming another animal’s lunch.

“It gives them a bit of a push out there, a little more of an advantage because there’s so many invasive species of turtles that are pushing them out because they’re so much bigger than them,” Turtle Bay animal trainer Adrienne John said.

Read more here.

More than one thousand endangered sea turtles have been seized by Vietnamese environmental police.

From :

“The turtles were all dead,” an official of the Ministry of Public Security’s environmental police department, Le Hong Thai, said. “They were meant to be processed into handicrafts for export to China,” he added.

“The case is under investigation, so we cannot reveal the number of detainees or any other details,” he said.

Vietnamese law protects five native marine turtles, making it a criminal offense to hunt, trade, or store them.

Read the full story here.

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Researchers at the Yuma Proving Grounds are making headway tagging tortoises to study their movements.

From the Yuma Sun:

To track the tortoises and study their habits, biologists attach small VHF transmitters and GPS data loggers to the shell of each tortoise they find. They also paint a unique number on the tortoise’s shell, and file a small notch through one of the keratin scutes at the thin rear edge of the shell, which has a consistency similar to a human fingernail. All this is done after an examination of the tortoise’s health and weight.

Coaxing one of the creatures out of their shelters can be a challenge: if they feel threatened, they oftentimes wedge themselves against the rear wall and ceiling of their miniature caves, which can be yards deep.

“They’re shockingly strong,” said Hillary Hoffman, a herpetologist with the Arizona Game and Fish Department who has been coming to YPG since 2009. “If they don’t want to come out, they’re not coming out.”

Read more...

A just-published study has turned scientific concensus upside down by suggesting turtles aren't very closely related to snakes and lizards after all. Instead, their closests cousins are birds, crocodiles, and dinosaurs, a group researchers are now calling "Archelosauria," which is believed to be the largest group of vertebrates to be assigned a new scientific name.

From Phys.org:

A team of scientists, including researchers from the California Academy of Sciences, has reconstructed a detailed "tree of life" for turtles. The specifics of how turtles are related—to one another, to other reptiles, and even to dinosaurs—have been hotly debated for decades. Next generation sequencing technologies in Academy labs have generated unprecedented amounts of genetic information for a thrilling new look at turtles' evolutionary history. These high-tech lab methods revolutionize the way scientists explore species origins and evolutionary relationships, and provide a strong foundation for future looks into Earth's fossil record.

Research results, appearing in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, describe how a new genetic sequencing technique called Ultra Conserved Elements (UCE) reveal turtles' closest relatives across the animal kingdom.

Read more here.

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School children in Ireland spent time handling Rascal the Burmese python at the Reptile Conservation Zoo.

From the Independent:

The scary encounter was to celebrate the launch of the zoo’s search for an Irish Junior Conservation Hero.

The new initiative is to help raise awareness about the rapid rate of extinction that is wiping out unique species across the planet.

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An exotic pet hospital in Australia saved a monitor lizard that was hit by a car, and warns drivers to keep an eye out.

From the Daily Telegraph:

“If you see one hurt ... it’s best to be cautious and call an expert.

“Also, try and look out for them on the roads. They tend to move slowly across the road when they want to warm up or look for food.”

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What does the evolution of the tortoise shell have to do with breathing?

From Phys.org:

Lead author Dr Tyler Lyson of Wits University's Evolutionary Studies Institute, the Smithsonian Institution and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science said: "Tortoises have a bizarre body plan and one of the more puzzling aspects to this body plan is the fact that tortoises have locked their ribs up into the iconic tortoise shell. No other animal does this and the likely reason is that ribs play such an important role in breathing in most animals including mammals, birds, crocodilians, and lizards."

Instead tortoises have developed a unique abdominal muscular sling that wraps around their lungs and organs to help them breathe. When and how this mechanism evolved has been unknown.

Read more...