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.
Thursday, January 1 2015
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.
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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
![](/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.
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user ToucanJungle!
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Monday, December 29 2014
![](/blog/uploads/Croc12.26.14.jpg) Militant attacks on a sacred shrine have lowered the number of visitors to the site, which means the local crocodiles aren't being fed.
From Aljazeera America:
Iqbal has already paid bus fare and an entrance fee and given a donation to the shrine’s saint. Now she’s worried that the meat’s inflated price means she won’t have enough money to get home. The crocodiles’ caretaker, Shahan Mahmood, shakes his head sadly. He can’t afford to sell her the meat at a lower price.
“The crocodiles are starving,” he says. “No one is coming to feed them.”
In the last year, Mahmood and the rest of the shrine’s caretakers have buried two crocodiles. For two years, they say, very few of the eggs laid by the reptiles here have hatched. Iqbal forks over the change and watches as the caretaker walks to the makeshift iron fence to feed the closest crocodile. Mahmood says this is the first purchase of meat he has seen in three days.
Read more here.
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user reptillia69!
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Friday, December 26 2014
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user Snakeskii!
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Check out this video "Soft Shell Turtle?" submitted by kingsnake.com user freymann.
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Thursday, December 25 2014
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user ninthof9!
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Wednesday, December 24 2014
![](/blog/uploads/ProfWu.jpg) The largest amphibian in the UK is a Chinese salamander named Professor Wu.
From the London Evening Standard:
The 19-year-old has been brought over for a new conservation project to help research ways to prevent the giants from becoming extinct in the wild and was named after one of the project’s partners.
Professor Wu is the only Chinese giant salamander in the UK and can be seen in the Land of Giants exhibit at the zoo.
The animals are classified as the world’s largest amphibian and face threat of extinction because they are being over-harvested for human consumption.
Read more here.
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user Snakeskii!
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Tuesday, December 23 2014
![](/blog/uploads/Aquilops.jpg) A new dinosaur, the size of a large rabbit, is the earliest known horned dinosaur in North America.
From IFL Science:
Over a decade ago, paleontologists working in the Cloverly Formation of Carbon County, Montana, unearthed the partial skull, lower jaw, and teeth of a small horned dinosaur. Previous work has shown that horned dinosaurs (or neoceratopsians) originated and diversified in the Early Cretaceous, but findings from that time period in the North American fossil record were limited to isolated teeth and bits of the post-cranial skeleton. Beloved triceratops showed up much later.
Now, based on several features—including a hook on its beak-like structure (or rostral bone) and a long, pointed cavity over its cheek—the skull belongs to a previously unknown species, according to Andrew Farke from the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology and colleagues.
Read more here.
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user ginag!
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Monday, December 22 2014
![](/blog/uploads/TasTiger.jpg) Some scientists predict we are heading toward a mass extinction event.
From the Guardian:
A stark depiction of the threat hanging over the world’s mammals, reptiles, amphibians and other life forms has been published by the prestigious scientific journal, Nature. A special analysis carried out by the journal indicates that a staggering 41% of all amphibians on the planet now face extinction while 26% of mammal species and 13% of birds are similarly threatened.
Many species are already critically endangered and close to extinction, including the Sumatran elephant, Amur leopard and mountain gorilla. But also in danger of vanishing from the wild, it now appears, are animals that are currently rated as merely being endangered: bonobos, bluefin tuna and loggerhead turtles, for example.
In each case, the finger of blame points directly at human activities. The continuing spread of agriculture is destroying millions of hectares of wild habitats every year, leaving animals without homes, while the introduction of invasive species, often helped by humans, is also devastating native populations. At the same time, pollution and overfishing are destroying marine ecosystems.
Read more here.
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user pyromaniac!
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Friday, December 19 2014
Check out this video "Do Tortoises Eat Toes?" submitted by kingsnake.com user rugbyman2000.
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It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user corrinna!
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Thursday, December 18 2014
![](/blog/uploads/Dartfrog12.17.14.jpg) A newly identified poison dart frog is already threatened.
From mongabay.com:
“Many scientists are surprised about this discovery. People thought that it was difficult to find a new species of poison frog in this region of the country,” stated Abel Batista. “In Panama almost all areas are well investigated, and finding a such bright colored frog, gives us the impression that in Panama still a lot of research is needed, principally to investigate those remote areas, that nobody is going to do research."
“Much of the western slope of the Panamanian Caribbean has been poorly studied and is difficult to access,” Jaramillo further explained, “also, these frogs are very small, making them difficult to observe.”
The scientists celebrated the new species by naming it, Andinobates geminisae, after Marco Ponce's wife, Geminis Vargas, due to her unwavering support of his studies in Panamanian herpetology. However, celebration surrounding the discovery of this new species was short-lived as attention immediately shifted toward determining a special conservation plan to ensure the species’ survival.
Read more here.
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user Gregg_M_Madden!
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Wednesday, December 17 2014
![](/blog/uploads/Turtle12.16.14.jpg) A group of women is fighting to protect the habitat of Blanding's turtles from development.
From keysnet.com:
“We started out with as six little old ladies,” laughs Cheryl Anderson. “Now we’ve got eight little old ladies.”
But, she adds quickly, they’ve managed to rally support from across the county — and the country — to chip in with donations toward the estimated $220,000 legal cost of the case.
They’re trying to protect the point — a former military exercise area that for decades has been left to the birds, bees, bats, butterflies and reptiles.
Read more here.
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user Hwal!
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Tuesday, December 16 2014
![](/blog/uploads/Croc12.15.14.jpg) The population of Lower Keys crocodiles in Florida has rebounded enough for the animals to start to return to their native terrain.
From keysnet.com:
Reports of a Lower Keys crocodile, a species not long ago virtually unseen outside of North Key Largo, did not surprise Nancy Finley, manager of the Florida Keys National Wildlife Refuges Complex.
"We have crocs documented in various places. The lowest location in the Lower Keys right now probably is in the Boca Chica area," she said Friday. "But we have documented sightings from the Cudjoe and Saddlebuch areas, as well."
State and federal wildlife experts estimate the American crocodile population has grown from a near-extinction level in the mid-1970s of around 300 adults (most then in North Key Largo) to more than 2,000 adults today.
Read more here.
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user RamblinRose!
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Monday, December 15 2014
![](/blog/uploads/GTort.jpg) A captive breeding program and removal of invasive goats has helped Española Galapagos tortoises improve their numbers from 15 to 1500.
From treehugger.com:
How was the Española population of giant tortoise saved? The Galapagos Islands National Park Service began a program of captive breeding and reintroduction in 1973. Using an enclosure on another island to help some of the remaining tortoise to focus on breeding, they were successful in reintroducing more than 1500 of the captivity-raised giant tortoise offspring on the island of Española.
For this effort to be successful, the non-native goats had to be culled, and eventually exterminated. Otherwise, the life-sustaining catci could never have recovered:
"[The goats] would feast on the roots... and chew away at the bark, and eventually that would topple these cacti. And then they had an incredible buffet of maybe 500-1000 years of cactus growth, demolished in a week or two," explained Professor Gibbs, from the College of Environmental Science and Forestry at the State University of New York.
Read more here.
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user snakemanskynard!
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Friday, December 12 2014
Check out this video "Caution, Snakes!" submitted by kingsnake.com user smetlogik.
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It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user gshis!
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Thursday, December 11 2014
![](/blog/uploads/Titanboa.jpg) Have you seen the titanboa exhibit?
From NJ.com:
Twice as long as the longest snake alive today, Titanoboa was discovered in 2009 by a team of scientists working in one of the world's largest open-pit coal mines at Cerrejón in La Guajira, Colombia. Fossil plants, giant turtles and crocodiles found with it deep underground reveal the earliest known rainforest, teeming with life and dating to the Paleocene, the lost world that followed the demise of the dinosaurs.
"Titanoboa is a bigger, badder boa, and it will simply knock your socks off," said Jennifer Sontchi, Academy director of exhibits.
Read more here.
It's our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user peaceodarock!
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