The intrepid researchers at the University of Oklahoma tested the old adage about how if you put a frog in boiling water he'll jump right out, but if you put him in cold water and slowly warm it, he'll be lulled into a false sense of security until it's too late. What did they find out?

From io9.com:

Dr. Victor Hutchison, at the University of Oklahoma, dispelled the myth when he studied frogs' reaction to temperature changes in water. He followed the procedure outlined for a proper frog-boiling; put a frog in cold water, and gradually warmed the water up. (He stopped well before the boiling point.) The frogs most definitely did jump out when the water got too warm for them.

Read the rest here. (And no, no frogs were boiled to test the other part of the adage.)

Photo: kingsnake.com user coluberking25

Baby, it's cold out there. But are your efforts to keep your reptiles warm putting them -- and you! -- in danger?

From an article written for kingsnake.com by Susan Jacob:

My tortoise and my lizards have extended time out in the sunshine in the summer. Once fall arrives, it's time to start getting everyone indoors. Here in New York it is not good reptile weather after late September. The lizards have their own set ups, but the sulcata tortoise, being as big as she is, is in a pen in my boiler/laundry room. I have 80-degree temperatures in that room for most of the winter, with an occasional drop when the weather is really cold. Most of the animals can take that and I don't keep the heat too high at night.

I always keep the tortoise on fresh timothy or alfalfa hay and I switch off in the winter when she isn't getting the green grass of the lawn to graze on. In the past few winters I used an UVB/heat bulb over her pen, but always had a problem getting it to stay put. I use the metal light bulb holders with the clips and it seems they always slip and fall sideways directing the heat to the other direction or worse into the plastic wall of the pen. I meant to buy a holder to keep the light fixture upright, but kept putting it off.

I was doing laundry at the time in the basement and that day the tortoise was hiding under her hay, so I adjusted the UVB/heat bulb in her direction, using the clip on the back of the fixture to attach it to my husband's workbench, which is along side her pen. Ten minutes later, I was supposed to leave to go food shopping, but had put it off a bit to go online and check my email. Thank God I did, because that little sidetrack probably saved my house. I was upstairs for maybe five minutes, tops, when the downstairs fire/smoke alarm went off. I was busy on the computer and it took about three seconds to realize what it was. I was thinking it was the alarm on the washer when it goes out of balance. When it finally hit me I took off for the basement. I swear I took the last four steps in a leap, twisting my calf muscle in the process.

When I rushed into the reptile room the lamp had popped off and was lying fully on and operational down in the hay in the tortoise enclosure. The room was smoky and the hay was blackened and smoldering. I grabbed the light and put it on the floor and grabbed the entire armful of blackened hay and ran and dumped it in the slop sink and turned on the water. It had not ignited in a flash, but I believe if I had been a few minutes later it would have flashed into flames. The entire pen, my laundry room with hanging clothes and all my lizard litter enclosures would have been on fire. My basement ceiling is only six feet, so if the hay had blazed upwards and caught the ceiling I would never have been able to stop it.

Read the rest here!

Photo: kingsnake.com user StephaneA

Someone thought it would be funny to release nine baby crocodiles into an Australian swimming pool, but it cost one of the babies his life.

From the North West Star:

The 25-30 centimetre crocodiles are still at the pool in a turtle tank waiting to be picked up by local snake and reptile handler Gavin Lawrence.

He said what started as a harmless prank ended up killing one of the baby crocodiles.

"It's annoying they've dumped them in the pool," he said.

"The chlorine is no good for them and at the end of the day it's sort of reckless."

Mrs Rodriquez said she suspected the baby crocodile succumbed to the heat after it was found after closing time outside of the pool.

Read the full story here.

Photo: North West Star

Each year, a German conservation organization called NABU lists those animals it considers most in need of protection in the coming year. This year, one of those animals is the yellow-bellied toad:



See the rest of the animals NABU thinks need special protection here.

Photo: dw.de

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



Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!

Scientific American has the top ten weird animal stories of 2013, including this amphibious tale:

For Emei moustache toads, a top-quality moustache is an essential, and violent, weapon … During the breeding season, each male grows 10 to 16 spines. "They are as sharp as a pencil lead" says Cameron Hudson of the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, adding that the frogs "do try to stab you a bit when you pick them up".

The males fought underwater, head-butting each other in the belly to drive their spines into the other toad's flesh. "I've never seen any of them kill each other," says Hudson. "But they get a lot of puncture wounds."

Watch the video below, then see the rest of the top ten here.

This image of Tokay Christmas, uploaded by kingsnake.com user bloodpython_MA, is our herp photo of the day!



Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!

Let it snow (rosy boas), let it snow! This image, uploaded by kingsnake.com user bloodpython_MA, is our Christmas Eve herp photo of the day!



Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!

This image of a Festive Iguana, uploaded by kingsnake.com user Really, is our herp photo of the day!



Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!

Birds do it. Crocodiles do it. Dinosaurs did it. And now it looks like monitor lizards are in the one-way, flow-through breathing club, too. That's the word from researcher Emma Schachner in a recently-published article in the prestigious journal Nature.



From the awesome Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week blog:

After 1972, biologists had almost four decades to get used to the idea that birds had this amazing miraculous lung thingy that was unique in the animal kingdom. Then in 2010, Colleen Farmer and Kent Sanders of the University of Utah blew our collective minds by demonstrating that alligators have unidirectional flow-through lungs, too. That means that far from being a birds-only thing, unidirectional flow-through lung ventilation was probably primitive for Archosauria, and was therefore the default state for non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, the other ornithodirans and the hordes of croc-line archosaurs.

The birdy-ness of crocodilian lungs was further cemented earlier this year when Schachner et al. described the lung morphology and airflow patterns in Nile crocs, which have lungs that are if anything even more birdlike than those of gators. I got to review that paper and blogged about it here.

Now…well, you read the headline. Monitor lizards have unidirectional airflow through their lungs, too. This falls at about the halfway point between "whatisthisIdonteven"–I mean, dude, unidirectional airflow in friggin’ lizards!–and “yeah, that makes a weird sort of sense”. Because to sum up a lot of science unscientifically, monitors just kick a little more ass than other squamates. They have crazy high aerobic capacities for animals that aren’t birds or mammals, they’re ecologically versatile and geographically widespread, they get waaay bigger than any other extant lizards (Komodo dragons) and until recently got even bigger than that (Megalania). Is it going too far to link the success of varanids with their totally pimpin’ flow-through lungs? Maybe, maybe not. But it seems like fertile ground for further study.

Read the full story here.

Photo: Emma Schachner

From Scientific American, an amazing overview of how male veiled chameleons display aggression, including turning their bodies into billboards and, of course, changing colors.



Check out the video below, and then read about all the latest research into how color changes look to chameleon eyes here.



Photo: Russell Ligon/Scientific American

Thirteen-year-old Jackston Stone was born without feet, and suffered years of painful surgeries. Now he's walking on snake-like prosthetic legs, thanks to the Shriners of Salt Lake City.



From ABC News 4 Utah:

That new choice meant wearing two prosthetics legs, and Jackson wanted his to look like snakes.

"They're like me," Jackson Stone said.

"How's that?" Reporter Brian Carlson asked.

"I have no feet, they have no feet," he said.

Snakes are part family business. A tattoo artist created the design for Jackson's dream legs, but prosthetic maker couldn't do it.

"So they brought me the art work and it was on canvas which was too heavy for me to apply the prosthesis," said Eric Green, Prosthetist.

That's when Shriners stepped in.

"So I said ya know, I might be able to help," said William "Mr. Bill" Voorhies, Shriners of Salt Lake City.

William Voorhies contacted fellow Shriner Bob Shupe who runs a printing company. He put the design on surface that worked.

"Fortunately our company was able to take that need and develop it," said Bob Shupe, Past Potentate.

The prosthetic maker turned Jackson's snake legs into reality. He loves them, and his friends do too.

"They think it's really cool because a tattoo artist designed it and none of them can get tattoos," said Jackson Stone.

Read the rest here.