Emily Merola can relate. The Hooper native and psychologist is Hogle Zoo’s primary reptile keeper. She takes care of 52-year-old Kronk, a huge Aldabra tortoise that sometimes follows her around like a puppy during feeding time, Bill and Hillary — the crocs, not the political couple — and an assortment of snakes, lizards, turtles, tortoises and amphibians.

"You have to work with reptiles to really appreciate the grand scale of them," she said. "They are unlike any animal that I have ever worked with before. They are kind of a challenge. You can’t read them like an ape or a giraffe. They don’t have facial expressions. They are the most laid back animals you could ever work with, and the most difficult."

Merola began her Hogle Zoo career volunteering and then serving an internship. She became part of the staff called Eco Explorers that took live animals or exhibits around the grounds and interacted with visitors. She took a seasonal position and, two years later, earned her way into the reptile supervisor position.

An endangered Kemp's ridley sea turtle was fitted with a black hood and held quietly Tuesday as it received laser therapy for a joint injury that, under normal circumstances, could keep it in the South Carolina Aquarium's Sea Turtle Hospital for as long as two years.

The turtle, stunned by last winter's cold, has developed a bone infection. The aquarium's new laser will ease the creature's pain and is expected to reduce its recovery time.

Infected snakes have been located in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Illinois has seen multiple fatalities over the last several years in a threatened snake species – the eastern massasuaga. While the total number of deaths is small, so is the total snake population in northern states like Illinois.

“Even a few individuals can be significant,” TWRA biologist Brian Flock writes in an email.

One of the leading researchers on the topic is wildlife veterinary Matthew Allender, who says the fungus that’s being discovered is often found on captive reptiles like bearded dragons. He told the University of Illinois News Bureau that finding infections in the wild is significant.

The global population of hawksbills, named for their narrow head and shape of their beak, has dropped by 80 per cent in just three generations despite international conventions banning hunting and trade.

They have been threatened in recent years by human encroachment, particularly construction and coastline activity that threaten coral reefs, one of the turtles’ natural habitats.

Other threats include fishing, pollution and eggs being stolen from nesting beaches.

The turtles released at the Mangrove Natural Reserve in Khor Kalba were found by members of the public and taken to Sharjah Aquarium, which has been running a programme to protect and rehabilitate the creatures for the past three years.

Ismail Al Bloushi, a marine biologist, has led a Sharjah Aquarium team rehabilitating turtles for their release.

Something spectacular is coming to Zoo Atlanta, and the evolution officially began on June 4, 2013. At a gathering of elected and appointed officials, community partners and Zoo Atlanta leaders and staff, ceremonial shovels broke ground on Scaly Slimy Spectacular: The Amphibian and Reptile Experience, scheduled to open in late 2015.

Scaly Slimy Spectacular will represent the largest fundraising effort in the Zoo’s history. Zoo Atlanta has raised just under $22 million as part of an ongoing capital campaign to fund the roughly 14,000 square-foot experience, with a goal of raising an additional $1.4 million over the next few months.

“We’re standing on the cornerstone of a new era for Zoo Atlanta. Our community has shown willingness to make a significant investment in the future of the Zoo,” said Raymond B. King, President and CEO. “We hope that as the public aspect of our capital campaign continues, Zoo Members, families and guests will also want to play a personal role in seeing history being made with what will truly be a world-class experience for Atlantans and Georgians.”

Winter Johnson Group, a partnership of the Atlanta-based Winter Construction and Johnson Construction Services, has been selected as general contractor; Scaly Slimy Spectacular will be the company’s 22nd construction project. Project architects are Torre Design Group Consortium, Ltd.

Scaly Slimy Spectacular will replace the 51-year-old World of Reptiles, the Zoo’s oldest building still in use for public exhibits. The new complex will be erected on a separate site which has not been accessible to the general public in decades.

There are more than 450 reptiles and amphibians at Zoo Atlanta, but a sizable portion of these animals have not been on exhibit as a result of space constraints in the World of Reptiles. Scaly Slimy Spectacular will provide naturalistic new homes for members of the existing collection while introducing large crocodilians and other exciting new arrivals. The complex will feature interactive indoor venues and state-of-the-art exhibits showcasing the amazing extremes in size, speed, color and behavior that make reptiles and amphibians such compelling animals to observe, study, and protect.

Some laws are in place to protect the dragon-like creatures from unsustainable hunting and harvesting for the exotic pet trade. But a new study warns that dealers may be overexploiting the reptiles, taking advantage of the scant information conservations have on many of these species in the wild.

In a report in the journal Herpetological Conservation and Biology, researchers assessed the distribution, threats and conservation status of species of monitor lizards that live in Southeast Asia and New Guinea.

[...]

Study researcher Mark Auliya, of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Conservation (UFZ) in Leipzig, explained in a statement that the lizards draw high profits because of their looks and rarity.

"Quite often four-digit amounts are paid, for pairs occasionally even five-digit sums," Auliya said. "Even the large Komodo dragons are illegally traded, although international trade regulations under CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) do not permit commercial trade of wild specimens of this species."

During the spring of 2011, the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife in collaboration with the Orianne Society and The Nature Conservancy began a two-year study of the summer range of the timber rattlesnake in western Rutland County.

To that end, transmitters were implanted in the body cavity of twenty-two adult snakes. From late spring through early autumn, the snakes were radio tracked across rough terrain west of Otter Creek. Now that that phase of the project has ended, and Dr. MacLachlan, who had inserted the transmitters, is removing them, as well as taking skin and blood samples from each rattlesnake to check for pathogens.

The day I observed the procedure, the operating room was well lit , with a sink in one corner flanked on both sides by a pink linoleum countertop. The floor was a soft white and textured like the back of a snake. There were cupboards, tanks, computers, glass-fronted cabinets filled with a diversity of surgical instruments, and an aluminum operating table situated beneath a hose descending from the ceiling. The hose, called a gas scavenger, delivers both anesthesia to put the snake to sleep and oxygen to bring it back. There’s a heating pad covered by a blue terry-cloth towel on the operating table to keep the snakes warm.

It’s a question so obvious a schoolchild can ask it, but for more than a century, consensus has eluded the paleontologists and evolutionary biologists who study the reptiles and their bony carapaces. Now, a group of scientists at Yale University and the Smithsonian Institution argue that a reptile fossil that’s been gathering dust in museum collections is actually a turtle ancestor, and that its reduced number of ribs, distribution of muscles, and T-shaped ribs could help settle the question once and for all.

In a new paper published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, they unveil the argument that a 260 million-year-old creature called Eunotosaurus africanus was a turtle ancestor, hoping to help resolve a debate that has split the scientific community for decades.

Scientists at the Vancouver Aquarium have sprung into action, as part of an effort to prevent an endangered frog population from becoming extinct in eastern British Columbia.

The Rocky Mountain population of northern leopard frogs plummeted by the millions in the 1970s, and only two populations are now known to exist near Creston, in B.C.’s West Kootenay region.

The aquarium announced Thursday its scientists have, for the first time in Canada, bred the species in an aquarium setting and created an assurance — or backup — population.

Dennis Thoney, the aquarium’s director of animal operations, said officials plan to release about 2,000 tadpoles Monday in the Columbia Marshes near the east Kootenay city of Cranbrook, while maintaining a population at the aquarium.

The roughly 6-pound, foot-long animal nicknamed “Charley” was first located by a fisherman who spotted it floating in a patch of weeds 22 miles off of the Middle Keys.

Upon examination veterinarians discovered that Charley had ingested a small piece of plastic, causing its digestive system to become impacted.

Richie Maroetti, Turtle Hospital founder and director, said in a statement that turtles sometimes confuse plastic with one of their favorite food sources: jellyfish.

"It plugged up her bowel and she started to float," Moretti said. "We gave her some antibiotics and gave her a little Metamucil and she's just much better.”

Ultimately, however, Charley’s struggle is symptomatic of a much larger problem, Moretti warns.

"We just gotta keep plastic out of our ocean," he said.

An amazing glow-in-the-dark cockroach, a harp-shaped carnivorous sponge and the smallest vertebrate on Earth are just three of the newly discovered top 10 species selected by the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University. A global committee of taxonomists -- scientists responsible for species exploration and classification -- announced its list of top 10 species from 2012 today, May 23.

No to the Mine! Snake
Sibon noalamina
Country: Panama

Snail-eating snake: A beautiful new species of snail-eating snake has been discovered in the highland rainforests of western Panama. The snake is nocturnal and hunts soft-bodied prey including earthworms and amphibian eggs, in addition to snails and slugs. This harmless snake defends itself by mimicking the alternating dark and light rings of venomous coral snakes. The species is found in the Serranía de Tabasará mountain range where ore mining is degrading and diminishing its habitat. The species name is derived from the Spanish phrase "No a la mina" or "No to the mine."

World's Smallest Vertebrate
Paedophryne amanuensis
Country: New Guinea

Tiny frog: Living vertebrates -- animals that have a backbone or spinal column -- range in size from this tiny new species of frog, as small as 7 millimeters, to the blue whale, measuring 25.8 meters. The new frog was discovered near Amau village in Papua, New Guinea. It captures the title of 'smallest living vertebrate' from a tiny Southeast Asian cyprinid fish that claimed the record in 2006. The adult frog size, determined by averaging the lengths of both males and females, is only 7.7 millimeters. With few exceptions, this and other ultra-small frogs are associated with moist leaf litter in tropical wet forests -- suggesting a unique ecological guild that could not exist under drier circumstances.

Amphibians are suffering a "terrifying" rate of extinction say the researchers, making them the most threatened vertebrates in the world. The Mexican salamander or axolotl is being threatened by expanding cities, pollution and invasive fish species which eat their young.

While many of the survival issues facing species highlighted on the map are extremely challenging, sometimes small changes can make a big difference.

(Zoological Society of London Director of Conservation Jonathan) Baillie highlights the example of a small worm like amphibian from Kenya called the Sagalla caecilian.

"It was just losing its habitat because the native trees were taken, so we've started a programme of replanting the native trees and 6,000 have been replanted and the areas where they have their strongholds are now being protected."

"That kind of simple action can ensure that those species can be there hopefully for hundred of years to come."

Ichythyosaurs were dolphin-shaped swimming reptiles that gave birth to live young. They lived in the oceans at the same time dinosaurs were tromping around on land. Previously, researchers thought only one group of ichthyosaurs, called ophthalmosaurids, made it out of the Jurassic into the Cretaceous. The newly named fossil, dubbed Malawania anachronus, is a Cretaceous survivor that does not belong to the ophthalmosaurids, however. That means a "ghost lineage" of ichthyosaurs survived alongside the ophthalmosaurids, changing very little over millions of years.

The fossil in question was first found in the 1950s by British petroleum geologists, who noticed the slab being used as a stepping stone on a mule track in Iraq. The geologists rescued the fossil and took it to the United Kingdom, where it stayed unstudied until the 1970s. Because researchers didn't know where in the rock record the fossil had come from, they struggled to determine its age. (Layers of earth build up over time, meaning, in a general sense, the oldest layers will be on the bottom and the more recent layers more toward the surface.)