Photo : Florida Atlantic University

"If climatic changes continue to force the sex ratio bias of loggerheads to even greater extremes, we are going to lose the diversity of sea turtles as well as their overall ability to reproduce effectively. Sex ratios are already strongly female biased,""That's why it's critical to understand how environmental factors, specifically temperature and rainfall, influence hatchling sex ratios." - Dr. Jeanette Wyneken Florida Atlantic University

“We’re the first institution to breed the frogs and we’ve been instrumental with a lot of the husbandry and medical side of things,” said Kevin Barrett.
Barrett is the herpetology collection manager and runs Project Golden Frog at the Maryland Zoo.

Photo: AUREAPTERUS/ISTOCKPHOTO

The findings suggest that some salamander ancestors had the ability to regenerate body parts nearly 80 million years before the first salamander existed.
The results “show that salamander-like regeneration is not something that is salamander specific, but was instead widespread in the evolutionary past,” says study coauthor Nadia Fröbisch, a paleontologist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin.

Photo: Cuba Headlines

"This vertebrate has close to brown coloration. Its natural habitat is the soil moist, hence its survival in this area of eastern Cuba where rainfall is abundant throughout the year" - Gerardo Begue-Quiala

Photo by Dan England @greeleytribune.com

“If you interact with it,” “you realize you don’t have to kill it.” - Ray Tschillard - Poudre Learning Center

"I love snakes, and a few other humans on this planet also love snakes. Sadly there are so many humans that do not. I painted this series to make people smile.

Smiling is a positive thing. If I can get humans to have a nice fun feeling while looking at snakes, my job is done. - Bill Flowers"

Brazilian Lancehead - Gallery Photo by Neverscared

“It’s interesting that you can take something so deadly and turn it into something that has the potential to save lives,” Jeffrey Hartgerink Rice University

Photo: Chris Dresh

Dorset County Council's environment councillor, Peter Finney, said: "We're incredibly proud of our natural environment in Dorset and we strive to find new ways to work alongside our many protected areas and species, and enhance it - even when we are doing something as destructive as rebuilding a road."

Photo: Freshwaters Illustrated/Dave Herasimtschuk/USDA.

Trudeau knew that the hormone systems controlling mating were nearly identical in fish and mammals, and he reasoned that they should be similar in amphibians, too. Taking a page out of the fish reproduction playbook, he combined a hormone that stimulates cells in the pituitary gland with a chemical that blocks the neurotransmitter dopamine, which can interfere with breeding. This combination had been used extensively in fish, to encourage breeding stock for the aquaculture industry. But it hadn’t yet been tried in amphibians. Before Amphiplex, only individual hormones, sans dopamine blockers, had been used on captive amphibians, with mixed success.

Photo: Annette Ruzicka/Bush Heritage Australia

To capture these legless lizards – the name comes from legs that disappeared through evolution leaving just a scaly protrusion – Bush Heritage has purchased roof tiles in bulk.

About 800 have been strewn across the area for the proposed caravan park. The idea is simple but effective. Reptiles like to press themselves against heated surfaces to get warm. As the sun heats the tiles, legless lizards will wriggle underneath them.

Photo: Inside Edition

"To my surprise, the reason the baby couldn't exit was because it was attached to its twin," he told INSIDE EDITION. "I helped them out of the egg and discovered they were joined at the yolk sac which is basically the equivalent to an umbilical. Immediately we knew we had a bit of a challenge on our hands."

Photo: The News-Press

The gator's plan for a nice meal was all set in motion when the turtle found itself surrounded by the alligator's teeth. The turtle remained incarcerated by the alligator's gaping mouth until a golf cart scooted close enough to scare the gator back into the lake, Backman says.

Photo: StevenDavidJohnson.com and Wild Virginia

It recommends changing the route of the pipeline to avoid as much of the salamanders' habitats as possible, possibly going south of South Sister Knob and Chestnut Ridge or north of Romney, West Virginia.
Another proposal would have the pipeline construction crews bore through Shenandoah Mountain, but that would not eliminate impacts on the habitats of the two species.

Photo: Fox News

Citing new evidence from a study in India and Bangladesh, the experts said around 46,000 people died annually of snake bites in India, plus another 6,000 in Bangladesh. The WHO estimates the annual death toll in India from snake bites is 10,000.
"Snake bite ... is almost completely ignored and grossly underestimated," said Alan Harvey, head of the International Society of Toxinology, who led the meeting.
"WHO and governments need to ... rank snake bite where it belongs -- as a very real public health and medical concern which needs funding, training and focus."

Photo: Don Lyman

Biologists hope that building a strong population of Blanding’s turtles at Assabet River will help offset population losses being experienced by the turtles elsewhere.
Although there are some big Blanding’s turtle populations in the Midwest, most populations in the Northeast are less than 50 turtles, Butler says. The only large population is at Oxbow NWR, where an estimated several hundred Blanding’s turtles make their home. “That’s virtually unheard of east of the Mississippi,” explains Butler.

Photo: A photo obtained from the Christian-Albrechts-Universitat of Kiel shows a South-American horned frog (genus Ceratophrys), waiting for its prey

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-06-super-sticky-frog-scientists-tongue-tied.html#jCp

"The experimental data shows that frog tongues can be best compared to pressure-sensitive adhesives that are of common technical use as adhesive tapes or labels," according to the study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Photo: The News-Press

Mr Coffee said the information could be used to identify and protect habitats.
"The idea is that I'll be sampling nesting females as well," he said.
"So I'll be taking blood and skin from nesting females over the summer period at Mon Repos and Heron Island and be hoping to use ... analysis on those and figure out where they were foraging before they came to nest.

Photo: Robin Moore/ILCP

“When I spied that oh so familiar pose of a Long-limbed Salamander basking in the rain with feet splayed and spine bent with that beautiful long tail hanging down, I was thrilled. It really brought back much of what it had been like in ‘76; going out night after night in the rain. Finding this salamander is as rewarding as it was years ago.”

Photo: Lauren Kurkimilis/Marine Corps via AP

Biologists have been raising tortoises over the past nine years at a six-acre facility to help boost the population that was nearly decimated by a respiratory virus in the late 1980s.

Photo: Eric Sharp, Detroit Free Press

The biggest threat to the snake, across its range from Missouri to New York, is loss and degradation of habitat, Kingsbury said.

"The snakes don't travel as far as other animals do from habitat patch to habitat patch," he said. "Anytime you have paved roads, a farmer's field, a residential area, they will be barriers to the snake, and it will turn around and head back from where it came."

Photo Credit: Matthew Schlesinger, New York Natural Heritage Program

"There might have been some jumping up and down," recalled Dr. Matthew Schlesinger, the head of zoology at the New York Natural Heritage Program, who was part of the team. "There might have been some high fives going around."
...
Now, with virtually nothing known about this animal, the team trying to track and learn about its range and habits. "It's like we're trying to write the page of the field guide that's devoted to this species," Schlesinger said.

Photo via Twitter user @MeghanCArnold

Guy with large iguana on crowded MUNI picking dead iguana skin off his iguana

Photo : Sjoerd van Berge Henegouwen/Nature World News

At the time the photos were taken, both the ranger and tourist, Sjoerd van Berge Henegouwen, were unable to identify the species. When Henegouwen posted them on his Facebook page, Dr. Wagner identified the lizard. These photos will be published in a book Dr. Wagner is writing about reptiles in Africa.

“We are tremendously excited about what the findings could mean to medicine,” Zhang said. “Our team is studying surgical brain injury and, currently, when a surgeon removes a brain tumor, the liver, or some other organ is often damaged in the process. By immunizing the patient with snake venom ahead of time, we can reduce the trauma that is associated with the surgery.”