Check out this video "Tadpole Hunting" submitted by kingsnake.com user hdhungryman.
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Scientists have long believed lizards are asocial, but research by Cissy Ballen, Richard Shine, and Mats Olsson of the University of Sydney using veiled chameleons suggests the lizards are a fairly social species after all.



From Wired Science:

Ballen and her colleagues staged interactions between pairs of chameleons when the animals were two months old. The researchers found the two groups didn’t differ in aggression, but chameleons raised in isolation were more submissive than their siblings raised in groups. The isolation-reared chameleons tended to flee or curl into a ball during confrontations with other chameleons, and they adopted darker and less green colors than the group-reared chameleons. The researchers also tested the foraging ability of the animals, and found that group-reared chameleons seized their prey (crickets) faster than isolation-reared chameleons.

Studies like this add to an increasing appreciation of the flexibility and complexity of reptile behavior.

Read more here.

Photo: kingsnake.com user 1sun

What's beautiful? The sweet sounds of the Harding University choir as heard in the Reptile House at the Cincinnati Zoo.

Watch below:

It's hard to know how we missed this froggy story from last fall, but we did.

From the Atlantic:

NASA's Minotaur V rocket blasted off from its launchpad at a spaceport in Virginia, carrying the LADEE spacecraft on the first leg of its trip from Earth to the moon. The scene that resulted was beautiful. It was inspiring. It was epic.

It was also not without its casualties.

The picture above, snapped on Friday by one of the remote cameras NASA had set up for the big launch, captured a creature that found itself, alas, caught in the crossfire of humanity's drive to explore: a frog. A possibly very large, and certainly very surprised, frog. The launch setting, NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, is located on an island that is essentially a six-mile-long salt marsh; this little guy, it seems, happened to be in the wrong place at the wrongest possible time.

Read the rest here.

Photo: NASA/Wallops/Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport with Chris Heller

Texas is considering banning the gassing of rattlesnakes and other animals in the state, but the Texas Parks and Wildlife Dept. doesn't think a ban will impact the barbaric "rattslesnake round-ups," which torture and kill rattlesnakes, but rarely use gas.

From NPR:

Pouring gasoline or other noxious chemicals into the earth to force rattlesnakes and other animals from their underground homes has been a tactic of some hunters and snake wranglers for years. But it has a harmful effect on the environment and wildlife. Now, Texas Parks and Wildlife (TPWD) is considering following in the path of 30 other states and banning the practice in most circumstances.

The technique, known as "gassing" is used to capture and/or kill many different types of animals, including prairie dogs. But its greatest defenders appear to be those involved in "rattlesnake roundups" that are a tradition in parts of the state.

[....]

As far as the prospect that banning the practice will end the "rattlesnake roundup" tradition in Texas, TPWD says that's overblown.

"Many rattlesnake events currently discourage the collection of snakes by gassing," says the Department.

Read more here.

Photo: kingsnake.com user kevinjudd

Check out this video "Field Herping in Colorado" submitted by kingsnake.com user jfarah.
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The LA Times has the scoop on a new study from Nature on the coloration of ancient reptiles:

Ancient leatherback turtles, ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs were a rather staid and formal black, maybe with some gray, according to a study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.



The study offers the first direct chemical evidence of pigmentation in the three species, and illustrates an example of convergent evolution, when animals separately develop the same adaptive features.

Read the rest here.

Artist's rendering: Stefan Solberg/LA Times

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

Check out our Herp Video of the Week, "Corn Snake Morphs and Genetics," submitted by kingsnake.com user boa2cobras.
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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.

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All of us at kingsnake.com wish you a Merry Christmas!

Check out our Herp Video of the Week, "The Normal Ball Python," submitted by kingsnake.com user boa2cobras.
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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.

We all may love Bahamanian rock iguanas, but their digest tracts don't love how we show that affection.

From Scientific American:

Hop on over to the photo-sharing site Flickr and you’ll find dozens of photos and videos of people eagerly feeding grapes to hungry iguanas on the beaches of the Bahamas. It looks like great fun and the iguanas obviously go crazy for the fruit, which is usually fed to the lizards on the ends of long sticks. There’s just one problem with this activity: the food is making the iguanas sick. Health conditions arising from the grapes and other foods that iguanas do not normally eat in the wild include diarrhea, high blood sugar and cholesterol as well as lowered levels of potassium and a high level of parasitic infections. All of these problems “could have deleterious effects on long-term fitness and population stability,” according to Charles Knapp, director of conservation and research at Chicago’s John G. Shedd Aquarium and the lead author of a new study of the iguanas published last week in Conservation Physiology.

Read the rest here.

Photo: Chris Dixon. Used under Creative Commons license.

Check out our Herp Video of the Week, "Field Herping 2013," submitted by kingsnake.com user smetlogik.
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Venom from the Southeast Asia pit viper (Deinagkistrodon acutus) may help stop human heart attacks and strokes.

From the Montreal Gazette report on the Canadian study:

Using venom milked from the snake, researchers filtered out all but one protein to create a drug called Anfibatide, which in human testing prevented blood clots from forming but didn't prolong bleeding as is the case with some clot-busting drugs.

"The concept that we can harness something potentially poisonous in nature and turn it into a beneficial therapy is very exciting," said Dr. Heyu Ni, a scientist at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto involved in the drug's development.

Anfibatide is designed to target a specific receptor on the surface of platelets in the blood that is instrumental in the formation of clots.

Read the rest here.

Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO - St. Michael's Hospital

Ever heard of Siats meekerorum? Our old dino friend T. rex did, and not in a good way.

Check out this video all about Siats, and why he's been dubbed a "man-eating monster."

Dead mice pumped full of poison are being dropped from planes onto Guam to kill brown tree snakes (Boiga irregularis).

From NBC News:

They floated down from the sky Sunday — 2,000 mice, wafting on tiny cardboard parachutes over Andersen Air Force Base in the U.S. territory of Guam.

But the rodent commandos didn't know they were on a mission: to help eradicate the brown tree snake, an invasive species that has caused millions of dollars in wildlife and commercial losses since it arrived a few decades ago.

That's because they were dead. And pumped full of painkillers.

The unlikely invasion was the fourth and biggest rodent air assault so far, part of an $8 million U.S. program approved in February to eradicate the snakes and save the exotic native birds that are their snack food.

Read the full story here.

Photo: kingsnake.com user Tereza

A robotic turtle, deveoped at the Tallinn University of Technology's Centre for Biorobotics, premiered at Robot Safari at the London Science Museum. The robot is intended to be used to investigate shipwrecks, but after that will probably take over the world.



Read all about it here.

Photo: Tallinn University of Technology

Check out our Herp Video of the Week, "Eastern hog defensive display," submitted by kingsnake.com user wisema2297.
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New research into the Cerataphora lizard, an endangered agamid lizard from Sri Lanka, suggests that the animal uses its horns to communicate.

From National Geographic:

Ruchira Somaweera, a zoologist at the University of Sydney and principal investigator in the yearlong field study, which is funded by the National Geographic Society, said the data is still being analyzed, but the primary hypothesis is that the horns are used in communication within specific species.

Somaweera and his team focused mainly on the critically endangered leaf-nosed lizards (C. tennentii) and found that on these and on rhino horn lizards (C. stoddartii), the males of both species can move their horns slowly at a 45-degree angle while opening their mouths in a threat display.

This may aid in communication between males, he said.

Read more here.

Photo: National Geographic

Students at Wichita State University have found chytrid, a fungus deadly to frogs, in Kansas ponds and streams.

From the Wichita Eagle:

Students working with (biologist Mary Liz) Jameson in her Wichita State University field ecology class over the last three years have confirmed the fears of anyone in Kansas who likes frogs: They found an amphibian-killing fungus called chytrid in streams and ponds of Kansas.

They found it in several streams and ponds near Wichita, and in Wichita at Chisholm Creek Park, near 32nd Street North and Oliver. WSU released a statement earlier this year outlining the basics of what Jameson and her students found, including a warning from one of her graduate students, Timothy Eberl.

Eberl said in the news release that this has implications beyond the death of frogs.

Read the full story here.

Photo: Wichita State University

Malaysian authorities are pointing fingers at each other after a documentary, The Return of the Lizard King, alleged that Anson Wong was still active in the illegal wildlife trading business after a high-profile arrest and conviction in 2010.

Wong was orginally sentenced to five years for trafficking wildlife including endangered species like snow leopards, pandas, and rare reptiles, but his sentence was reduced to 17 months.

From the Star:

(Election strategist Dr.) Ong (Kian Ming) claimed that there was an obvious question of corruption within Perhilitan (Department of Wildlife and National Parks) as public records show that Wong and his wife, Cheah Bing Shee still owned companies involving in importing and exporting wildlife.

He said there was a need to see if there was anyone who was helping them obtain the permits, despite the Government's insistence that all of Wong and Cheah's licenses had been revoked.

"This affects Malaysia's reputation. Anson Wong could just be the tip of the iceberg. If Malaysia is identified as a possible transshipment hub for illegal wildlife activities, this will give us a bad reputation, " he warned.

Read more here.

Photo: The Star

A former Animal Planet personality admitted he sold endangered lizards in a federal court last week.

From NBC Los Angeles:

Donald Schultz, 35, the former host of "Wild Recon" on Animal Planet, pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court to violating the Endangered Species Act by offering to sell, and actually selling, two live desert monitor lizards (Varanus griseus) in interstate commerce, according to the U.S. District Attorney's Office.

Schultz admitted that on July 29, 2010, he sold the lizards to an undercover agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who was posing as a prospective buyer, and shipped the lizards from Los Angeles to Buffalo, New York.

Schultz told NBC4 that he kept the lizards as pets, but decided to sell them because he was moving.

"Someone contacted me and asked to buy them from me," said Schultz. "In retrospect, it was a stupid thing to do. I had no idea it was against the law."

Read the full story here.

Photo: US Attorney