There's a happy ending, and a new beginning, in store for Tinkerbell and Wendy, two juvenile sea turtles who have been returned to the wild after being cared for by the Walton Beach, Fla., Gulfarium Sea Turtle C.A.R.E. Program.

From the Pensacola News Journal:

As beachgoers watched in awe at Langdon Beach on Gulf Islands National Seashore, two Gulfarium specialists carefully removed Tinkerbell, a 20-pound green sea turtle, and Wendy, a 14-inch Kemp's ridley, from large plastic containers and carried them to an inviting, calm and azure Gulf.

The turtles flapped their flippers furiously in anticipation of freedom as Rachel Cain and Samantha Fuentes carried them to the edge of the surf. Then with a splash punctuated by cheers from the crowd of onlookers, the two turtles swam with purpose toward open water, their shadowy shapes darting here and there under the clear sea.

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A pilot refused to take off at San Francisco International Airport until a garter snake was moved from the runway to safety, prompting a flurry of Tweets from passengers:

Flight delayed briefly at SFO due to a SNAKE ON THE RUNWAY! Airport security is attempting to bag the snake and take it to a snake sanctuary

— Charlie Knights (@knightc3) May 16, 2014

From the New York Post:

A JFK-bound flight was delayed at the San Francisco airport Friday by a pilot who refused to squish a six-inch garter snake on the runway, officials said.

The Delta Air Lines pilot had announced a delay in takeoff to waiting passengers, explaining that a worker had been dispatched to snatch a wayward reptile off the runway, according to fliers tweeting from the plane.

A spokesman for San Francisco International Airport later said the snake was caught and set free in a “grassy area.”

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A sea turtle named Hofesh was badly injured in 2009. Now, thanks to Jerusalem industrial design student Shlomi Gez, he's cruising around with a prosthetic based a Lockheed Martin Corp.'s F-22 Raptor warplane.



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Fourteen new species of dancing frog have been identified in India.



From Scientific American:

The 14 new species were described last week in the Ceylon Journal of Science, bringing the total number of known dancing frog species in India to 24. All of the tiny frogs, the largest of which measure just 35 millimeters, come from the genus Micrixalus, which can only be found in the Western Ghats.

Unfortunately, none of these tiny frogs may be around much longer. According to the research by University of Delhi biologist S. D. Biju and colleagues, Micrixalus frogs already suffer from a 100 to 1 male-to-female sex ratio. (That’s another reason for the “dancing”—the males also kick away potential mating competitors.) The frogs only breed after monsoon season when water in their habitats is moving swiftly. On top of that, the Western Ghats are expected to experience much lower rainfall levels in the coming years due to climate change. In fact, the rivers already appear to be drying up and the number of frogs observed in the wild has dropped by 80 percent since 2006, the researchers report.

Read more and watch video here...

The Turtle Survival Alliance (TSA) is caring for 521 tortoises seized at Ivato Airport in Madagascar.



From the TSA website:

On Sunday, May 11, 521 tortoises – all juveniles - were seized prior to being loaded on a Kenya Aiways flight to Nairobi; the smuggler ran away when his name was called by the information desk and was not apprehended. The shipment included 512 Radiated Tortoises (Astrochelys radiata) and nine Ploughshare Tortoises (Astrochelys yniphora) that were placed with the Turtle Survival Alliance (TSA) for initial care and safe keeping.

Read the full story...

Photo: TSA

Of course you like snakes. But do you want a snake robot slithering its way into your heart?

That's just what the Modsnake does -- as well as crawl around inside pipes and similar systems looking for damage, and just about anywhere else you'd like to send a snake cam.

Watch below:

The media usually doesn't do a very good job with its coverage of snake stories, so when it does, we take notice.

Compare these two articles: One uses science to tell its story, and one uses media panic.

London's Camden New Journal gives an overview of the discovery of a colony of around 30 Aesculapian snakes living nearby:

But the "non-native species" has been ranked "of high concern" by the London Invasive Species Initiative (LISI), a government advisory quango which has called for the "foreign" family of snakes to be eradicated. It claims, if not stopped, the snakes could spread, causing "serious negative impact" on the eco-system.

This tough-line stance was this week disputed by Dr Wolfgang Wuster, a snake venom expert and senior lecturer of the School of Biological

Science in Bangor University, who told the New Journal: "Any attempt to eradicate the Aesculapian snake would require justification of resources to be devoted to an almost certainly non-problematic introduced species with little prospects of spread, as opposed to the many far more damaging species already out there."

Sane. Balanced. Investigative, even.

Then there's the Daily Mail, whose coverage can be well-summed up by the headline: "Colony of killer snakes 'capable of crushing small children to death' on loose in London."

Of course we all know the Aesculapian snake (now Zamenis longissimus, previously Elaphe longissima, is built much like our native bull snakes. and obviously not large enough to kill a child. But why should that get in the way of some sleezy tabloid clickbait?

Photo: kingsnake.com user nechushtan

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While dad's out screwing around, glass frog (Hyalinobatrachium fleischmanni) embryos have to take care of themselves -- and they do.

From Discovery News:

(S)cientists discovered that glass-frog eggs hatched about 21 percent earlier on average when the fathers were removed. They hatched up to about 34 percent earlier when conditions were drier, suggesting that dehydration was the cue the eggs relied on to hatch early.

"Embryos can cope with delinquent dads," Delia said.

The researchers suggest this kind of embryo behavior may be common among species that provide care to eggs, such as insects, bony fishes and amphibians. "Variation in parental care seems to be the norm rather than the exception," Delia said.

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Photo: kingsnake.com user rockrox83

Fines from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill are being used to help save the lives of sea turtle hatchlings.

Disoriented by the lights of civilization, the newly-hatched turtles often blunder into traffic instead of the sea. By retrofitting nearby homes and businesses with LED lights, however, the risk to the baby tutles is dramatically reduced, because they operate on a frequency the hatchlings can't see.

From Scientific American:

A lot of the money to fund these retrofits comes out of criminal penalties from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which killed or otherwise affected an estimated 100,000 sea turtles. The first two years of the STC’s retrofit efforts were financed by the Recovered Oil Fund for Wildlife (which itself was created with money from Deepwater owner British Petroleum); the organization just received additional funding from the similar Gulf Environmental Benefit Fund, both of which are administered by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

This restitution money, Godfrey says, "has allowed us to actually work with private property owners to go ahead and convert their lights, to work with them, to supplement the money they’re spending. We match money they put in. In some cases where the problem is particularly heinous and the property owners just don’t have the money to fix the problem, we can actually go in and do it for them. That funding mechanism, which has been made available following the spill, has allowed a lot of major progress on this issue."

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In case you ever wax nostalgic for the age of the giant reptiles, a quick read of The Paleoart of Julius Csotonyi will probably change your mind.

In this image, for instance, the artist has depicted the events that must have led to a block of fossils found in Utah. Not exactly anyone's idea of a good time.



See more over on Wired Science.

Christian Dior fine jewelry creative director Victoire de Castellane likes snakes. If you like her beautiful designs, however, be prepared to bring a bucket of money -- prices start at $150,000 per piece.

Fortunately, looking is free.



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You don't normally think Burmese pythons when you hear about therapy animals helping kids, but that's just what they're doing at Nova’s Ark in Brooklin, Ont.



Read about it here.

Photo: MSN Canada

Now, see, this is what we mean when we say "decent media reporting about snakes where the reporter actually takes a few minutes to do his or her job," which is something we don't get to say much.

Sadly.

So thank you, Brian Hicks, of the Post and Courier, for pointing out that the media frenzy over the Gaboon viper threatening a small South Carolina town is probably based on... absolutely nothing.

Read it here.

Photo: Wikicommons, released to public domain

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Nothing must ever happen in South Carolina, given the insane levels of hype over a supposed stray Gaboon viper roaming its streets. So with all that free time and dearth of current events to report on, you'd think the media could, you know... investigate? Or maybe just hit Wikipedia? Anything other than what they've been doing.

From the Charleston Post Courier:

Michelle Reid, of Animal Rescue and Relief, removed the traps and gear Monday after learning that the nearest any antivenin can be found is Africa, and the antivenin can't be brought to the United States until the Federal Food and Drug Administration approves it. She is trying to get that approval.

We thought this seemed implausible, so we checked with Jim Harrison over at the Kentucky Reptile Zoo. This is what he had to say:

Unfortunately, the media did no research on the subject. At the very least, two facilities carry South Africa polyvalent antivenin . They are Riverbanks Zoo and Alligator Adventure. We at Kentucky Reptile Zoo have over 30 vials at the moment of the antivenin. Further more, their experts are lacking as well with their information on trapping as well as the natural history of the Gaboon. It appears they may have spent their time watching Animal Planet rather than researching the real husbandry of the the species.

There's a few facts for you, South Carolina media. You're welcome.

Photo: Wikicommons, released to public domain

Venom from Australian snakes is helping save human lives. Seriously ill patients are benefiting from shorter turnaround time on critical blood tests, thanks to the coastal taipan (Oxyuranus scutellatus) and the Eastern brown snake (Pseudonaja textilis).

From ABC Australia:

The bites of eastern brown snakes and coastal taipans are dangerous because their venom causes a victim's blood to coagulate.

Researchers at the University of Queensland have pioneered a way to use snake venom to speed up the processing of blood tests of patients who have been given anti-coagulants.

Dr Goce Dimeski says tubes infused with snake venom are producing faster and more accurate results.

"From a clinical perspective, results will be available in a shorter time," he said.

"There's a potential to decrease the length of stay for patients, increase patient throughput and in the end could lead to saving lives."

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Photo: Denise Chan/Used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

A fire in a Savannah Reptiles Planet warehouse in France killed between 20,000 and 30,000 reptiles and another animals.



From Prensa Latina:

The flames destroyed around 4,000 square meters of the facility and killed a large number of snakes, iguanas, chameleons, lizards, amphibians, rabbits, rats, and insects.

Only eight turtles, between 60 and 100 kilograms, were saved, when rescuers poured water on their shells.

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Image: France TV

There's a pretty flipping cool photo spread of crocs in nature in the UK's Metro. See it here.



You're welcome.

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We've heard of snow days... but snake days?

A high school in Kyrgyzstan was closed down after they found at least 30 snakes in the building every day this spring. No ID was made of the types of snake, but media speculation has ranged all over the place, including the Caspian cobra, Naja oxiana.



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Photo: Omid Mozaffari, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

What if there was a disease that killed or crippled hundreds of thousands of people every year, but no one seemed to care?

It's not a disease, but as Dr. Matthew Lewin wrote in the New York Times Sunday Review last weekend, snakebites kill 94,000 people and cripple 400,000, mostly in impoverished parts of the world.



So where are the telethons, the philanthropic dollars? Where are new developments other than costly, mostly unavailable anitvenin? How about drugs, or a snakebite EpiPen?

Find out...

Photo: Naja annulifera by kingsnake.com user Neverscared

Did you hear the one about the man who got out of his car to get a closer look at an alligator... and got bitten by a water moccasin?



No, it's not a joke. It's a true story from WTSP in Tampa. Read it here.

Some people in a Mississippi town might have had turtle soup on their minds when they rescued a huge snapping turtle from a storm drain, but they quickly changed their minds and decided to save him, instead.



Read the story at KPTV.com.

Are poachers stealing and selling the golden lancehead pit viper (Bothrops insularis) from an island off the coast of Brazil?



That was the topic of last night's Nightline Prime:

One poisonous bite from the Golden Lancehead pit viper is enough to kill a grown man within a few hours. It’s fast-acting venom will burn through flesh and cause its victim to bleed to death.

Rogerio Zacariotti, a researcher with the Cruzeiro Do Sul University in Brazil, travels to “Snake Island” regularly to monitor the Gloden Lancehead population. He is convinced poachers are stealing the snakes from the island and selling them on the black market.

Zacariotti allowed "Nightline Prime" to accompany him and his team on one of his research trips to "Snake Island," where ABC’s Dan Harris had some too-close encounters with the deadly snakes.

Read more and watch the video...

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Will the 'family fun' that is the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Round-Up in Sweetwater, Texas, ever be stopped?

From CNN:

The Jaycees, short for the U.S. Junior Chamber, bills itself as a group that gives young people "the tools they need to build the bridges of success." The Sweetwater branch has been holding what it calls "The World's Largest Rattlesnake Round-Up" for 56 years on the first weekend in March, and the tool for success that it teaches young people is that it's fun to kill and torture animals.

For weeks or even months, rattlesnakes are stored in crowded barrels until it's roundup time. The snakes that have not suffocated under their kin arrive hungry, dehydrated, and sick from gasoline that was sprayed into their burrows to flush them out.

After a tour of the roundup, Michael Smith wrote an article for "Cross Timbers Herpetologist" in which he recalls noticing "...an unusual smell ... like bad cologne and also like something gone bad." Throughout the tour the smell keeps coming back to him, he writes, until he realizes what it is: "...the musk, feces, and blood of a thousand terrified snakes, half-covered with sprays of deodorant from Jaycees working the pits."

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Can the conservationist and the cowman be friends? Not if you're Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who posted a challenge to the BLM on his ranch's website protesting efforts to save the desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii), saying, "They have my cattle and now they have one of my boys. Range War begins tomorrow."

From ABC News:

Bundy's beef with federal land management officials dates back to 1993, according to federal officials, when Bundy's allotment for grazing his cattle on public land was modified to include protections for the desert tortoise. Bundy, who told the Associated Press his family has been ranching this part of Nevada since the 1870s, did not accept the modified terms, and continued to let his cattle graze anyway.

After legal maneuverings on both sides, a Nevada district court judge in 2013 permanently enjoined Bundy's cattle (some 900, by the government's count) from grazing on public property. The judge reiterated that decision in 2013 and authorized the U.S. government to impound the cattle.

The first phase of that impoundment started Saturday, with 58 head of cattle being removed from BLM land, federal officials said in an online statement. As of Monday afternoon, that number had risen to 134, BLM spokeswoman Kirsten Cannon told ABC News. Removing the rest of the trespassing cattle should take another 21 to 30 days, she said.

Bundy disputes the federal government's authority to take such action. The Nevada Sheriff's Office, he contends, is the only entity empowered to impound his cattle. The Bundy Ranch website calls the federal agents "cattle thieves."

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