The Orianne Society knows that herpetological conservation is just as important as other wildlife efforts, and plans to step up for herps.

From Online Athens:

“We are trying to develop a university-based nonprofit that’s a global leader for reptilian and amphibian conservation and herpetology,” said Chris Jenkins, chief executive officer of The Orianne Society and an adjunct faculty member at The Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources. “If you look at different types of mammals and birds you’ll find that the entities working to provide conservation and manage those populations is numerous, but there’s nowhere near as many working for reptiles and amphibians.”

The Orianne Society approaches conservation in three ways — research, conservation and boots-on-the-ground work such as purchasing land, managing and restoring habitats, conducting inventories of animals and reintroducing rare reptiles and amphibians into habitats where they have become extinct.

Read more here.

Several lizards who survived illegal shipment to the U.S. have found a permanent new home with the Detroit Zoo.

From mlive.com:

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 200 of the lizards died within a few weeks of being seized due to the "inhumane methods used to ship the animals and the conditions they were held in prior to their arrival in the United States..."

The Detroit Zoological society said in a statement that the lizards are representations of a global wildlife trafficking crisis.

"Many individual animals die in situations like this, and the impacts on wild populations can be catastrophic," Scott Carter, Detroit Zoological Society chief life sciences officer, said in a release. "We are happy to be able to provide great care and permanent sanctuary for these lizards, and to help bring attention to this important wildlife issue."

Read more here.

A new type of pit viper has been identified.

From the Epoch Times:

“It’s a surprising finding,” Dr. Vogel told mongabay.com, “as [the new species] is a large viper, very colorful and superficially different.” It inhabits forested areas between 1,500 and 2,000 meters (5,000 to 6,500 feet) in elevation. This is an important difference from T. sumatranus, which lives on lower, hilly areas rarely above 950 meters (3,000 feet).The difficulty in accessing these high mountain areas, as well as lack of economic interest in developing them, has preserved them from deforestation, according to a 2011 study in Global Change Biology.

“This is a highland species and in Sumatra there is little infrastructure in the higher mountain areas, so I feel it might be safe in the near future,” Vogel said. However, he cautioned its safety is far from secure, saying that its distribution should be more thoroughly studied to help further understanding of the species and its long-term prognosis. He added the region itself deserves more attention, with more endemics possibly awaiting scientific discovery. Vogel, who has discovered other reptile species, is a freelance herpetologist as well as a chemist whose research is self-funded and not tied to any particular institution. For their study, the researchers inspected 53 specimens of T. sumatranus and Trimeresurus hageni, with the primary objective of establishing the differences between them and amend the historical confusion of these two species.

Read more here.

Stuck in the middle of a drought that may last years, endangered turtles in California were given a roof-top reprieve.

From CBS:

With so much of the fresh water lost to evaporation, what's left is highly concentrated with minerals and very salty. And that has left the turtles in bad shape.

The USGS researchers called Shaffer when they noticed that not only were the turtles lethargic, but some of their heads, feet and shells were coated in a thick white crust of mineral deposits.

"Some of them looked like ceramic turtles," Shaffer said. "Between the biologists who were out there and me, we have a hundred years of turtle experience and we had never seen turtles look like this."

So they mobilized, collecting 60 turtles from the arid lakebed and transporting half to the Turtle Conservancy's captive breeding facility in Ojai, and the other half to UCLA, where Shaffer and his team set up a reptile refugee camp on the roof of the botany building.

Read more here.

An oil spill in the world's largest mangrove forest has killed many animals, and will have an impact for years to come.

From the Daily Star:

Animals have started to die. The water hyacinths on the two rivers have turned black. Some Golpata trees have gone under heavy layers of oil.

One local, Abu Jafar, spotted two animals -- a monitor lizard and an otter -- dead and smeared with oil along the banks of the Shela.

Meanwhile, the authorities pulled the sunken oil tanker ashore around 11:00am yesterday, some 30 hours after the accident. But all the 3.58 lakh litres of furnace oil the tanker had been carrying already spilled into the rivers and the adjacent cannels.

Read more here.

A turtle with an unusual breathing method faces extinction.

From the Scientific American:

Few reptiles can breathe underwater. Australia is home to one of the exceptions, the white-throated snapping turtle (Elseya albagula), which can extract oxygen from water through its backside via a process called cloacal respiration. This unusual technique, shared by a handful of other turtle and fish species, gave the turtles an evolutionary advantage for millennia, allowing them to hide from predators underwater for days at a time.

Unfortunately, breathing out of your butt requires very specific conditions that no longer exist in the turtles’ only habitat, Queensland’s Connors River and three nearby catchments. Dams, weirs, agriculture and mining have left the water sluggish and full of sediment. That makes it significantly harder for the turtles—especially vulnerable juveniles—to stay underwater. As a result, predation has increased to the point where populations have crashed. The problem has gotten so bad that less than 1 percent of eggs and young turtles survive to adulthood and the species has now been declared critically endangered by the Australian government

Read more here.

Militant attacks on a sacred shrine have lowered the number of visitors to the site, which means the local crocodiles aren't being fed.

From Aljazeera America:

Iqbal has already paid bus fare and an entrance fee and given a donation to the shrine’s saint. Now she’s worried that the meat’s inflated price means she won’t have enough money to get home. The crocodiles’ caretaker, Shahan Mahmood, shakes his head sadly. He can’t afford to sell her the meat at a lower price.

“The crocodiles are starving,” he says. “No one is coming to feed them.”

In the last year, Mahmood and the rest of the shrine’s caretakers have buried two crocodiles. For two years, they say, very few of the eggs laid by the reptiles here have hatched. Iqbal forks over the change and watches as the caretaker walks to the makeshift iron fence to feed the closest crocodile. Mahmood says this is the first purchase of meat he has seen in three days.

Read more here.

The largest amphibian in the UK is a Chinese salamander named Professor Wu.

From the London Evening Standard:

The 19-year-old has been brought over for a new conservation project to help research ways to prevent the giants from becoming extinct in the wild and was named after one of the project’s partners.

Professor Wu is the only Chinese giant salamander in the UK and can be seen in the Land of Giants exhibit at the zoo.

The animals are classified as the world’s largest amphibian and face threat of extinction because they are being over-harvested for human consumption.

Read more here.

A new dinosaur, the size of a large rabbit, is the earliest known horned dinosaur in North America.

From IFL Science:

Over a decade ago, paleontologists working in the Cloverly Formation of Carbon County, Montana, unearthed the partial skull, lower jaw, and teeth of a small horned dinosaur. Previous work has shown that horned dinosaurs (or neoceratopsians) originated and diversified in the Early Cretaceous, but findings from that time period in the North American fossil record were limited to isolated teeth and bits of the post-cranial skeleton. Beloved triceratops showed up much later.

Now, based on several features—including a hook on its beak-like structure (or rostral bone) and a long, pointed cavity over its cheek—the skull belongs to a previously unknown species, according to Andrew Farke from the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology and colleagues.

Read more here.

Some scientists predict we are heading toward a mass extinction event.

From the Guardian:

A stark depiction of the threat hanging over the world’s mammals, reptiles, amphibians and other life forms has been published by the prestigious scientific journal, Nature. A special analysis carried out by the journal indicates that a staggering 41% of all amphibians on the planet now face extinction while 26% of mammal species and 13% of birds are similarly threatened.

Many species are already critically endangered and close to extinction, including the Sumatran elephant, Amur leopard and mountain gorilla. But also in danger of vanishing from the wild, it now appears, are animals that are currently rated as merely being endangered: bonobos, bluefin tuna and loggerhead turtles, for example.

In each case, the finger of blame points directly at human activities. The continuing spread of agriculture is destroying millions of hectares of wild habitats every year, leaving animals without homes, while the introduction of invasive species, often helped by humans, is also devastating native populations. At the same time, pollution and overfishing are destroying marine ecosystems.

Read more here.

A newly identified poison dart frog is already threatened.

From mongabay.com:

“Many scientists are surprised about this discovery. People thought that it was difficult to find a new species of poison frog in this region of the country,” stated Abel Batista. “In Panama almost all areas are well investigated, and finding a such bright colored frog, gives us the impression that in Panama still a lot of research is needed, principally to investigate those remote areas, that nobody is going to do research."

“Much of the western slope of the Panamanian Caribbean has been poorly studied and is difficult to access,” Jaramillo further explained, “also, these frogs are very small, making them difficult to observe.”

The scientists celebrated the new species by naming it, Andinobates geminisae, after Marco Ponce's wife, Geminis Vargas, due to her unwavering support of his studies in Panamanian herpetology. However, celebration surrounding the discovery of this new species was short-lived as attention immediately shifted toward determining a special conservation plan to ensure the species’ survival.

Read more here.

A group of women is fighting to protect the habitat of Blanding's turtles from development.

From keysnet.com:

“We started out with as six little old ladies,” laughs Cheryl Anderson. “Now we’ve got eight little old ladies.”

But, she adds quickly, they’ve managed to rally support from across the county — and the country — to chip in with donations toward the estimated $220,000 legal cost of the case.

They’re trying to protect the point — a former military exercise area that for decades has been left to the birds, bees, bats, butterflies and reptiles.

Read more here.

The population of Lower Keys crocodiles in Florida has rebounded enough for the animals to start to return to their native terrain.

From keysnet.com:

Reports of a Lower Keys crocodile, a species not long ago virtually unseen outside of North Key Largo, did not surprise Nancy Finley, manager of the Florida Keys National Wildlife Refuges Complex.

"We have crocs documented in various places. The lowest location in the Lower Keys right now probably is in the Boca Chica area," she said Friday. "But we have documented sightings from the Cudjoe and Saddlebuch areas, as well."

State and federal wildlife experts estimate the American crocodile population has grown from a near-extinction level in the mid-1970s of around 300 adults (most then in North Key Largo) to more than 2,000 adults today.

Read more here.

A captive breeding program and removal of invasive goats has helped Española Galapagos tortoises improve their numbers from 15 to 1500.

From treehugger.com:

How was the Española population of giant tortoise saved? The Galapagos Islands National Park Service began a program of captive breeding and reintroduction in 1973. Using an enclosure on another island to help some of the remaining tortoise to focus on breeding, they were successful in reintroducing more than 1500 of the captivity-raised giant tortoise offspring on the island of Española.

For this effort to be successful, the non-native goats had to be culled, and eventually exterminated. Otherwise, the life-sustaining catci could never have recovered:

"[The goats] would feast on the roots... and chew away at the bark, and eventually that would topple these cacti. And then they had an incredible buffet of maybe 500-1000 years of cactus growth, demolished in a week or two," explained Professor Gibbs, from the College of Environmental Science and Forestry at the State University of New York.

Read more here.

Have you seen the titanboa exhibit?

From NJ.com:

Twice as long as the longest snake alive today, Titanoboa was discovered in 2009 by a team of scientists working in one of the world's largest open-pit coal mines at Cerrejón in La Guajira, Colombia. Fossil plants, giant turtles and crocodiles found with it deep underground reveal the earliest known rainforest, teeming with life and dating to the Paleocene, the lost world that followed the demise of the dinosaurs.

"Titanoboa is a bigger, badder boa, and it will simply knock your socks off," said Jennifer Sontchi, Academy director of exhibits.

Read more here.

Almost 200 sea turtles suffering from hypothermia were removed from chilly Massachusetts Bay and flown to warmer waters.

From the Orlando Sentinel:

Turtle rescues happen every year in late fall in the Northeast, but for reasons not yet known what's happening this year is "epic," said one of the nearly two dozen volunteers passing boxes of turtles like a bucket brigade.

"Statistically, I feel like we are out on Pluto," said Tony LaCasse, spokesman for the New England Aquarium's marine-animal hospital in Quincy, Mass., who fears the number of cold-stunned turtles could quadruple.

"We've been rescuing sea turtles for 25 years, and we are just absolutely shocked," LaCasse said.

Read more here.

Commercial fog is great for haunted houses, night clubs, and herpetological research?

From National Geographic:

Colleen Farmer used it to study how an iguana breathes.

She threaded an endoscope—a tube with a light and a camera at the end—into the lizard’s nose, while allowing it to inhale the artificial smoke from a fog machine. The smoke, though harmless, contained small particles, and the camera could detect these they worked their way into the iguana’s lungs.

And to Farmer’s surprise, no matter whether the lizard breathed in or out, the smoke particles only moved in one direction.

Read more here.

One lucky animal narrowly escaped being a meal for a hungry crocodile.

From the Express:

The tiny turtle was thrown into the air by the predator, but managed to slip from its mouth and back into the water thanks to the wet surface of its shell.

Later, the lucky terrapin was spotted chilling out on a nearby rock after its near miss.

South African safari guide Mario Moreno, 49, snapped the exhilarating incident when visiting Lake Panic in Kruger National Park.

Read more here.

Western pond turtles have great friends at Sonoma State.

From the Record Searchlight:

Every year as a part of what’s called a “Head Start Program,” a team of researchers from Sonoma State collect turtle eggs from a pond, hatch the babies and send them to Turtle Bay, the San Francisco Zoo and the Oakland Zoo. Crews care for the babies until they’re big enough to avoid becoming another animal’s lunch.

“It gives them a bit of a push out there, a little more of an advantage because there’s so many invasive species of turtles that are pushing them out because they’re so much bigger than them,” Turtle Bay animal trainer Adrienne John said.

Read more here.

Researchers at the Yuma Proving Grounds are making headway tagging tortoises to study their movements.

From the Yuma Sun:

To track the tortoises and study their habits, biologists attach small VHF transmitters and GPS data loggers to the shell of each tortoise they find. They also paint a unique number on the tortoise’s shell, and file a small notch through one of the keratin scutes at the thin rear edge of the shell, which has a consistency similar to a human fingernail. All this is done after an examination of the tortoise’s health and weight.

Coaxing one of the creatures out of their shelters can be a challenge: if they feel threatened, they oftentimes wedge themselves against the rear wall and ceiling of their miniature caves, which can be yards deep.

“They’re shockingly strong,” said Hillary Hoffman, a herpetologist with the Arizona Game and Fish Department who has been coming to YPG since 2009. “If they don’t want to come out, they’re not coming out.”

Read more...

A just-published study has turned scientific concensus upside down by suggesting turtles aren't very closely related to snakes and lizards after all. Instead, their closests cousins are birds, crocodiles, and dinosaurs, a group researchers are now calling "Archelosauria," which is believed to be the largest group of vertebrates to be assigned a new scientific name.

From Phys.org:

A team of scientists, including researchers from the California Academy of Sciences, has reconstructed a detailed "tree of life" for turtles. The specifics of how turtles are related—to one another, to other reptiles, and even to dinosaurs—have been hotly debated for decades. Next generation sequencing technologies in Academy labs have generated unprecedented amounts of genetic information for a thrilling new look at turtles' evolutionary history. These high-tech lab methods revolutionize the way scientists explore species origins and evolutionary relationships, and provide a strong foundation for future looks into Earth's fossil record.

Research results, appearing in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, describe how a new genetic sequencing technique called Ultra Conserved Elements (UCE) reveal turtles' closest relatives across the animal kingdom.

Read more here.

Photo: kingsnake.com user anuraanman

School children in Ireland spent time handling Rascal the Burmese python at the Reptile Conservation Zoo.

From the Independent:

The scary encounter was to celebrate the launch of the zoo’s search for an Irish Junior Conservation Hero.

The new initiative is to help raise awareness about the rapid rate of extinction that is wiping out unique species across the planet.

Read more...

An exotic pet hospital in Australia saved a monitor lizard that was hit by a car, and warns drivers to keep an eye out.

From the Daily Telegraph:

“If you see one hurt ... it’s best to be cautious and call an expert.

“Also, try and look out for them on the roads. They tend to move slowly across the road when they want to warm up or look for food.”

Read more...

What does the evolution of the tortoise shell have to do with breathing?

From Phys.org:

Lead author Dr Tyler Lyson of Wits University's Evolutionary Studies Institute, the Smithsonian Institution and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science said: "Tortoises have a bizarre body plan and one of the more puzzling aspects to this body plan is the fact that tortoises have locked their ribs up into the iconic tortoise shell. No other animal does this and the likely reason is that ribs play such an important role in breathing in most animals including mammals, birds, crocodilians, and lizards."

Instead tortoises have developed a unique abdominal muscular sling that wraps around their lungs and organs to help them breathe. When and how this mechanism evolved has been unknown.

Read more...

New research explains why snakes have two penises instead of one.

From the Washington Post:

In snakes and lizards, the external genitals get a little funkier. These reptiles have paired external genitals, even though they only use one at a time during mating.

But all of these genitals spring out of the same embryonic structure, called the cloaca. This structure sends out signals to the cells around it in the embryo, telling them to turn into genitals.

Scientists have wondered why these structures — which are triggered to grow by the same genetic mechanisms during embryonic development, and have the same function in adulthood — develop so differently.

Read more...

How would you like to come across a 57 pound venomous snake?

From Live Science:

Laophis crotaloides measured between 10 and 13 feet (3 and 4 meters) long and weighed a whopping 57 lbs. (26 kilograms). Today's longest venomous snakes, king cobras (Ophiophagus hannah), can grow to be about 18 feet (5.5 m) long. But at typical weights between 15 and 20 lbs. (6.8 to 9 kg), king cobras are scrawny compared to Laophis.

What makes Laophis even stranger was that it achieved this bulk not in the tropics, where most large reptiles live today, but in seasonal grasslands where winters were cool.

Read more...

Artists and activists held a satirical wake to raise awareness of Pancho, a Florida croc killed resisting capture, and other wildlife killed by humans.

From the Miami Herald:

Cortada said his goal was to have a dynamic service to honor the fallen croc, but at the same time to bring ecological awareness to community members, and teach them how to coexist with nature.

Florida International University biology students said the death of a South Florida animal is not rare. They cited the manatee, the sawfish, the Key Largo mouse and the indigo snake.

“Why are we here lamenting Pancho when we have killed so many Panchos in the last 100 years?” Cortada said, adding that humans are at fault for the reptile’s death after invading his natural habitat. “I just wanted to cry real tears and have a real conversation about our reptilian friend. We love you, Pancho.”

Read more...

DNA testing may hold the key to identifying the right antidote to use for snake bite victims.

From New Scientist:

Chappuis and his colleagues collected samples from the fang wounds of 749 people at three health centres in Nepal, amplified the DNA and sequenced it. They then looked for matches in a publicly available reference bank of DNA sequences.

They managed to identify the snake species responsible for 194 bites, 87 of which were from species whose venom is harmful to people – most commonly the spectacled cobra and the common krait.

Read more...

The Big Apple is home to a small frog with a very distinctive croak.

From Wired:

The new species, which biologists are calling the Atlantic Coast leopard frog, was hiding in plain sight. Besides its croak, the new species is nearly indistinguishable from several other frog species living in the area. As detailed today in PLoS ONE, the researchers were able to make the identification after comparing the DNA, appearance, and croaking noises of hundreds of frogs.

The authors, led by Jeremy Feinberg of Rutgers University, first announced their suspicions of the new species in 2012, when they reported that familiar-looking frogs with unfamiliar croaks were hopping around the wetlands near Yankee Stadium. Although the coloration of the Atlantic Coast leopard frog is very similar to that of other leopard frogs, its distinctive croak, which sounds like a simple, repeated “chuck,” sets it apart.

Read more...

Unlike a mythical dragon, bearded dragons and fire don't go together.

From The Daily Mail:

Crews were called to a terraced house in Bolton, Greater Manchester, just before 11am this morning when a fire began behind the fridge-freezer.

When firefighters arrived they found a woman outside with her two husky dogs, who told them her pet lizard was still inside as smoke poured from the kitchen.

They found the bearded dragon in its tank and took it out to the fire engine where medics treated it with oxygen therapy.

Read more...