By Herp News Juan Santamaría International Airport. Photo by Freestylerob [dropcap]E[/dropcap]ach year millions of travelers stream through the gates of Costa Rica’s Juan Santamaría airport in route to one of the country’s many natural wonders. But often when tourists leave, a piece of the country’s biodiversity goes with them. Turtle shell bracelets, reptile-skin wallets, bird […]

Although not common, red phase brown anoles are well documented in Florida populations. This pretty little female brown anole visited our back deck yesterday. She caught the eye of an amorous male brown anole of normal color. As far as aberrancies go, orange headed female and all orange male brown anoles are not particularly rare. […]

A True Giant. This Komodo Dragon takes center stage in our Herp Photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user cowboyfromhell s! Be sure to tell them you liked it here! Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here! …read more Read more here: King Snake […]

Tuatara Gallery photo with the late Rico Walder The rare New Zealand Tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) doesn’t have a penis but it may go a long way to help scientists understand phallic evolution. Researchers at the University of Florida in Gainesville found that the tuatara develop tiny nubbins as an embryo but the development of these […]

By Herp News Prionopelta xerosilva, named after the dry forests in which it exclusively lives in northwestern Madagascar. During a recently concluded study conducted over the last ten years, researchers from the California Academy of Sciences (CAS) working with the Madagascar Biodiversity Center (MBC) have discovered and described six new species of ants belonging to […]

By Herp News A red morph specimen of Lehmann’s poison frog. Photo courtesy of Tesoros de Colombia. Lehmann’s poison frog (Oophaga lehmanni) is one of many beautiful frog species endemic to Colombia. It is has been subject to illegal trafficking for the wildlife pet trade, and is listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN. Considered […]

By Herp News The first-ever successful elimination of a fatal chytrid fungus in a wild amphibian has been revealed by scientists, marking a major breakthrough in the fight against the disease responsible for devastating amphibian populations worldwide. Go to Source …read more Read more here: herpetofauna.com No products found. Amazon Auto Links

What a great Indigo field shot for our Herp Photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user ACO3124 ! Be sure to tell them you liked it here! Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here! …read more Read more here: King Snake No products found. […]

Photographing herps takes practice Photographing herps is an art form that takes many years to master. Even after many years of practice I can always find something wrong with the best pictures I have taken and, like all of you, I wish I could take better herp pictures. But I am still practicing and learning, […]

It’s a sad sight no self-respecting reptile hobbyist wants to see. Three pet Boa constrictors, purposely frozen and then dumped along a rural road. Sheriff’s deputies in northern Wisconsin are investigating a reptile mistreatment case after the reptiles were found frozen in a tote box along a road near Irma. The Lincoln County Humane Society […]

By Herp News Road construction crews in southeastern Nigeria have begun work on a six-lane, 260-kilometer “superhighway” in Cross River State, which Governor Ben Ayade argues will be an economic booster shot for the region. Opponents, however, worry about the effects it may have on the nearby Cross River National Park. The Oban division of […]

By Herp News With its furry face and adorable antics, the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) attracts an equally giant wave of financial support. Zoos pay the Chinese government up to $1 million each year to host pairs of pandas, and conservation groups pour millions of dollars into protecting the species. Some see this effort to […]

By Herp News Researchers have identified the fungal culprit behind an often deadly skin infection in snakes in the eastern US. The research shows that Ophidiomyces ophiodiicola is the definitive cause of snake fungal disease, which will help researchers pinpoint why it is emerging as a threat to snake populations and how its impacts can […]

This hatching Beaded Lizard in our Herp Photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user Kevin Earley will probably break the internet with it’s cuteness! Be sure to tell them you liked it here! Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here! …read more Read more […]

The owner of a king cobra that went AWOL for over a month in Orlando Florida is appealing a ruling that he should no longer be able to own venomous snakes. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has ordered to revoke the “sanctuary status” of the facility, which the commission said was applied in […]

A common liana snake en situ, Peruvian Amazon. We had looked for years with no success for a common liana snake, Siphlophis cervinus, on the Amazonian (Peru) preserves that Patti and I regularly visited. We looked high and low, in trailside trees, in shrubs, and of course on lianas but to no avail. After all, […]

By Herp News The endangered Hyacinth Macaw is highly coveted by traffickers and collectors. Photo by Juliana M Ferreira. [dropcap]W[/dropcap]ildlife trafficking transit chains in Latin America are complex, secret, and as varied as the many common and threatened animal species targeted. After poachers illegally pluck wildlife from their habitats, the animals are passed on to […]

By Herp News The US Department of the Interior says the Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel, one of the first species listed as endangered in the US nearly fifty years ago, is no longer at risk of going extinct. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), which worked together with states and landowners on conservation efforts […]

By Herp News On November 3, Cameroonian activist Nasako Besingi was convicted of four criminal counts against a controversial palm oil company operating in the country. But a coalition of environmental and human rights organizations is denouncing the charges, urging authorities to stop what they call the “repression” of Besingi and other activists. Besingi is […]

By Herp News The Green Macaw (Ara ambiguus) is an Endangered species. Traffickers hunt it on the banks of Nicaragua’s San Juan River. Captured birds are often transported for sale to San Salvador more than 1000 kilometers away. From there some birds are moved north through Mexico into the United States. Photo credit: Carlos Chávez. […]

By Herp News The Indian star tortoise (Geochelone elegans) is a little-known, but common, victim of illegal wildlife trade. In 2014, at least 55,000 wild tortoises were poached from just one “trade hub” in southern India, a recent study published in Nature Conservation has uncovered. “We were most shocked at the sheer scale of the […]

Hopefully this adorbable shot of an Elongated Tortoise in our Herp Photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user TylerStewart will help brighten your Monday! Be sure to tell them you liked it here! Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here! …read more Read more […]

Gallery photo by user Dean Alessandrin Police are trying to track down a Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) stolen from the Pierrelatte crocodile farm in the Drôme département of southeastern France. The monitor lizard was one of four on loan from the Barcelona Zoo where it was born in captivity. “This is the work of an […]

By Herp News White-faced saki monkey (Pithecia pithecia). Photo by Rhett Butler. It’s being called the “landmark” conservation policy [ThinkProgress] President Obama recently released a presidential memorandum declaring that development projects on America’s public lands, such as energy and mining, should result in in net benefit for the nation’s rivers, lands, and wildlife resources. Peru […]

By Herp News The world’s largest amphibian sounds like a work of fiction: virtually unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs, and reportedly growing as long as a man, the Chinese Giant Salamander (Andrias davidianus) is clinging to survival in the wild in a few fast-flowing rivers scattered across the highlands of China. Meanwhile, the […]

By Herp News A group of scientists from the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) and World Animal Protection is on the prowl for new tools to help protect wild tigers. Today, they launched a competition called “Think for Tigers,” which urges anyone associated with academic institutions, NGOs, governments and tech companies to […]

By Herp News On the week of October 9th, a 10-man ranger patrol team was ambushed by wildlife poachers equipped with heavy artillery as they searched for an elephant tracking collar in Garamba National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo. Most of the unit escaped, but four men were killed in the attack, bringing the ranger […]

By Herp News Nature isn’t quite so natural anymore. Our interaction with the world around us has changed it drastically, and nowhere more so than in cities, vast artificial landscapes lacking in biodiversity. However, cities are also evolutionary hotspots, home to moths that changed color to camouflage themselves amongst pollution-stained trees, “superworms” that can munch […]

By Herp News Phenological mismatches, or a mistiming between creatures and the prey and plants they eat, is one of the biggest known impacts of climate change on ecological systems. But a new study finds that one common migratory songbird has a natural flexibility in its breeding time that has helped stave off mismatches, at […]

Gallery photo by user antshrike The British newspaper The Guardian has published an in depth article targeting the illegal trade in protected lizard species in Europe. The article details some of the species it’s undercover reporters encountered in their search, including Earless Monitor Lizards and Alligator Lizards, as well as others. “All the specimens (of […]

Happy Rattlesnake Friday! Gotta love a field found Black-tailed Rattlesnake in our Herp Photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user SDeFriez ! Be sure to tell them you liked it here! Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here! …read more Read more here: King […]

kingsnake.com gallery photo by chaz901 Four campers in Maryland that decided to go all “Bear Grylls” on a protected timber rattlesnake, Crotalus horridus, by killing it with a BB gun then grilling and eating it, have been sentenced to probation and a $200.00 fine and probation from 14 to 28 months each. Court records show […]

What a cute lil Punkin! Loving this gorgeous shot of a young Tokay Gecko in our Herp Photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user mfontenot ! Be sure to tell them you liked it here! Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here! …read more […]

A black female Kaznakov’s viper. One female is orange with black markings, one is almost all black, and the male is mostly orange. I can let you have them for, awwww—I’ve forgotten how much—but the amount was almost affordable so I became the owner of a viper taxon that I had long wanted to work […]

By Herp News In the mid 2000s, Patricia Parker of the University of Missouri-St. Louis and her colleagues were trying to solve a mystery. Concerned by how avian pox was wiping out several bird species on the Hawaiian Islands, the researchers wanted to find out if the disease was a threat to a unique bird species of another group of […]

Photo: (Photo: Andrea Stetson/Special to The News-Press) Two locations in Florida are reporting record sea turtle nests this year, despite the actual numbers of hatchlings being slightly lower than last year. Collier County and Sanibel Island in Lee County smashed the turtle nesting record for the second year in a row, with 1,510 nests laid […]

Every year I try to do something in my snake rooms that I have never done before. One thing I tried this year that actually worked out was having one of my Children’s Python maternally incubate her clutch of eggs. I found her on her clutch on 27 April 2015, but I think she laid […]

By Herp News [dropcap]F[/dropcap]ew places offer a glimpse of Indonesia’s forlorn environmental track record like Meru Betiri, a 58,000-hectare national park tucked away in the southeast corner of Java island. The park is perhaps best known as the last-known sighting of the Javan tiger (Panthera tigris sondaica) before it was declared extinct in the 1990s. […]

Sucha lovely contrast against the blue, this Angolan Python takes the spotlight in our Herp Photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user EdCB ! Be sure to tell them you liked it here! Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here! …read more Read more […]

By Herp News Species in Southeast Asia are in crisis.  Compared with most other regions, Southeast Asian countries — Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam — have a higher proportion of species that are categorized as threatened on the IUCN Red List. Southeast Asia also harbors large […]