By Herp News

The Lizard Patrol claims to have brought down Xbox Live with a DDOS attack.

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By Herp News

Loggerhead who recuperated in Galway will move to sanctuary in Las Palmas

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By Herp News

Tortoise Power and Energy Infrastructure Fund, Inc. today announced that as of Nov. 30, 2014, the company’s unaudited total assets were approximately $259.4 million and

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By Herp News

Tortoise Pipeline & Energy Fund, Inc. today announced that as of November 30, 2014, the company’s unaudited total assets were approximately $443.6 million and its u

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By Herp News

Tortoise Energy Independence Fund, Inc. today announced that as of Nov. 30, 2014, the company’s unaudited total assets were approximately $400.1 million and its unaudit

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By Herp News

Tortoise MLP Fund, Inc. today announced that as of Nov. 30, 2014, the company’s unaudited total assets were approximately $2.3 billion and its unaudited net asset value

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By Herp News

Tortoise Energy Infrastructure Corp. today announced that as of Nov. 30, 2014, the company’s unaudited total assets were approximately $4.4 billion and its unaudited ne

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By Herp News

Fierce predatory sharks rule the oceans from the apex of the food pyramid. But climate change may be tougher than these marine hunters, a new study suggests. As oceans warm and their waters become more acidic, fewer sharks may survive their infancies.

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By Herp News

Grammy-winning R&B singer Frank Ocean released the new track “Memrise” on his Tumblr to plenty of blogger buzz, and Glasgow producer Turtle has shared “Lavender,” the first track from his second EP.

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By Herp News

Life in modern Egypt clings to the Nile River. This crowded green strip within the desert supports more than 2,300 people per square kilometer (6,000 per square mile). But 6,000 years ago, all of Egypt was green and vibrant, teeming with life much like the current Serengeti. Over time, this rich ecosystem fell apart.

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Box turtles, though primarily terrestrial, love to splash around in the water, and of course box turtles need access to fresh drinking water, too.

Tortoises need access to fresh water as well, so it’s a natural that some type of pond should be included in an outdoor enclosure, even if only deep enough to provide a ready source of fresh drinking water.

I wanted ponds that were deep enough for the turtles and tortoises to immerse themselves, but not big enough to require major maintenance or financial outlay. They needed to be very basic and easily reproduced. They had to be sloped enough to allow the turtles and tortoises easy and safe access, and they had to be easy to clean. I wanted ponds that could be flushed weekly rather than requiring filters that would have to be powered in some manner.

In looking for the right solution, I tried a number of options used successfully by other people. All of them had and have issues.

My initial design had a small rectangular pond excavated from each pen, framed in wood, and concreted in with a sump and drain plug.

For my first test pen, I used this design. I used a shovel to excavate most of the pond, and the auger to create a deep 3-4 gallon sump at the lowest spot. I used some hard plastic from an underbed box lid, and cut a rough cover for the sump hole.

In the center of the plastic, I inserted a 1-5/8 PVC pipe to provide a drain, and placed the plastic with the pipe over the sump hole. With the sump hole covered carefully first so the plastic didn’t cave in under the weight, it took around two 60-lb bags of quik-crete to fill my pond excavation, which when cured held approximately 3 gallons of water.

While this worked well and was relatively inexpensive, it seemed more labor-intensive than I’d like. By framing it, the dirt had to be excavated further than planned and required more concrete to build back the slopes.

However, the 3-toed box turtles loved it, and within 24 hours were happily splashing around. The pond allowed them easy access in and out, and was just deep enough to submerge. The biggest issue was that I failed to give the pond a “lip” that would prevent heavy rains from washing down into the pond, so it needs to be flushed if rainwater fills it with mud.

With the first pond down I wanted to try some other ideas. Stay tuned for part 2! …read more
Read more here: King Snake

More than one thousand endangered sea turtles have been seized by Vietnamese environmental police.

From :

“The turtles were all dead,” an official of the Ministry of Public Security’s environmental police department, Le Hong Thai, said. “They were meant to be processed into handicrafts for export to China,” he added.

“The case is under investigation, so we cannot reveal the number of detainees or any other details,” he said.

Vietnamese law protects five native marine turtles, making it a criminal offense to hunt, trade, or store them.

Read the full story here. …read more
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It’s our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user Phil Peak!

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By Herp News

In his nearly 10 years studying anacondas in the Amazon, researcher and conservationist Paul Rosolie, 27, has faced his share of danger. The giant reptile is known to grow up…

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By Herp News

A BUM-BREATHING turtle is not something you hear of every day and without more protection it won’t be heard of anymore either.

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By Herp News

Boris Johnson chased a lizard through a tropical paradise today as he visited Singapore's botanic garden to endorse the site's bid to become a world heritage site (WHS).

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By Herp News

A BUM-BREATHING turtle is not something you hear of every day and without more protection it won’t be heard of anymore either.

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By Herp News

This notice provides stockholders of Tortoise Power and Energy Infrastructure Fund, Inc. with information regarding the distribution paid on Nov. 28, 2014 and cumulativ

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By Herp News

This notice provides stockholders of Tortoise Pipeline & Energy Fund, Inc. with information regarding the distribution paid on Nov. 28, 2014 and cumulative distribu

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By Herp News

The Turtle Back Zoo is hosting a weekend holiday lights spectacular.

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It was time to add the hoophouse roof, but as planned, the final greenhouse would be considerably larger than this first prototype.

That’s why I only wanted a temporary solution, until I could determine the size of the final greenhouse, and could plan accordingly. Thus I wanted to try to use the 16-foot steel livestock panels as a temporary solution, and didn’t want to permanently affix them to the structure.

Allowing the remaining posts concrete to set overnight, I then placed the steel livestock panel arches into the pens, allowing the bottom of one end to dig into the dirt while I pushed from the other side.

As the other end stopped upon encountering the wall, it began to bow upwards, forming the arch needed for the roof. Once the end I was pushing was also inside the pen, I set it down, allowing the spring effect to push it outward and dig into the dirt as well.

Were this the plan for the permanent solution for the roof, and had this been as big as I was planning it would have been, I would have framed the bottom with 2x4s and cemented the livestock panels in as well. As it was, only their weight, and the pressure exerted by their spring tension from being bent, held them in place, which was enough for a temporary solution.

Once I had the livestock panels in place, I covered the whole thing with poultry wire and then zip-tied some inexpensive tarps across the top to provide temporary shade.

And we were ready for turtles. Not finished, but ready enough to move them from their temporary home.

This worked really well, was quick to build out, used a minimal of materials at hand or easily available, and could be finished as-is with doors, or expanded to be part of a larger entity. Since I had purchased the auger, I had long ago decided to make this part of a larger entity. But, would my design expand in real life as well as it did on the computer? I was about to find out — and so will you, in the next in this series!
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Check out this video “Pink Eastern Worm Snake,” submitted by kingsnake.com user Minuet.
Submit your own reptile & amphibian videos at http://www.kingsnake.com/video/ and you could see them featured here or check out all the videos submitted by other users! …read more
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It’s our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user cycluracornuta!

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By Herp News

For Stu McKenzie, guitarist and “creative director” in local psychedelic garage band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, the process of making an album is more than a linear aggregation of distinct songs. 

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By Herp News

A Loggerhead Turtle that was washed up on the Clare coast in November last year is set to return to warmer climes in time for Christmas.

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By Herp News

For Stu McKenzie, guitarist and “creative director” in local psychedelic garage band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, the process of making an album is more than a linear aggregation of distinct songs. 

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It’s our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user anialady!

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If I were only going to do a single pen, I could have stopped with where I was in my last post, and do the finish out. All that was left was to set the steel panel hoophouse roof up, cover it in wire, and throw a tarp over it. But not yet.

We had planned on three pens for our initial test, so digging another four holes with the auger, I quickly expanded to three pens, using the same approach as for the first pen, one pen at a time. Then I added the posts, the 2×4 toppers on the edges, then the corrugated panels.

The only difference was I needed to snip out a small amount of corrugated steel with tin snips on each of the interior wall panels, to allow the 2×4 top frame to seat properly on the 4×4 posts. Building the two remaining pens took about the same amount of time as building the first pen.

Once all three pens were up, all the walls were checked where they met the ground to ensure that there were no gaps that could provide an escape path. Once that was done, fill dirt excavated from the post holes was used to build up the dirt around the edges of the pens to a depth of 3-5 inches. This would prevent immediate escapes. but would do little to dissuade a burrower from either direction.

When we were done with the basic pens. it was time to consider our herp greenhouse roof. Stay tuned!
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By Herp News

Humans, or Homo sapiens sapiens, are really just upright apes with big brains. We may have traded actual jungles for gleaming concrete and steel ones, but we are still primates, merely one member of an order consisting of sixteen families. We may have removed ourselves from our wilder beginnings, but our extant relatives—the world’s wonderful primates—serve as a gentle living reminder of those days.

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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.”

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It’s our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user snakepunk!

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By Herp News

A tortoise owner in Wormit, Fife, bought a new pet on the trading website for £100 but to his horror it arrived utterly immobile inside a purple box of Choco Hoops.

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By Herp News

In just two forest patches may dwell a tiny, little-known chameleon that researchers have dubbed the world’s most endangered. Chapman’s pygmy chameleon from Malawi hasn’t been seen in 16 years. In that time, its habitat has been whittled down to an area about the size of just 100 American football fields.

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By Herp News

VALHALLA, N.Y., Nov. 25, 2014 /PRNewswire/ – Turtle Beach, the leading audio brand in the video games industry, today announced that the officially licensed Heroes of the Storm ™ PC Gaming Headset is …

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I sat in the yard this morning watching the ducks swim in their little pool and the dogs play rambunctiously over the expanse of the yard. It was a sunny 75 degrees Fahrenheit and very comfortable overall. Then came the blue jays. Within moments there were 8 or 10 of them, all screaming at the top of their lungs.

Then came an American crow, and then another. Cawing and gurgling they joined the screaming jays. At first I thought this to be an owl response, but even with binoculars I could see neither an owl nor a hawk. But then I noticed the birds seemed to be looking down and finally, in a leafy limb-end bower, I made out a sinuosity of form – a snake. It was small, probably only 3 feet long or perhaps even a bit smaller.

As I watched, it began moving downward and it was apparent that it was a yellow rat. The snake’s movement prompted the jays to find a new upper level of volume to their cacophonous calls. The snake didn’t seem to care. I stood and moved towards the tree and the crows, more nervous than the jays, departed.

The snake continued downward until less than 20 feet separated us. The jays, with a final look of disdain, flew away. The rat snake got to the lowest limb, moved in towards the trunk and the last I saw it was coiling slowly, largely secluded between the trunk and an immense grape vine that clambered up the tree.

I walked away thinking this was a lucky snake. Perhaps it was because I was so close that the frenzied calls of the jays and crows hadn’t summoned a red-shouldered hawk. Had one of these herp-eating buteos arrived the ending for this tale and the snake would probably have been just that: a literal ending.
Continue reading “Yellow in a tree “ …read more
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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.

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It’s our herp photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user HappyHeathen!

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By Herp News

Electronic Arts Inc. is still experiencing a number of problems with its EA online service after a DDoS attack late Sunday.

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By Herp News

Chameleons are an unmistakable family of wonderfully bizarre reptiles. They sport long, shooting tongues; oddly-shaped horns or crests; and a prehensile tail like a monkey’s. But, chameleons are most known for their astonishing ability to change the color of their skin. Now, a update of the IUCN Red List finds that this unique group is facing a crisis that could send dozens of chameleons, if not more, to extinction.

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By Herp News

A Philippine court has found nine Chinese fishermen guilty of poaching and environmental crimes for fishing in disputed waters.

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