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.

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By Herp News

Living here in the desert, you've probably seen your fair share of reptiles, like snakes and lizards, roaming around. Some people are afraid of them, but the Repticon show in the valley this weekend shows us that reptiles aren't so scary and are actually pretty cool.Thousands of exotic animals will be at the Repticon traveling reptile show at the Arizona State Fairgrounds this weekend so that …

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Fossilized remains of the kryptodrakon progenitor (“hidden dragon”), which evolved into the largest flying creatures ever to inhabit earth, were discovered in northwest China, where Ang Lee's Oscar-winning film was shot. read more

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Fossilized remains of the kryptodrakon progenitor (“hidden dragon”), which evolved into the largest flying creatures ever to inhabit earth, were discovered in northwest China, where Ang Lee's Oscar-winning film was shot. read more

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By Herp News

Fossilized remains of the kryptodrakon progenitor (“hidden dragon”), which evolved into the largest flying creatures ever to inhabit earth, were discovered in northwest China, where the Oscar-winning film was shot. read more

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By Herp News

When you’re a critically endangered hawksbill sea turtle, any news is usually bad news. But not today.

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Hacking group the 'Lizard Squad' has claimed responsibility for an outage which took down the web login page for the PSN this morning, marring a weekend of celebration and PR for PlayStation on its 20th anniversary.

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Down in Baja California there crawls a beast so bizarre, so cruel, so foul, that the mere mention of it sends locals scurrying. It’s an opportunist, said to attack humans at their most vulnerable moment: potty time. The post Absurd Creature of the Week: The Adorable Mexican Mole Lizard Has a Disgusting Reputation appeared first on WIRED .

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Short of buying back logging concessions, switching from conventional logging approaches to reduced impact logging techniques across existing forestry concessions may be the best way boost biodiversity in areas earmarked for timber extraction, argues paper.

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There’s nothing like really bad science and equally bad reality TV to make problems for reptile rescuers.

Discovery Channel, in their brilliant glory, ran a farce of a documentary last weekend where a man got into a snake proof suit, slathered himself in pigs blood and then pretended like he was going to be “Eaten Alive” to boost their ratings. Unfortunately, it’s created a big headache for reptile resue groups like mine.

My first call was to find out if anacondas are able to live in Wisconsin. The answer is no. Despite the fact that we have a lot of rivers and swamps, as the caller pointed out to me, the temperatures are far too cold for an anaconda to survive. I mean seriously, it is 22 degrees outside right now.

Three emails followed that asking about anacondas. All three inquired as to if anacondas could really eat people and if they do all the time. It was about this time my head started to hurt and that is when I logged onto Facebook and realized that “Eaten Alive” had aired the previous night.

Several emails followed, all asking a variety of questions about large species of snakes and their deadliness to humans. By the end of Monday night, I had a pre-typed email as a response and was several beers into my 12-pack.

A call this morning also induced severe head pain (no, it wasn’t a hangover!), but thankfully I was able to talk the person down and into keeping their pet. The caller had a ball python and wanted to surrender it because they ate meat. Not the snake, mind you, but the pet owner!

They were concerned because the “scientist” who appeared on the show used pig’s blood, and since they eat meat, their snake would become dangerous. Thankfully, I was able to explain the reality of snake ownership and also touch on cleanliness issues relating to owning any pet. Monty still has a home tonight and the owner no longer fears her pet.

While the show claimed it was aimed at educating about conservation, it merely introduced a new level of fear for those who live among reptiles. It is time that the media on all levels let go of the hype and stick to the facts.

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By Herp News

Down in Baja California there crawls a beast so bizarre, so cruel, so foul, that the mere mention of it sends locals scurrying. It’s an opportunist, said to attack humans at their most vulnerable moment: potty time. The post Absurd Creature of the Week: The Adorable Mexican Mole Lizard Has a Disgusting Reputation appeared first on WIRED .

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Check out this video “Caution, Snakes!” submitted by kingsnake.com user smetlogik.
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By Herp News

Brazilian biologist Alex Bager has been leading a crusade to raise awareness of a major but neglected threat to biodiversity in his country. Every year over 475 million animals die in Brazil as victims of roadkill, according to an estimate by Centro Brasileiro de Ecologia de Estradas, an initiative funded and coordinated by Bager. This means 15 animals are run down every second on Brazilian roads and highways.

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Scientists noticed a dramatic increase in nesting of critically endangered hawksbill sea turtles including the highest nest counts since a conservation project began there in 2000.

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Tortoise Capital Advisors, adviser for five closed-end funds, today announced that Alexandra Herger will join the current Board of Directors of its closed-end funds on Jan. 1, 2015.

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I can still remember turning the big flagstone that was out by the day lily bed and seeing my very first snake.

I was probably 6 or 7 and had already turned a lot of stones in my short lifetime. I found toads and stag beetles and star-nosed moles – enough things so that I spent a goodly amount of time flipping rocks and debris and marveling at the creatures that called such places home.

But a snake? And in my own backyard at that. Even when the little snake inflated itself and began an almost inaudible hissing, my parents declared it harmless and left the snake and me to our own devices.

That was my introduction to the species then called the DeKay’s snake and now known as the northern brown snake, Storeria dekayi dekayi. Notice the species name, dekayi, is spelled with a “k” and not a “c.” It is named for early New York naturalist, James Edward DeKay, not for any lack of serpentine structural integrity.

Although a gigantic specimen of just over 19 inches has been documented, most northern brown snakes are adult at 10 to 12 inches. The dietary preference is earthworms but an occasional cutworm or other insect may be accepted. This tiny snake, a relative of the larger garter and water snakes, gives birth to live young. Literature proclaims a litter may number from 3 to 31, but 5 to 12 seems the norm.
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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.

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By Herp News

Researchers have found genetic evidence that highly toxic venom proteins were evolutionarily ‘born’ from non-toxic genes, which have other ordinary jobs around the body, such as regulation of cellular functions or digestion of food.

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Tortoise Capital Advisors announced the following special distributions today:

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In 1912, a group of intrepid explorers led by Rollo and Ida Beck, widely acknowledged to be the foremost marine bird collectors of their time, embarked on a most remarkable effort to catalogue South America’s oceanic birds. Museums of the day held opportunistically collected specimens from scattered sources, but rarely did these include ocean-bound birds that spent little time near the coast.

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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.

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A little tortoise with a metabolic bone disease has had mobility returned thanks to a Lego rig glued to his shell.

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A turtle found in the Northern Territory close to death and with a fishing hook through its neck which tethered it to a tree has been released back into the wild after being nursed back to health.

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A turtle found in the Northern Territory close to death and hanging from a tree with a hook through its neck has been released back into the wild after being nursed back to health.

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Armen Shahrigian will star in a new reality-based show that showcases his passion and knowledge of reptiles. Shahrigian has had a fascination with reptiles since he…

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For the first time, marine conservation group, Sea Shepherd, is employing their controversial methods to protect Antarctic and Patagonian toothfish. Dubbed ‘Operation Icefish,’ Sea Shepherd Australia is sending two ships into Antarctic waters to disrupt illegal vessels targeting the little-known species that are often sold in luxury markets as Chilean seabass.

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In rural southeast Alabama , where gently rolling red hills transition into the sandy soil of the lower coastal plain, lives one of Alabama’s most beautiful snakes. The eastern kingsnake Lampropeltis getula getula, known by the old timers as “The Swamp Wamper,” calls this region home.

The eastern kingsnake has a large distribution in the eastern United States, ranging from New Jersey to Florida across Georgia into South Alabama . Although once common here, the eastern kingsnake has now become scarce over much of its range in Alabama, so much so that the species is now on Alabama’s state protected list.

I had seen eastern king snakes from other regions of the southeast but not in Alabama, so we set out on a perfect day in early October in hopes of getting to see our target species in my home state.

We checked two or three promising sites and came up empty. At our last site, as we were poking around in a old tin pile, we heard something moving in the dry leaves behind us. As I turned around I saw the most beautiful eastern kingsnake that I had ever seen.

Measuring nearly 5-1/2 feet long, this male eastern kingsnake was truly an impressive animal. He was glossy black with thin, vivid yellow “chains. Being able to see and photograph such a large, perfect specimen was worth the bites and musk I received for disturbing him.

This happened in the fall of 2012, but since that time, we have found seven more animals in the region. Even though these animals have become uncommon in Alabama, at least they are still locally abundant in certain areas. …read more
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By Herp News

While unpleasant car exhaust makes us wrinkle our noses, such human-made fumes may pose serious problems to insects searching for nectar. Researchers recently revealed that background odors make finding flowers difficult for pollinators. The study, published in Science, measured how hawk moths (Manduca sexta) pick out the sacred datura flower scent (Datura wrightii) amidst all the other smells that waft through the environment.

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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.

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From Maine to Ontario and Florida to Texas, you may encounter the little turtle known vernacularly as the “stinkpot” and more formerly as the common musk turtle, Sternotherus odoratus.

The names, both common and scientific, are derived from the odorous secretions produced by the two musk glands: one on each side of the plastron where the skin meets the shell bridge.

Although primarily aquatic, this little blackish turtle with the striped face, pointed nose, and elongate but high domed carapace may choose at times to wander far from its watery home.

Although musk and mud turtles are closely related, the small plastron of the musk turtles easily separates them from muds which all have a large plastron. Throughout most of its range the common musk is the only species of musk turtle to be found. Although the intensity and integrity of the yellow may vary, it is the only musk turtle to have a yellow striped face.

Hatchlings, so small they can sit comfortably on a quarter and have a roughened carapace, while the upper shell of the adults is usually very smooth.

Common musks are usually quite inexpensive and are very hardy and long-lived as captives. If you have an opportunity to get a baby you will find it an easily kept and responsive pet.
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By Herp News

The venomous white cobra captured in Thousand Oaks in September is soon to emerge from quarantine at the San Diego Zoo and go on exhibit.

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The PSN went offline Sunday night, with hacking group Lizard Squad taking responsibility for the attack.

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The chances of long-term survival for the Pacific gecko have been boosted with the release of 54 of the threatened native reptiles on pest-free Motuihe Island / Te Motu-a-Ihenga in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf / Tīkapa Moana.

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Two reptile dealers were sentenced to prison for trafficking animals out of the state. Prosecutors say, between 2006 and 2008, the men collected protected snakes from the wild in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

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It all went to hell when Jane Goodall started handing out bananas. Within a few years, the previously peaceful chimpanzees she was studying split into two warring tribes. Gangs of males from the larger faction systematically slaughtered their former tribemates. All over the bananas. Or so the argument goes.

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