By Herp News

Six elementary school students stood anxiously awaiting some sort of reptile to be placed into their tiny hands at the Hatboro-Horsham School District assembly May 12.

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Hamilton’s Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo can keep its exotic animals at its Barton Street location, and for the foreseeable future can also conduct off-site activities with its snakes and reptiles.

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TOLEDO CITY, Cebu- An adult female green sea turtle with four gunshot wounds in its carapace recued over the weekend is now back in her natural habitat after it was recently released by officials of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) 7 through its Protected Areas Wildlife Bureau (PAWB). In a report submitted […]

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An injured green sea turtle swam into the boat basin of the Turtle Hospital in the Florida Keys Thursday and was rescued.

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New research is the first to tie the stable carbon isotope record of Africa's South Atlantic coast to global records. This record clarifies the age of rocks at Bentiaba, Angola. The work provides a 71.5 million year age for the richest marine reptile fossil bed along the South Atlantic. The new record of time represents nearly 30 million years of Cretaceous fossils and environments in the …

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By Herp News

BARTONSVILLE — Someone stole a 250-pound turtle statue from the front of the Comfort Inn hotel along Route 611 in…

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By Herp News

New research has found that adult sea-turtle migrations and their selection of feeding sites are directly influenced by their past experiences as little hatchlings adrift in ocean currents. When they breed, adult sea turtles return to the beach where they were born. After breeding, adult sea turtles typically migrate several hundreds to thousands of kilometres to their feeding habitats. However, there has been little information about how turtles chose their feeding sites.

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On Friday, eleven Chinese fishermen were caught by Filipino police with 555 marine turtles, 378 of which were dead. Officials in the Philippines have since released the 177 living turtles. But the incident has sparked an international standoff between the Philippines and China as the Chinese nationals were arrested in disputed waters in the South China Sea.

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In the fight for conservation Madagascar is without a doubt on the front lines. Not only are most of its forests already destroyed—with a mere 10% of intact forest remaining at best—but there’s still much to lose in what remains. Madagascar is listed as having the third highest primate diversity in the world, with all primate species being lemurs.

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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.

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By Herp News

Think again. This Godzilla is a dud

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By Herp News

New research has found that adult sea-turtle migrations and their selection of feeding sites are directly influenced by their past experiences as little hatchlings adrift in ocean currents. When they breed, adult sea turtles return to the beach where they were born. After breeding, adult sea turtles typically migrate several hundreds to thousands of kilometres to their feeding habitats. However …

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By Herp News

Six elementary school students stood anxiously awaiting some sort of reptile to be placed into their tiny hands at the Hatboro-Horsham School District assembly May 12.

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By Herp News

The Reptile Gardens tourist attraction in Rapid City is now in the record books.

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By Herp News

The Reptile Gardens tourist attraction in Rapid City is now in the record books.

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New horned lizard Phrynosoma sherbrookei discovered in Mexico

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This is the story of three seals: the Caribbean, the Hawaiian, and the Mediterranean monk seals. Once numbering in the hundreds of thousands, the Caribbean monk seal was a hugely abundant marine mammal found across the Caribbean, and even recorded by Christopher Columbus during his second voyage, whose men killed several for food.

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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.

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By Herp News

A TURTLE was found on the shore of Times Beach, Sabroso, Barangay 76-A, Bucana, at 10 p.m. Monday. Personnel of the San Pedro Police Station along with the Pawikan Task Force immediately responded to a call from a resident of Barangay 76-A.

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By Herp News

Among the largest and most endangered crocodilians in the world, the gharial is on the verge of extinction today. This harmless fish-eating crocodile has fewer than 200 adult breeding individuals in the wild, their numbers having plummeted rapidly over the past few decades. But among this gloom and doom, conservationists have been working tirelessly to reinstate the wild populations.

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Grass is on my mind. It keeps me up at night. It takes up a lot of my time during the day. No, not “Colorado Grass”. Grass as in Frankie’s grass in his yard, or the lack of grass in Frankie’s yard.

The backyard grass that came with the house is woefully inadequate. Regretfully, we moved in the house during the winter and didn’t know until Spring that Frankie’s yard never had much grass. What it had isn’t enough for a 95 pound sulcata.

Woefully lacking grass. The rest of the yard has no grass.

Hey, mom. No Grass. Do something.
Frankie’s been somewhat patient about the situation. No, I take that back. Frankie has not been patient about a lack of grass in the yard. He mopes about with this sad I-can’t-believe-you-abuse-me look on his face.

I am starving, mom! Wait, is this a giant carrot?

Since there is no grass then I must pick a bag of grass & weeds for him, twice a day, and we all know how well that is going. If I don’t go pick a bag of grass then I must take Frankie for a walk.

Frankie siting by the gate. Well, more like blocking the gate until I get the hint Frankie wants a walk
Used to be Frankie and I would go on walks but we don’t walk any more. The minute he is out the gate he heads to the neighbor’s house where they have real grass. We don’t walk, we graze.

Frankie having thoughts of moving in with the neighbors who actually have grass in their yard.

There’s been some heated discussions as to why there is no grass in our yard and how we’re gonna get some grass: Bad soil, lack of care of previous owners, not enough sun, aliens. We looked at the biggest sun blocker tree and had it removed. No kidding. Took down a perfectly healthy tree so we could grow grass in our yard. Well, okay, it was a Pine Tree and Frankie was eating too many pine needles anyway. It was a good thing to take down.

Timber!
I started planting more grass. Bought Tortoise Grazing Seed from Carolina Pet Supply and planted it in three areas of the yard. It came in great. Then Frankie ate it. The grass still exists but as it’s kept trimmed to the ground by the hungry Frankie. So I bought more seed.

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Unlike the abundant eastern newts of the genus Notophthalmus, the black-spotted newt, Notophthalmus meridionalis, of southeastern Texas is among the rarest of American salamanders.

Because of the harsh habitat in which this very pretty 4-inch long salamander has evolved, it is largely restricted to the few permanent ponds within its range, and seldom strays more than a few feet from the water. This newt is aptly named, having many relatively large black spots both on the olive-green dorsum and rich orange venter.

The only black-spotted newts I have seen in the wild were found in the 1960s. Gordy and I stopped to listen to some frogs calling from a small, lilypad covered, roadside pond and there at pond-edge we saw a half dozen newts as well. Since then a few additional examples have been seen by field researchers, but I have not been among the lucky ones.

Despite its rarity in the wild, the black-spotted newt is bred successfully by several zoological parks. Many hundreds are in captivity and several wild populations have been augmented by the release of captive raised examples.

More photos under the jump…
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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:

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By Herp News

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio has stepped up with a $1 million donation to the Elephant Crisis Fund, an initiative that aims to stop the ivory poaching crisis.

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By Herp News

The closed-end funds managed by Tortoise Capital Advisors declared the following distributions today:

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By Herp News

Researchers have identified an alternative to a sometimes toxic therapy that protects frogs in zoos from a deadly fungal infection that has been destroying the amphibian populations worldwide.

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By Herp News

RAPID CITY — The Reptile Gardens tourist attraction in Rapid City is now in the record books. The facility that is home to more than 200 species of reptiles from around the world is listed in the latest edition of the Guinness World Records book, as the world's largest collection of reptiles.

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By Herp News

DNA testing has confirmed that an animal shot in February in Iowa’s Buchanan County was in fact a wolf, according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. This is the first confirmed gray wolf (Canis lupus) in the U.S. state since 1925.

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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?

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By Herp News

KOTA KINABALU: With the recent reports of 60 dead turtles found in waters off Kudat as well as […]

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By Herp News

Byline: The Lizard’s Tamar class all-weather lifeboat Rose launched yesterday afternoon to assist the yacht Marique with 2 people on board which had suffered rigging damage due to the high winds and rough seas, reporting to be 37 miles south of Lizard Point Page Content: The Lizard lifeboat launched just before 3pm to assist the Lowestoft registered yacht Marique which was on passage from Bayona …

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By Herp News

A loggerhead sea turtle found Thursday was the fifth stranded turtle in San Diego this year.

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By Herp News

Seventy-seven years after Earl Brockelsby started Reptile Gardens with a sack full of rattlesnakes, the tourist attraction outside Rapid City has become resplendent with reptiles and is now officially the most slithery spot on the planet.

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By Herp News

Domestic animals cause life threatening injuries to local wildlife, leading to 104 admissions this week to the von Arx Wildlife Hospital.

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By Herp News

Are you wondering why “Turtle Song” became a worldwide trending topic on Twitter Friday night?

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By Herp News

A loggerhead sea turtle found Thursday was the fifth stranded turtle in San Diego this year.

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Check out this video “Baby Turtle eating raspberry,” submitted by kingsnake.com user Minuet.
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By Herp News

The Chinese Premier, Li Keqiang, has pledged $100 million to combat poaching in Africa during a visit to the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa.

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By Herp News

CHICAGO, May 8, 2014 /PRNewswire/ – Life is not for sitting idly by – especially when there's a freshly washed and waxed car waiting to help you get out and go.  That's why Turtle Wax® is introducing the Get Out There and Shine campaign – celebrating the miles of smiles a freshly waxed car brings to drivers everywhere.  Before hitting the road this summer, Turtle Wax wants drivers to share …

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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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