By Herp News

Tortoise Energy Infrastructure Corp. today announced that as of Dec. 31, 2013, the company’s unaudited total assets were approximately $2.3 billion and its unaudited ne

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By Herp News

A reserve that is home to the world’s largest population of the critically endangered blue-throated macaw (Ara glaucogularis) has been more than doubled in size, reports the American Bird Conservancy (ABC), a group that helped fund the expansion.

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By Herp News

Byline: The Lizard lifeboat has launched just after 1:30 this morning (New Year's Day) to a report of a person having been swept into the sea off the Lizard Peninsular. Page Content: Falmouth Coastguard tasked The Lizard lifeboat crew to search the sea off Loe Bar between Porthleven and Gunwalloe, the Lizard, after they had received a call reporting a person missing after a group of friends had …

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By Herp News

Endless rain. Loneliness. Years of agonizingly slow research. Bouts of malaria. Despite it all, a community of scientists in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are working to chart the smallest animal and the most obscure plant – the building blocks of the universe.

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By Herp News

The Outdoor Technology Turtle Shell 2.0 portable Bluetooth speaker can get quite loud for its size, but it suffers from some distortion woes on bass-heavy genres.

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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 Dec. 31, 2013 and cumulativ

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Scientific American has the top ten weird animal stories of 2013, including this amphibious tale:

For Emei moustache toads, a top-quality moustache is an essential, and violent, weapon … During the breeding season, each male grows 10 to 16 spines. “They are as sharp as a pencil lead” says Cameron Hudson of the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, adding that the frogs “do try to stab you a bit when you pick them up”.

The males fought underwater, head-butting each other in the belly to drive their spines into the other toad’s flesh. “I’ve never seen any of them kill each other,” says Hudson. “But they get a lot of puncture wounds.”

Watch the video below, then see the rest of the top ten here.

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By Herp News

Since 1985, the Turtle Island Quartet has forged a name for itself as a classically based string quartet that plays jazz.

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By Herp News

Like every year, wildlife conservation had its ups and downs in 2013. Elephant and rhino poaching hit levels unseen since the 1970′s, but there were nascent signs of growing awareness in China on the impacts of wildlife trade, including official bans on the serving of wildlife products at official state affairs. Meanwhile there were major developments in endangered species reintroduction programs, the controversial de-extinction (resurrection biology) movement, and efforts to apply household technologies like model airplanes (e.g. conservation drones), mobile phones, and digital cameras (e.g. camera traps) to conservation.

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By Herp News

There are only 13 Lizard junipers in the Gew Graze Valley on the Lizard Peninsula and they are failing to regenerate.

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By Herp News

Conservationists hope to save an “extremely rare” plant which is only found in the wild in the UK in one valley in Cornwall.

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By Herp News

Parametric Sound Corporation , a leading innovator of audio technology and solutions, announced today that, at a special meeting of stockholders held on December 27, 2013, Parametric stockholders overwhelmingly …

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Check out our Herp Video of the Week, “Caiman lizards at the Nashville zoo,” submitted by kingsnake.com user jw.
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
Read more here: King Snake

By Herp News

2013 was full of major developments in efforts to understand and protect the world’s tropical rainforests. The following is a review of some of the major tropical forest-related news stories for the year. As a review, this post will not cover everything that transpired during 2013 in the world of tropical forests. Please feel free to highlight anything this post missed via the comments section at the bottom. Also please note that this review focuses only on tropical forests.

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By Herp News

Somehow, Meghan the turtle made a wrong turn – and meandered about 1,000 miles too far to the north. Normally, her kind prefers warm tropical waters near South America.        

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By Herp News

The Loggerhead Marinelife Center says the first-ever occurrence of an olive ridley sea turtle stranding in Palm Beach County occurred on Christmas Day.

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All of us at kingsnake.com wish you a Merry Christmas! …read more
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By Herp News

Tortoise Capital Advisors mourns the loss of Dr. John R. Graham, a valued and influential founding member of its closed-end fund board of directors, who died on Dec. 20, 2013 after

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By Herp News

A LIZARD was killed in a house fire in Leigh.

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By Herp News

A nationwide ban on importing four giant snake species or transporting them across state lines is costing reptile breeders, handlers, hobbyists and vendors millions and should be overturned, according …

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By Herp News

Miami — A nationwide ban on importing four giant snake species or transporting them across state lines is costing reptile breeders, handlers, hobbyists and vendors millions and should be overturned, according to a lawsuit filed by a reptile industry trade

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By Herp News

Reptile industry trade association sues US government to overturn ban on 4 giant snake species        

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By Herp News

A nationwide ban on importing four giant snake species or transporting them across state lines is costing reptile breeders, handlers, hobbyists and vendors millions and should be overturned, according to a lawsuit filed by a reptile industry trade association.

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Eighteen days and still there is no fence.

Eighteen days doesn’t sound like a long time does it? To me it feels like forever.

When I was younger a horse threw me into a fence. I bounced off the fence and slammed into the ground. I didn’t pass out but I lay there unable to breath for what felt like forever thinking I would never feel air in my lungs or oxygen in my brain ever again and I cursed that fence.

Probably that was the only time I didn’t like a fence because I’ve had pets and animals all my life and a fence means safety and security for them.

Fences have broken my heart. An inadequate fence was cause for a younger Frankie to disappear. That 24 hour period felt like forever.

My best friend died and my mother died so I know a broken heart. Pets have passed and I felt I would never recover. Boyfriends have broken from me and I thought I would never love again.

But when Frankie disappeared I felt bereft, broken hearted, and emotionally lost in such a way I knew I could never bear to go through that again.

So Frankie is microchipped, his yard has two security cameras, every neighbor in my area knows Frankie so they can be his watch dogs, he is the most photographed tortoise in Alabama, and he has blue painter’s tape on his shell that says “Please return me” with my phone number.

I put my foot down and insisted that Frankie and I would not move to Mobile until a fence was installed.

We’re in Mobile. Still there is no permanent fence.

Frankie hasn’t escaped and yet my heart is unsettled. Greg’s done his best by putting up a strong temporary fence in a small area by the house. I’ve done my best to amuse Frankie by taking him on daily walks and providing an enriched living environment.

Frankie has various objects to walk around, things for him to push, his umbrella stand (of course), heated cave and his dogloo. I have a chair to sit in. There is even a big cement mixer (for future fence construction) for him to walk under. I hung a black garden cloth on the temporary fence to block Frankie’s view.

Frankie has …read more
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By Herp News

A LIZARD was killed in a house fire in Leigh.

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Check out our Herp Video of the Week, “The Normal Ball Python,” submitted by kingsnake.com user boa2cobras.
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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By Herp News

Thousands of species were scientifically described for the first time in 2013. Many of these were ‘cryptic species’ that were identified after genetic analysis distinguished them from closely-related species, while others were totally novel. Below are some of the most interesting “new species” discoveries that took place or were formally announced in 2013.

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By Herp News

U.S. calls ban necessary to protect wildlife A reptile industry trade group has gone to court to overturn a federal ban on the import of four species of large snake, including the Burmese pythons that have infested the Everglades.        

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By Herp News

Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men and women. During a heart attack, a blocked arte

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By Herp News

Researchers want a permanent station in Queensland to monitor populations of Flatback turtles.

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By Herp News

Greenpeace today released a clever video highlighting the global biodiversity crisis with a little help from a much-beloved Disney film. While it might seem unlikely the Africa’s animals will vanish, this is exactly what’s happening in parts of the continent due to poaching, unsustainable bushmeat trade, habitat loss, massive development projects that are often poorly planned, and a booming human population.

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By Herp News

Researchers are celebrating after an urgent global search turned up a female mate for a fish that is on the brink of extinction.

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By Herp News

U.S. calls ban necessary to protect wildlife A reptile industry trade group has gone to court to overturn a federal ban on the import of four species of large snake, including the Burmese pythons that have infested the Everglades.

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By Herp News

U.S. calls ban necessary to protect wildlife A reptile industry trade group has gone to court to overturn a federal ban on the import of four species of large snake, including the Burmese pythons that have infested the Everglades.        

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By Herp News

1. China begins to tackle pollution, carbon emissions: As China’s environmental crisis worsens, the government has begun to unveil a series of new initiatives to curb record pollution and cut greenhouse emissions. The world’s largest consumer of coal, China’s growth in emissions is finally slowing and some experts believe the nation’s emissions could peak within the decade. If China’s emissions begin to fall, so too could the world’s.

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Birds do it. Crocodiles do it. Dinosaurs did it. And now it looks like monitor lizards are in the one-way, flow-through breathing club, too. That’s the word from researcher Emma Schachner in a recently-published article in the prestigious journal Nature.

From the awesome Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week blog:

After 1972, biologists had almost four decades to get used to the idea that birds had this amazing miraculous lung thingy that was unique in the animal kingdom. Then in 2010, Colleen Farmer and Kent Sanders of the University of Utah blew our collective minds by demonstrating that alligators have unidirectional flow-through lungs, too. That means that far from being a birds-only thing, unidirectional flow-through lung ventilation was probably primitive for Archosauria, and was therefore the default state for non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, the other ornithodirans and the hordes of croc-line archosaurs.

The birdy-ness of crocodilian lungs was further cemented earlier this year when Schachner et al. described the lung morphology and airflow patterns in Nile crocs, which have lungs that are if anything even more birdlike than those of gators. I got to review that paper and blogged about it here.

Now…well, you read the headline. Monitor lizards have unidirectional airflow through their lungs, too. This falls at about the halfway point between “whatisthisIdonteven”–I mean, dude, unidirectional airflow in friggin’ lizards!–and “yeah, that makes a weird sort of sense”. Because to sum up a lot of science unscientifically, monitors just kick a little more ass than other squamates. They have crazy high aerobic capacities for animals that aren’t birds or mammals, they’re ecologically versatile and geographically widespread, they get waaay bigger than any other extant lizards (Komodo dragons) and until recently got even bigger than that (Megalania). Is it going too far to link the success of varanids with their totally pimpin’ flow-through lungs? Maybe, maybe not. But it seems like fertile ground for further study.

Read the full story here.

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By Herp News

The ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), perhaps the most well-known of Madagascar’s endemic animals, is facing a “very high” risk of extinction in the wild. The Madagascar Section of the IUCN Primate Specialist Group reassessed the Red List status of ring-tailed lemurs and upgraded the species from Near-Threatened (2008) to Endangered (2012). Ring-tailed lemurs are facing extinction in some parts of Madagascar because of continued habitat loss, and more recently, species exploitation.

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By Herp News

The ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), perhaps the most well-known of Madagascar’s endemic animals, is facing a “very high” risk of extinction in the wild. The Madagascar Section of the IUCN Primate Specialist Group reassessed the Red List status of ring-tailed lemurs and upgraded the species from Near-Threatened (2008) to Endangered (2012). Ring-tailed lemurs are facing extinction in some parts of Madagascar because of continued habitat loss, and more recently, species exploitation.

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By Herp News

Tortoise Capital Advisors, adviser for seven closed-end funds, today announced that Rand Berney will join its closed-end fund board of directors on Jan. 1, 2014.

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By Herp News

Turtle Beach and Parametric Sound today announced that Turtle Beach has designated two independent directors to be appointed to the board of directors immediately after the closing of the pending merger …

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