By Herp News

In 1992, scientists made a spectacular discovery: a large, land mammal (200 pounds) that had somehow eluded science even as humans visited the moon and split the atom. Its discoverers, with WWF and Vietnam’s Ministry of Forestry, dubbed the species the saola (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis). Found in the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam, the saola is a two-horned beautiful bovine that resembles an African antelope and, given its rarity, has been called the Asian unicorn. Since its discovery, scientists have managed to take photos via camera trap of a wild saola (in 1999) and even briefly studied live specimens brought into villages in Laos before they died (in 1996 and again in 2010), however the constant fear of extinction loomed over efforts to save the species. But WWF has announced good news today: a camera trap has taken photos of a saola in an unnamed protected area in Vietnam, the first documentation of the animal in the country in 15 years.

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The Chicago Herpetological Society is caring for a two-foot alligator found under an escalator at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.

From the Chicago Tribune:

The group has about 500 members, including about 30 in the Chicago area who open their homes, bathtubs and backyards to reptiles and amphibians who need a place to stay or recover. While by many accounts this was the first alligator found at the airport, it’s not the first Floridian reptile found in Illinois that the volunteers have taken in.

The Illinois Department of Natural Resources confiscates a dozen to two dozen alligators every year, said Scott Ballard, the department’s expert in herpetology, the branch of zoology that pertains to the study of reptiles and amphibians.

No one in the state, other than zoos and licensed facilities, should have one. Because the reptile is protected by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Endangered Species Act, a permit is required to own one in Illinois. The state stopped issuing permits for people to keep them as pets about a decade ago, Ballard said. While violators can be convicted of a Class A misdemeanor under the state’s Endangered Species Protection Act, a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department said there is no criminal investigation into the abandoned animal at O’Hare.

Read the full story here.

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By Herp News

Puppet shows, posters and children’s activities that draw from local traditions are helping to save an endangered monkey in China. The activities, which encourage villagers—children and adults alike—to protect their forests and adopt fuel-efficient cooking stoves, have worked, according to a report published in Conservation Evidence. Local Chinese researchers, supported by the U.S.-based conservation organization Rare, designed the campaign to protect the monkeys.

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By Herp News

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

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By Herp News

Rescued just in time. An injured loggerhead sea turtle was pulled out of a Coconut Grove canal by Florida Fish and Wildlife Officials after receiving a call from a good Samaritan of a turtle in distress.

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By Herp News

Sailors assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman rescued a sea turtle that was tangled in a makeshift fishing net last week. “They called away, 'man the port davit,' because a lookout saw some containers attached to a net in the water, and there was a sea turtle trapped in it,” said Lt. j.g. Lillian Bean, who served as the boat officer for the rigid-hull inflatable boat used in the …

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By Herp News

Schildi the tortoise is back up and running now. (Credit: Bird Consulting International) Schildi the tortoise was found in rough shape in Germany. He was abandoned and missing part of his front leg. What was left of the leg was in such bad condition, it had to be amputated at the shoulder. German veterinary clinic Bird Consulting International took care of Schildi, but had to figure out how to …

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By Herp News

SONOMA, Calif., Nov. 11, 2013 /PRNewswire/ – Following a decade in the American Le Mans Series and coming off of a team championship clinching GTC class win in the final ALMS race at Road Atlanta, Flying Lizard Motorsports today announced that it would join the new TUDOR United SportsCar Championship with two cars to be run in the GT Daytona class for the 2014 season.  The team will continue to …

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By Herp News

Long-time Porsche sportscar squad Flying Lizard will switch to Audi for the first season of the United SportsCar Championship in 2014

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By Herp News

The Turtle Creek Garden Club has selected the property at 316 Applewood Drive as its November Yard of the Month. The lovely property, owned by Jennifer and Jason Andrews, was selected for its variety of color, texture and for being…

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By Herp News

In the eyes of a female poison-dart frog, a red male isn’t much brighter than a green one. This does not however mean that the mating behavior of the green and red variants of the same species of frog is exactly the same.

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Check out this video “Living Art,” submitted by kingsnake.com user phiff1.
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By Herp News

THE thought of cuddling with a crocodile or wearing a snake like a scarf might terrify a lot of people. But not reptile fans like Calum de Mezieres.

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By Herp News

Reaching the turtle was the first step in what turned out to be the difficult process of freeing it.

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Horned lizards are a collection of eight southwestern reptile species that are often referred to as 'horny toads' because of their chunky bodies. / James Cornett, Special to The Desert Sun

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By Herp News

The lizard-like object was snapped by Nasa's Mars rover Curiosity.

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By Herp News

Law enforcement on Long Island are getting some trained on handling reptiles, many exotic and some poisonous. In September, Suffolk cops and SPCA officers uncovered 850 snakes, including Burmese pythons, in a home in Shirley, part of an illegal reptile business.

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By Herp News

Suffolk SPCA chief Roy Gross said the training is crucial, given the spike of reptiles turning up on Long Island.

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By Herp News

A federal judge has granted Comptroller Susan Combs the day in court she hoped for to address conservation of endangered species in Texas.

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By Herp News

A dolphin swimming through the world’s oceans after fish, and a bat flying through the air with its membranous wings to catch insects or eat fruit: at first glance, it looks like no two creatures could be more different. But it turns out they share a superpower – they hunt prey by emitting high-pitched sounds and listening for a returning echo. A recent study published in the journal Nature Letters has shown that the regions of the genome responsible for this ability are strikingly similar between these very different mammals.

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Tenants in a Georgia apartment complex are suing over what they call an invasion of snakes on the property — indoors and out.

From WSB TV:

Shawn Davis told Channel 2’s Tom Regan she spotted one slithering down her hallway and another in a fruit bowl.

“The first was a baby copperhead; the second was a rat snake. My husband said since the last two snakes, he found two more. But he didn’t want to tell me about it, cause I’m a nervous wreck,” Davis said.

Residents first contacted Channel 2 Action News about the problem in September. They reported sightings of a half-dozen snakes, including a six-foot-long copperhead that was trapped in an apartment breezeway and killed.

Davis and her husband, Paul Patterson, said they repeatedly reported their concerns to management and requested moving into another building but were told that was not possible.

Earlier this week, they filed a lawsuit accusing apartment management of negligence in failing to control the population of venomous snakes. The suit seeks unspecified damages.

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Seven days until Frankie’s Big Move.

If you’ve been counting you’ll notice it’s seven days and not three days due to one little word not appearing on one piece of paper of many, many, many papers to close our new house in Mobile. That’s right. The closing of our house was cancelled at the last minute because Greg’s name didn’t appear on an insurance paper that had NOTHING to do with ownership of a house.

Yes, I am in House Closing Purgatory.

Poor Frankie was the primary victim of one little word. Once we closed on the planned Friday date we would promptly run to Lowe’s and buy fence posts and cement and for an entire weekend put up Frankie’s new privacy fence. The completion of said fence would take the entire week but those all important fence posts needed the attention and dedication of four persons. Once posts are up the pickets could be completed during the week after everyone got off work.

In the mean time I would be back in Birmingham packing and preparing Frankie for the big move.

That everything would work like the Boulder, Colorado’s Atomic Clock is denying the very real existence of HouseClosingPurgatory. Closing was postponed to Monday.

So Frankie’s Fence was not going to get done in time. Four adults of which only one is a Frankie Expert try to decide on a solution.

My favorite is the one where Frankie will live in our friends’s screened porch for five to seven days.

If that idea didn’t cause you to drop to the floor and laugh your arse off then you don’t currently own or have ever owned a 100 pound sulcata tortoise.

Another idea involved putting up a temporary metal fence.

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By Herp News

BADEN, Germany, Nov. 7 (UPI) — Veterinarians in Germany said a tortoise that lost a front leg is successfully moving around with the help of a Lego wheel.

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By Herp News

Mating-behavior studies of lizards in three southern US states have revealed which females male lizards find to be the sexiest. The research provides insight into the evolution of male-female differences.

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By Herp News

Even ten years ago it would have been impossible to imagine: clear-as-day footage of a jaguar plodding through the impenetrable Amazon, or a bicolored-spined porcupine balancing on a branch, or a troop of spider monkeys feeding at a clay lick, or a band of little coatis racing one-by-one from the dense foliage. These are things that even researchers who have spent a lifetime in the Amazon may never see. Now anyone can: scientists at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station in Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park have recently begun using camera trap videos to take movies of animals few will ever view in their lifetimes. The videos—following years of photo camera trapping—provide an intimate view of a world increasingly threatened by the oil industry.

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By Herp News

TUCSON – The community came together to help Quail Run Elementary adopt a desert tortoise.

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LOS ANGELES — More than 70 million years ago, a baby shark may have bitten off more than it could digest. A fossilized hunk of poop from an ancient baby shark has revealed the tiny predator's last meal: a baby turtle. “It's a case where a newborn shark ate a newborn turtle and died,” said study co-author David Schwimmer, a paleontologist at Columbus State University in Georgia.

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In a world where “rattlesnake round-ups” are considered good family fun, the arrest of a Florida man who tortured and killed a rattler comes as a refreshing change.

From Tallahassee.com:

According to the weekly Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission law enforcement report for Oct. 25, in mid-September, Ward Lee Waff “taunted the pygmy rattlesnake continuously … kicked the snake into the roadway, attempting to get a car to run over the snake,” and then shot it repeatedly with a .22 caliber rifle, sending it flying off the roadway.

In the video, Waff, 45, asks the snake if it would “bite one of my dogs. Would you bite one of my children?” before capturing it and holding it before a number of braying dogs in the back of a truck. He can be heard laughing as he torments the reptile.

[…]

In the report, Waff is described as having a criminal history with FWC and is “currently on probation for fish and wildlife violations that were committed in the past.”

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By Herp News

The Wildlife Conservation Society’s Central Park Zoo is debuting a pair of snow leopard cubs that were born this past summer.

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By Herp News

A reptile attack was the last straw for a Phnom Penh family locked in a land dispute who sought legal intervention yesterday.

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By Herp News

VANCOUVER, B.C. — ANGKOR GOLD CORP. (“ANGKOR”) has completed preliminary exploration on the Blue Lizard Prospect, South Oyadao Exploration Lease, Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia. The prospect …

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By Herp News

VALHALLA, N.Y., Nov. 5, 2013 /PRNewswire/ – Turtle Beach, the leading audio brand in the games industry, today announces the iSeries line of high-end media headsets. The iSeries headsets are packed with innovations that Turtle Beach first introduced to gaming headsets but are new for mobile users, including features that improve chat and voice call quality and provide an unmatched level of …

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Scientists from the Philadelphia Zoo are working to save the frogs of Haiti.

From Scientific American:

As much as 99 percent of Haiti has been deforested over the past few decades, as the country’s desperate people have cut down trees to make way for agriculture or charcoal production. This massive habitat loss has put the entire nation’s biodiversity at risk. Only a few untouched habitats remain.

The La Hotte land frog’s habitat is one of those areas. “It’s a very beautiful forest,” (Carlos) Martinez (Rivera, amphibian conservation biologist with the Philadelphia Zoo,) says. “There are a lot of tree ferns, pines and magnolia trees. It feels like going to any other tropical rainforest. But it’s a very tiny patch of forest.” The trees are still being cut down to produce charcoal or to clear land for cash crops such as parsley, celery, broccoli and carrots.

With so much of the country already deforested and more trees likely to be lost in the coming years, the Philadelphia Zoo in 2010 set out to save some of Haiti’s endemic frogs that live in those fading forests. They captured 154 frogs from nine species and brought them back to Philadelphia to establish a captive breeding program. “You can protect wildlife like frogs in a small space,” says the zoo’s chief operating officer, Andy Baker. “Trying to keep a genetically viable population of tigers takes the entire global zoo community, whereas in a relatively small room you can hold a genetically and demographically viable population of an entire species of frog. Our return on investment on species protection for animals like reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates can be very high.”

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By Herp News

The bay cat is arguably the world’s least-known member of the cat family (Felidae). Although first described by scientists in 1874, no photo existed of a living specimen until 1998 and a wild cat in its rainforest habitat wasn’t photographed until five years later. Given this, scientists with Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and Imperial College London were taken aback when their remote camera traps captured numerous photos of these elusive cats hanging out in a commercial logging concession in Sabah, a state in Malaysian Borneo.

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By Herp News

Parametric Sound Corporation , a leading innovator of audio products and solutions, and Turtle Beach, the market leader in video game audio, today announced that preliminary proxy materials have been filed …

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By Herp News

Based on a single tooth from Australia, scientists believe they have discovered a giant, meter-long (3.3 feet) duck-billed platypus that likely fed on fish, frogs, and even turtles, according to a new study in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. At least twice the size of a modern duckbilled platypus, the scientists say the extinct giant likely lived between 15 and 5 million years ago.

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By Herp News

A breeding population of a critically endangered harlequin toad thought to be extinct in Costa Rica has been discovered in a tract of highland forest in the Central American country, reports a paper published in Amphibia-Reptilia. Atelopus varius, an orange-and-black harlequin toad, was once relatively common from central Costa Rica to western Panama. But beginning in the 1980′s the species experienced a rapid population collapse across most of its range.

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By Herp News

A new study shows that snakes can optimize their vision by controlling the blood flow in their eyes when they perceive a threat.

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By Herp News

THE fifth annual Scales and Tails Reptile Festival on Saturday at North Ipswich Reserve promises to be entertaining and educational.

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By Herp News

The wisdom of linking oddball songwriter Nellie McKay with the jazzy string quartet Turtle Island wasn't immediately clear but, at The American Theatre on Friday, the pairing was often magical.        

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