By Herp News

“Gone are the tiger-filled days when Corbett, as a small boy wandering the jungles of Nepal in the 1880s, peeped over a plum bush that heaved as a tiger walked out on the far side.” Adele Conover, in the Smithsonian magazine. Even as recently as the 1930s, 40,000 tigers roamed the forests of India. By the 1970s, tiger number had plummeted to less than 2,000. Historically, the tiger ranged from the Caspian Sea to the Russian Far North to the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. Now, they occupy just 7% of this historical range, with India home to over half of the tigers remaining in the wild. And what a world they inhabit.

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By Herp News

Fences are not the answer to the decline in Africa’s lions, according to a new paper in Ecology Letters. The new research directly counters an earlier controversial study that argued keeping lions fenced-in would be cheaper and more effective in saving the big cats. African lion (Panthera leo) populations across the continent have fallen dramatically: it’s estimated that the current population is around 15,000-35,000 lions, down from 100,000 just 50 years ago. The animal kings are suffering from booming human populations, habitat loss and fragmentation, prey decline, trophy hunting, and human-lion conflict.

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By Herp News

Let’s go back some 14,000 years (or up to 50,000 depending on who you talk to), since this is the first time humans encountered the meandering, seemingly endless river system of the Amazon. Certainly, the world’s first Amazonians would have been astounded by the giant beasts of the region, including ground sloths and mastodons (both now extinct), as well as giant anteaters, armadillos, and tapirs, currently the biggest land animal on the continent. But these first explorers might have been even more surprised by what dwelled in the rivers: anaconda, caiman, and the arapaima. Wait, the what?

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By Herp News

When a giant tortoise named Lonesome George died, his kind, the Pinta Island tortoises of the Galapagos, suffered the same fate as the unfortunate dodo bird: Both bird and tortoise were wiped off their island homes and into extinction.

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By Herp News

Written by Tom Stephenson and Scott Whittle, with illustrations by Catherine Hamilton, The Warbler Guide by Princeton University Press is the “go-to” guide for identifying the 56 species of warblers in the United States and Canada. Warblers are notoriously difficult to identify. These champion singers are small, hidden amongst the tree top canopy, flighty and dancing from branch to branch, with variegated coloring blending greens, yellows, reds, browns, and grays.

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Check out this video “Spring Salamander Migration,” submitted by kingsnake.com user rugbyman2000.
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

Keepers at a NSW reptile park are “devastated” after thieves broke in and stole 23 exotic animals, including an alligator, snakes and dragons. read more

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By Herp News

Staff at the Australian Reptile Park fear that 23 animals stolen overnight may not survive away from the specialised care of their keepers.

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By Herp News

Jake Jachna of Ocala asked what to do if a gopher tortoise is seen on the road, which raised a bigger question about other animals encountered by motorists.

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By Herp News

NSW police searching for 23 reptiles, including an alligator, stolen from the Somersby reptile park.

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By Herp News

NSW police searching for 23 reptiles, including an alligator, stolen from the Somersby reptile park.

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By Herp News

Thieves have broken into a reptile park north of Sydney and stolen 23 animals, including an alligator, during a daring night raid.        

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By Herp News

The state gets lots of money to help desert tortoises in Washington County as part of an effort to conserve the species. The money will be used to purchase land in the Red Cliffs Desert Reserve, which has been damaged by wildfires.

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By Herp News

Adamanteus the golden retriever rested on the floor feet from a table of piles of venomous snakes on Saturday at Repticon, a reptile and exotic animals convention and sales show.

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By Herp News

The yellow-spotted green turtle that sparked mayhem this week on a Jersey Shore route may have left its home in the woods because of recent heavy rains or because of a strong nesting instinct.

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By Herp News

Snappy the turtle was out for a stroll when he landed a dress shirt and a free ride to the local pond. The 50-pound snapping turtle was crossing Bathurst St., near Elgin Mills Rd. W., in Richmond Hill around 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, when Samantha Butler scooped him up, put him in her trunk and gave him the shirt off her back — a pink-and-white striped Joe Fresh dress shirt, to be exact. Butler, a …

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Given the sheer tonnage of snakes Bryan Grieg Fry has seen up close and personal in his decades as a venom researcher, the accolade “coolest snake I’ve ever seen” has to impress us at kingsnake.com just as much it did as the guys at NatGeo.

From National Geographic:

The creature he’s talking is new to science, having only been described in 2006. It’s the spider-tailed viper (Pseudocerastes urarachnoides) and it is aptly named.

The tail is bizarre. If you saw a close-up photo of it, you’d struggle to believe that there was a snake at the other end. There’s a large orange or grey bulb at the tip, and the scales just before that are bizarrely long and thin. Together, these features look a bit like the legs and abdomen of a spider or their close relatives, the solpugids or ‘camel spiders’.

The resemblance is even more striking when the snake moves. It keeps the rest of the tail still, while moving the tip in a disconcertingly jerky way.

Read the rest, and watch video, here.

Photo: Omid Mozaffari/National Geographic …read more

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By Herp News

The University of Florida plans to build a sea turtle rehabilitation hospital at Whitney Marine Lab to target fibropapilloma, a viral disease that maims and kills sea turtles.

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By Herp News

A recent survey report confirmed that the nation’s amphibians, including frogs, toads and salamanders, are disappearing “at an alarming and rapid rate.” A biologist has found that North Carolina’s Southern Cricket Frog populations mirror this disturbing national trend.

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By Herp News

Five men were finally rescued on Monday after spending five days trapped in a tree by a group of Sumatran tigers. A team of around 30 people rescued the men after several tiger tamers were able to lure the animals away using chants and mantras. The men were attacked inside Aceh’s Gunung Leuser National Park by a mother tiger after accidentally killing its cub in a trap the group had set to hunt deer. The tiger killed one of the men, 28-year-old David, and forced the others to escape up a tree.

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By Herp News

Rising temperatures threaten wild birds, including the Missouri-native Acadian flycatcher, by making snakes more active, according to biologists. They noted that farmers, public health officials and wildlife managers should be aware of complex indirect effects of climate change in addition to the more obvious influences of higher temperatures and irregular weather patterns.

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By Herp News

A poignant novel of two lost souls and a dream of freedom, from the author of “Riddley Walker.”

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After a two-year rehab stint at the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, Mississippi, Big Mama — a 245-pound loggerhead sea turtle — has moved into her new digs at SeaWorld Orlando, where she’ll be helping to educate people about her species and threats to wildlife.

From BayNews9:

Big Mama was transported to SeaWorld Orlando from Mississippi where she had been receiving care since she was rescued after an oil spill in 2010 off the coast of Louisiana. Big Mama suffered severe bite wounds to her front and hind flippers making it difficult for her to swim properly. In 2012, Big Mama was deemed non-releasable by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and due to space limitations, IMMS could no longer care for Big Mama.

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A University of Michigan biologist may have unlocked the secret of polymorphism and survival in snakes.

From the University of Michigan:

If a mimicry system offers protection from predators, then why hasn’t evolution eliminated the “failed mimics,” such as ground snakes sporting color patterns that don’t remotely resemble a coral snake? That’s the puzzle that University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Alison Davis Rabosky has spent the last four years trying to solve.

“Logic predicts that non-mimics should by eaten preferentially by predators and, given enough time, you should end up with a single color type in the population. So the widespread co-occurrence of mimic and non-mimic color patterns is a puzzling and longstanding evolutionary paradox,” said Rabosky, an assistant research scientist in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and an assistant curator of herpetology at the Museum of Zoology.

While Rabosky and colleague Christian L. Cox of the University of Virginia don’t claim to have fully resolved the paradox, they did gain insights that help explain the persistence of non-mimic color patterns in ground snakes, especially rare patterns. It turns out that if you’re a ground snake, displaying a rare color pattern also provides an evolutionary edge.

Read the rest here… definitely worth the click!

Photo: Eric Bronson/University of Michigan …read more

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By Herp News

On 7/11/13, Tortoise Energy Capital Fund’s 3.95% Series C Mandatory Redeemable Preferred Shares (NYSE: TYY.PRC) will trade ex-dividend, for its monthly dividend of $0.0329, payable on 8/1/13. As a percentage of TYY.PRC’s recent share price of $9.97, this dividend works out to approximately 0.33%. On an annualized basis, the current yield is approximately 3.93%, which compares to an average yield …

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How do the ancestors of land animals make it out of the sea? New research comparing tiger salamanders and mudskipper fish tells the tale.

From Phys.org:

Paleontological examinations of the invasion of land by vertebrates suggest that limb-like appendages likely originated in aquatic environments, but direct comparisons of the functional consequences of using early limbs with digits, rather than fins, for terrestrial locomotion had not previously been performed. Salamanders are used to model the general body form of early tetrapods (e.g., Paleozoic amphibians) since their morphology has remained essentially unchanged for at least 150 million years. Mudskippers are similar to early fossil precursors of the tetrapods: they use “crutching” movements on land similarly to the hypothesised locomotion of Ichthyostega, and their pectoral fins are similar to elpistostegalids, such as Tiktaalik.

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By Herp News

A 3-foot alligator was captured from the Lamprey River, almost certainly dumped by its owner.

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Biologists have finally solved the riddle of the origin of the turtle shell. By observing the development of different animal species and confirming their results with fossil analysis and genomic data, researchers show that the shell on the turtle’s back derives only from its ancestors’ ribcage and not from a combination of internal and external bone structures as is often thought.

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Dozens of Australian species of the worm-like snakes classified as Scolecophidia have been identified by scientists in Australia.

From Phys.org:

Researchers from France, Australia and the United States analysed the genomes of 741 animals from 27 recognised species in a subgroup known as Australian blind snakes.

The data suggest the number of species is “at least two times the current number of recognised, nominal species,” said a summary of the results, published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society.

Snakes are divided into two major groups: Scolecophidia, which are generally less than 30 centimetres (12 inches) long, and the more common Alethinophidia, which include boas, pythons, cobras and vipers.

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Check out this video “Road Cruising for snakes,” submitted by kingsnake.com user naturebreak.
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By Herp News

Researchers have described a previously unknown species of white toothed shrew in the forests of Vietnam. The study was published July 2 in the open access journal ZooKeys.

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By Herp News

It was too little too late for conservation groups that wanted the Bel Air, Maryland, Kiwanis Club to cancel its annual Fourth of July turtle derby last Thursday. According to The Baltimore Sun, the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity sent a letter on Friday, June 28, requesting the event be canceled because it posed a “threat to struggling native turtle populations and a health hazard …

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By Herp News

The legacy of the former Borders flagship store continues to be reinvented as new restaurants like Slurping Turtle sign leases to move into the downstairs retail spaces.Tech hub, meet foodie hub. Iron Chef America participant and Chicago-based restaurateur Takashi…

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By Herp News

An anolis lizard. National Geographic/Youtube A 23-million-year-old complete fossil of a lizard was discovered by scientists in Mexico. The fossil contains soft tissues of the new species of the genus Anolis that were preserved in amber.

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Once thought to be extinct, six northern Mexican garter snakes were discovered last month near the Gila River and another three later in the month.

From the Denver Post:

Doug Hotle, curator of reptiles and amphibians at the BioPark, said one of the snakes found last month was a young female, which indicates the wild population is reproducing.

“Based on what we’ve seen so far, this is a very successful group of snakes living in ideal wetland habitat,” he said. “We can do on-the-ground study to find out more about these rare garters and what their needs are here in New Mexico.”

The snakes at the BioPark are expected to go on public display soon.

The northern Mexican garter snake is a candidate for federal endangered species protection. It was once found throughout Arizona, southwestern New Mexico and parts of Mexico. Scientists said it had been nearly 20 years since the last confirmed sighting of the snake in New Mexico.

Hotle said the discovery marks a huge step forward for his team.

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By Herp News

San Cristobal de las Casas (Mexico), July 8 (IANS/EFE) Mexican scientists are studying a complete fossil of a lizard that lived some 23 million years ago and whose soft tissue remains have been preserved in amber.

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By Herp News

The newest update to the IUCN Red List has downgraded the status of the Yangtze finless porpoise (Neophocaena asiaeorientalis asiaeorientalis) from Endangered to Critically Endangered, reflecting the deteriorating state of arguably the world’s most degraded river system. The downgrade follows a survey last year that counted only 1,000 animals, a 50 percent decline from 2006.

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By Herp News

Environmentalist and journalist, George Mobiot, makes a passionate new plea for the controversial idea of rewilding parts of Europe in his new book Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding. Rewildling—a relatively recent idea—entails bringing back some of the animals (especially large ones) lost in parts of the world in order to restore ecosystems and, in Mobiot’s view, retrieve a deeper connection between humans and the wild again.

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By Herp News

A complete fossil of a lizard that lived some 23 million years ago has gone on display at museum in Mexico, where it was found several months ago.

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By Herp News

Thousands thronged to a huge reptile show being held this weekend at Golden Hall.

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