By Herp News

Landlocked in the navel of South America, the forests, wetlands and savannahs of Paraguay boast rich biodiversity and endemic species, yet the unique landscapes of Paraguay also face increasing threats, primarily from agricultural expansion. Controlled burns and clear cutting have become common practice as wildlands are converted for soy and cattle production. In some areas this land conversion is rapid: the Paraguayan Chaco, for instance, is being lost at a rate of 10% per year. One organization is working to reverse this trend. Para La Tierra (PLT) is a small NGO dedicated to the conservation of threatened habitats in Paraguay. Located on the Reserva Natural Laguna Blanca, in-between two of South America’s most threatened habitats: the Atlantic Forest and the vast topical savannah known as the cerrado, PLT is in a unique position to champion conservation.

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By Herp News

Germans have drained a lake in a determined search for a turtle blamed for an attack on a young swimmer.

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By Herp News

• Click here for step by step directions • Click here for our interactive map of all the walks Distance 7 miles (11km) Classification Moderate Duration 3 hours Begins Kynance Cove OS grid reference SW6813 Walk in a nutshell A rangy circuit resembling the outline of a bat that will take you along sandy beaches and stony clifftop paths around the very end of the Lizard peninsula. Why it's special …

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Check out this video “Basic Reptile Incubator,” submitted by kingsnake.com user PigZilla50317.
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

By Samantha Allen sallen@lowellsun.com CHELMSFORD — Fire officials say a home on High Street was unoccupied at the time a fire started on the second floor, where five pets were rescued.

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By Herp News

A reptile park that is the only facility in Australia to milk the funnel-web spiders for venom normally has a lull in winter. But the poisonous arachnids are coming steadily through the door.        

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By Herp News

A reptile park that is the only facility in Australia to milk the funnel-web spiders for venom normally has a lull in winter. But the poisonous arachnids are coming steadily through the door.        

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By Herp News

A reptile park that is the only facility in Australia to milk the funnel-web spiders for venom normally has a lull in winter. But the poisonous arachnids are coming steadily through the door.        

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By Herp News

A reptile park that is the only facility in Australia to milk the funnel-web spiders for venom normally has a lull in winter. But the poisonous arachnids are coming steadily through the door.        

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By Herp News

A reptile park that is the only facility in Australia to milk the funnel-web spiders for venom normally has a lull in winter. But the poisonous arachnids are coming steadily through the door.        

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By Herp News

By Samantha Allen sallen@lowellsun.com CHELMSFORD — Fire officials say a home on High Street was unoccupied at the time a fire started on the second floor, where five pets were rescued.

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By Herp News

P REPARE yourselves for another onslaught of Turtle Mania. Filming is right now underway for a new movie on the four wise-cracking, pizza-eating mutants who are sworn to defeat the forces of evil from their sewer hideout in New York. The Ninja Turtles – katana-wielding Leonardo, free-spirited nunchaku master Michelangelo, technological genius Donatello and often sullen Raphael – were trained by …

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By Herp News

Revered by the Vietnamese, the creature has been made ill by pollution, but Hanoians are now struggling to clean its lake Hundreds of people are working round the clock to clean up a lake in the heart of Vietnam's capital in hopes of saving a rare, ailing giant turtle that is considered sacred. Experts say pollution in Hanoi's Hoan Kiem lake is killing the giant freshwater turtle , which has a …

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By Herp News

REDLANDS — The California Turtle and Tortoise Club of the Inland Empire held its annual Turtle and Tortoise Show on Saturday at the Redlands Senior Center. Live exhibits, educational displays and turtle and tortoise adoptions were highlights.

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By Herp News

By Samantha Allen sallen@lowellsun.com CHELMSFORD — Fire officials say a home on High Street was unoccupied at the time a fire started on the second floor, where five pets were rescued.

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By Herp News

Does size matter? When referring to primate brain size and its relation to social intelligence, scientists at Duke University do not think the answer is a simple yes or no. In the past, scientists have correlated large brain size to large group size. However, in a new study published in PLoS ONE, scientists at Duke University provide evidence that large social networks, rather than large brains, contribute to social cognition, favoring the evolution of social intelligence.

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By Herp News

The African rock python that killed two boys in Campbellton on Monday was not the only banned species at Reptile Ocean, officials say.

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Snowmelt is decreasing all over the United States, putting human endeavors and wildlife survival in jeopardy. One victim of climate change is the Cascades frog, a denizen of the mountains of the Pacifc Northwest known for his distinctive “chuckle.”

From NPR:

In Washington’s Olympic Mountains things are looking dryer than normal. On a recent day, Maureen Ryan is out looking for the wet spots. She’s a researcher with the University of Washington and an expert on amphibians that live at high elevation.

These mountain trails are Ryan’s lab, so to speak. She studies tiny snow-fed potholes of water, cupped in the folds of high mountain ranges in the Northwest, a perfect habitat for Cascades frogs. But as the global climate warms, that habitat is receding.

“What’s happening to these frogs is in no way dissimilar to what’s happening to us, even if we can’t necessarily see it,” Ryan says. “These frogs are reliant on snowmelt for the water they need to live.”

People in the Pacific Northwest also rely on snowmelt to supply water for agriculture, industry, hydropower and drinking water.

Cascades frogs spend most of the year beneath dozens of feet of snow. But for a few short months in the summer, the frogs come to warm sunny ponds to feed and mate. While they’re at it, they make what some describe as a “chuckling” sound.

[…]

“Last year we had a good number of ponds … [that] dried up before the tadpoles had metamorphosed, so they didn’t survive there,” she says.

Ryan worries that with less snowpack and hotter summers, more egg sacks and tadpoles will be stranded out of water. That could ultimately decimate the population, unless they can move into deeper alpine lakes that are more resilient to the warming climate.

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By Herp News

The pet store Reptile Ocean in Campbellton, N.B., where two young boys were killed by a python snake as they slept in the apartment above. (CP)

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By Herp News

Florida police officer rescues hatchling sea turtles at resort        

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By Herp News

Homer, a turtle found off Greece after being deliberately blinded, will live out his days in a Newquay aquarium A loggerhead turtle that had its eyes gouged out, probably by a Greek fisherman to protect fishing nets, was today starting a new life at a Cornish aquarium. The large male turtle, called Homer, was flown to London then moved by road to Newquay, where he will live out the rest of his …

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By Herp News

About 15 animals will be seized from the Reptile Ocean building in Campbellton where two boys died Monday after apparently being strangled by a python that escaped an enclosure.

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By Herp News

Jean-Claude Savoie, the owner of the python that the RCMP says killed two boys in northern New Brunswick earlier this week, did government officials a favour by taking in the animal and several others, a former employee told Global News.

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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

A biological survey of forests slated for destruction for a palm oil project in Cameroon has uncovered 23 species of large mammals, including the world’s most endangered chimpanzee subspecies, the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes ellioti). The project in question, operated by U.S.-based company Herakles Farms, has come under stiff criticism both locally and abroad for threatening one of Africa’s most biologically rich forest lands and arguably undercutting local peoples’ access to traditional lands.

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By Herp News

The New Brunswick Department of Natural Resources has obtained a warrant to search the Reptile Ocean building in Campbellton where two boys died Monday after apparently being strangled by a python that escaped an enclosure.

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By Herp News

About 15 animals will be seized from the Reptile Ocean building in Campbellton where two boys died Monday after apparently being strangled by a python that escaped an enclosure.

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In yet more news about just why rattlesnakes are so vital to our ecology, the “magazine of the west,” Cowboys and Indians, tries to explain why human fear and persecution of these animals are so misguided:

While it’s not especially natural to empathize with beady-eyed creatures that have been demonized throughout history and rounded up for mass killing, the idea that “the only good snake is a dead snake” is an erroneous one, says Steven J. Beaupre, Ph.D., a biology professor at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Snakes play an important role in sustaining the earth’s fragile balance of nature, and, although often unjustly persecuted, they offer humans many benefits. For example, according to the National Institutes of Health, snakes are the prized research animals for some scientists seeking better treatments for such disorders as high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer.

“Serious diseases lurk in nature, and healthy ecosystems provide protective effects. Rattlesnakes exactly fit the bill,” Beaupre says. “They’re critically important natural rodent-control agents and voracious small-animal predators that help keep rodent-born diseases like hantavirus and bubonic plague in check.”

Beaupre also says Arkansas timber rattlesnakes may actually help control Lyme disease by consuming large numbers of white-footed mice that carry the bacterial infection. “Plus, any rancher who stores grain knows how devastating rodents can be to his supply,” he notes.

In a world where snakes are villified even when they are harmless and doing nothing but trying to avoid humans, and rattlesnakes are abused and tortured in the name of “entertainment” at “rattlesnake round-ups,” those are words herpers and animal advocates alike should take to heart.

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By Herp News

Organization has advocated that large constricting snakes be banned as pets for safety reasons, because they can carry disease and because they are stripped from their own habitat

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By Herp News

It wasn't your garden-variety New Mexico lizard that Thomas Sullivan found hiding in the bushes.

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By Herp News

SARASOTA, Fla. (AP) — A Florida police officer saved nearly 100 baby sea turtles when he gathered the newly hatched creatures from a hotel parking lot and street and released them into the Gulf of Mexico.

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By Herp News

Aug. 6, 2013: A Royal Canadian Mounted Police cruiser sits outside the Reptile Ocean exotic pet store in Campbellton, New Brunswick, Canada. AP/The Canadian Press

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Hate ticks? Hate Lyme disease? Then embrace the rattlesnake.

Researchers at the University of Maryland discovered that the Eastern timber rattlesnake, Crotalus horridus, keeps the ticks that cause Lyme disease in check by eating the rodents they’re attached to.

From the UMD release:

Human cases of Lyme disease, a bacterial illness that can cause serious neurological problems if left untreated, are on the rise. The disease is spread by black-legged ticks, which feed on infected mice and other small mammals. Foxes and other mammal predators help control the disease by keeping small mammal populations in check. The decline of these mammal predators may be a factor in Lyme disease’s prevalence among humans.

Timber rattlers are also top predators in Eastern forests, and their numbers are also falling, so former University of Maryland graduate student Edward Kabay wanted to know whether the rattlers also play a role in controlling Lyme disease.

Kabay used published studies of timber rattlers’ diets at four Eastern forest sites to estimate the number of small mammals the snakes consume, and matched that with information on the average number of ticks each small mammal carried. The results showed that each timber rattler removed 2,500-4,500 ticks from each site annually.

Because not every human bitten by an infected tick develops Lyme disease, the team did not estimate how many people are spared the disease because of the ecosystem service that timber rattlesnakes provide. But Kabay, who is now a science teacher at East Chapel Hill High School, and his research colleagues will talk about the human health implications of their work at 4:20 pm today (Aug. 6) in Room 1011 of the Minneapolis Convention Center.

Timber rattlesnakes are listed as endangered in six states and threatened in five more under the Endangered Species Act.

“Habitat loss, road kills, and people killing them out of fear are the big issues,” said University of Maryland Associate Biology Prof. Karen Lips. “They are non-aggressive and rarely bite unless provoked or stepped upon.”

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By Herp News

The bushmeat markets of Lao PDR (Laos) are filled with racks of wild game harvested both legally and illegally from the surrounding landscapes. While these meat markets certainly provide local protein to patrons, for wildlife biologists they offer something more. These bizarre zoological exhibits are a rich source of information about wildlife populations and wildlife consumption in remote areas.

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By Herp News

The death of two young children who died after a large python escaped from a pet store has prompted shock and outrage across the country, from people who wonder how a creature could have been allowed to inflict such tragedy. … Continue reading →

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By Herp News

Police in Canada are looking into the deaths of two young boys who appear to have been strangled by an exotic snake.

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By Herp News

Parametric Sound Corporation , a leading innovator of audio products and solutions, today announced that a joint presentation describing the pending merger with Turtle Beach is available on the Company's …

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Pet owners never like to leave their pets behind when they travel — but only the obsessed few try to smuggle them onto an airplane disguised as a hamburger.

From the South China Morning Post News:

A man tried to smuggle his pet turtle through security in Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport by hiding it in a KFC hamburger.

The incident occurred on the morning of July 29, when a man, surnamed Li, was about to board China Southern Airlines flight 345 to Beijing, Guangzhou Daily reported. As Li passed through airport security, X-ray screening machines detected a few “odd protrusions” sticking out of a KFC burger that the man had packed in his bag.

Airport staff determined that the protrusions looked suspiciously like turtle limbs, and asked to inspect Li’s luggage.

“There’s no turtle in there, just a hamburger,” Li reportedly insisted. “There’s nothing special to see inside.”

Li finally acquiesced to an inspection after repeated requests from airport staff, who uncovered the pet turtle hidden inside the burger. When asked why he had devised this strange idea, Li said that he had only wanted to travel together with his “beloved” turtle.

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By Herp News

By Victoria Cavaliere (Reuters) – Two young brothers found dead in an apartment over a reptile store in New Brunswick, Canada, were believed to have been strangled by a snake that escaped its enclosure and slithered into the building's ventilation system, police said on Monday. The boys, ages 5 and 7, were sleeping over at a friend's apartment above Reptile Ocean in the city of Campbellton …

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By Herp News

By KATE STANTON, UPI.com A large snake — thought to be a boa constrictor but later identified as a python — strangled two Canadian boys in their sleep.

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