By Herp News

Six months ago, 80 arboreal camera traps and 40 more cameras on the ground were deployed by scientists in the Manu Biosphere Reserve in Peru, one of the world’s most biodiverse conservation areas. The researchers took the cameras down just a few weeks ago, and they provided Mongabay with a sneak peek at the results, which include footage of numerous threatened and endangered species that often go undetected by traditional survey methods. Species caught on camera in the reserve include the endangered Peruvian woolly monkey, the endangered black-faced spider monkey, a near-threatened, tree-dwelling cat commonly known as the margay, and one of the largest birds of prey in the world, the near-threatened harpy eagle. Jhon Florez, the head of Manu National Park, which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, said in a statement that “The videos of the harpy eagle are simply spectacular. To capture footage of different individuals, across different sites, of such an emblematic bird is special for Manu, and is a great attraction to people who wish to visit Manu and witness its unbelievable wildlife first hand.” Harpy eagles (Harpia harpyja) can be a full meter tall (3.3 feet) with a wingspan twice that — they’re so big they prey on mammals like monkeys and sloths. Here’s footage to prove it: https://youtu.be/0n9F3sfzLu8 Three different individuals were filmed, two adults and one not yet fully mature, all recorded in a native community where hunting still occurs. “Although these sites are hunted and appear to have…

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Amphibians occupy almost every ecological niche, from the highest tropical trees to the most fetid pools of desert water. Brightly colored and cryptically camouflaged, they have evolved an astounding array of defenses – about half of all amphibians are poisonous. But despite their adaptability, these animals are in serious trouble, all over the world. And now, it seems, their best defense may be their biggest weakness. According to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, poisonous amphibians may be more likely to go extinct than their benign counterparts. These results surprised study authors Kevin Arbuckle and Michael Speed of the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. They designed their study to test a hypothesis in evolution, called escape-and-radiate. Scientists first used this to describe competition between poisonous plants and the caterpillars that eat them. It holds that natural selection favors adaptations that help prey escape predators, because those traits will be passed down to future generations. At the same time, any traits that help predators catch their prey will be passed down, too. “It’s been described as an evolutionary arms race, and rightly so,” Arbuckle told Mongabay. The toxic Panamanian Golden Frog has gone extinct in the wild. Photo by Rhett A. Butler According to Arbuckle, few studies had actually tested this hypothesis in animals. Amphibians, with their diverse defenses against predators and their well-studied fossil record, seemed to be the perfect natural laboratory. “Plus,” Arbuckle added, “they’re exceptionally cool.”…

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Photos captured by camera traps could seal the fate of an alleged tiger poacher in Thailand, WCS announced last Wednesday. Thailand police have confiscated tiger skin and body parts at a police checkpoint in Mae Sot District in Western Thailand. Since poaching of tigers in Thailand is illegal, proving the geographic origin of tiger parts is crucial to prosecute the accused. Fortunately, camera traps set up across Thailand’s Western Forest Complex by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) have come to the rescue. A tiger’s stripe pattern is unique and comparable. By comparing stripe pattern of the confiscated tiger skin with those wild tigers photographed by hundreds of camera traps, WCS experts have identified the dead tiger: a female last photographed alive in Huai Kha Khaend (HKK) Wildlife Sanctuary this year. The tigress had also been photographed with cubs in some photos earlier this year. The fate of the cubs, estimated to be two years old now, remains unknown, according to the statement by WCS. Experts compared the confiscated tiger skin with camera trap photos and found that it matched a tigress last photographed alive by a remote camera in Huai Kha Khaend Wildlife Sanctuary with cubs. Photos courtesy of WCS. Thailand police have arrested the alleged poacher, who now awaits trial. Since, the camera trap photos confirm that the tigress was last seen inside a protected area in Thailand, WCS remains optimistic about a conviction. “The Wildlife Conservation Society commends the government of Thailand for arresting an alleged tiger poacher for possessing a…

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A shout out to the little guys! Loving this Vinales Anole in our Herp Photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user macraei ! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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By Herp News

A wildlife trafficker who was caught trying to sell three baby orangutans on Facebook was sentenced to two years imprisonment and fined 50 million rupiah ($3,653) in Indonesia’s Aceh province last week. The man, a 29-year-old university student named Rahmadani, was arrested in a sting on August 1. Besides the Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii), authorities found him with two red-backed sea eagles (Haliastur indus); a great argus (Argusianus argus), which is a type of pheasant; and a taxidermied Sunda clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi). “Hopefully the conviction serves as a deterrent for would-be perpetrators of environmental crimes, including traffickers of protected plants and animals,” said Genman Hasibuan, head of the Aceh branch of the Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA), which assisted in the sting. “This verdict is the first such conviction in Aceh,” said Panut Hadisiswoyo, director of the Orangutan Information Center, which also helped track the man. “It is an important milestone for law enforcement efforts in regard to environmental crimes in Aceh.” One of the baby orangutans that was confiscated from a trafficker in Aceh in August. Photo by Junaidi Hanafiah However, Panut said the man should have received a stronger sentence. The maximum penalty for wildlife trafficking under the 1990 Conservation Law is five years imprisonment and a 100 million rupiah fine. He noted that in neighboring North Sumatra province in July, a man who was caught trying to sell just one baby orangutan was sentenced to two years behind bars and a 10…

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Visitors to the tropics remember the bright colors. Take the blue-and-yellow macaw with its egg-yolk breast and turquoise back – “the usual gaudy colouring of the intertropical productions,” as Charles Darwin put it. But recent research in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography contests the idea that wildlife and flowers in the tropics are more colorful than those in temperate climes. They may, in fact, be blander. People, including scientists, have a bias for “thinking that tropical regions are filled with really vibrant and exuberantly colorful things,” said lead author Rhiannon Dalrymple, who completed the study at the University of New South Wales in Australia. “But there’s never been any strong test of the idea.” To assess how colors change from one place to the next, researchers have relied on evaluating the hues of specimens by eye. But for the first time, Rhiannon and colleagues applied an objective lens: measuring color with instruments. The approach also allowed them to capture wavelengths of light, such as ultraviolet, that are invisible to people but apparent to bees, birds, and other animals. The researchers amassed species and subspecies of a wider breadth of flora and fauna than in any previous study about color: museum specimens of 424 kinds of butterflies and 570 kinds of birds, as well as 339 kinds of freshly collected flowers. Spanning 34.5 degrees of latitude in eastern Australia, the samples hailed from tropical rainforest to heathland. The researchers looked at how the average of different properties – like color…

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A recent report, published by the Biological Society of Washington, details the discovery of a new rat species, Batomys uragon, on the mountainous island of Luzon in the Philippines.A member of the research team, Lawrence Heaney of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, responded to Mongabay’s request for an interview on the significance of the discovery and B. uragon’s conservation future.Mongabay: What is so unique about the discovery of the new Batomys species?Lawrence Heaney: This new species, Batomys uragon, is a member of a group of mammals called “cloud rats” that live only in the Philippines — a branch on the tree of life that occurs nowhere else. This discovery brings the number of cloud rat species to eighteen, twelve of which occur on Luzon Island, the largest island in the Philippines.These animals form an adaptive radiation, [in a] habitat restricted to the [islands of the] Philippines, much the same as lemurs are restricted to Madagascar. Cloud rats feed on plant material in the canopy of rainforest that grows on mountains above 1,000 meters [3,280 feet] in elevation. They’re rodents, distantly related to familiar pests like rats and mice, and in appearance quite similar to squirrels or chinchillas. A shot of thickly forested Mt. Isarog in 2005. Photo by Danny Balete.Mongabay: Where, when, and how was the discovery made?Lawrence Heaney: Members of our research team first encountered this species in 1988, on Mt. Isarog, a dormant volcano in southern Luzon designated as a national park. We were conducting…

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Is the Wild West using the most up-to-date technology for managing wildlife and researching conservation issues? Kyran Kunkel, Lead Scientist at American Prairie Reserve and Affiliate Professor in the Wildlife Biology Program at the University of Montana, wants to ensure that it is. He spoke with WildTech about technologies he relies on for his work on the Reserve and those he has used previously in carnivore research, as well as new technologies he hopes to see for wildlife management and restoration of North America’s grassland ecosystems in the near future. American Prairie Reserve – North America’s “Serengeti”. Photo credit: American Prairie Reserve Throughout his career, Kunkel has investigated the movement and foraging patterns of a suite of carnivores, including grizzly bears, wolves, and mountain lions, in the American West. In the late 1990s, he began shifting his attention to helping create and restore American Prairie Reserve – North America’s most expansive wildlife reserve and restoration project, protecting native bison, swift foxes, and pronghorn, among its more iconic mammals. In helping to initiate the reintroduction of bison back onto the Reserve, located in northeastern Montana, Kunkel is ensuring the species is returned to a portion of its historic native range. We spoke to him about how his team has used technology to better understand the use of the prairie ecosystem by bison and other wildlife. WildTech: Which technologies have you used for reintroducing bison to the Reserve? Kyran Kunkel: We have GPS collars on bison. The collars…

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Happy Rattlesnake Friday! Here’s lookin’ at you kid! Gotta love a field find like this rattlesnake in our herp photo of the day uploaded by kingsnake.com user sluggo781 . Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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photo by Grant Adams
Grant Adams will always have a little something extra to remember his time in the Peace Corp. Adams, a recent graduate in biology from Denison University was just hoping to find some scientific task to keep his resume up to date. He sent an e-mail to a mailing list for ecologists, offering to collect data for them during his two-year stint in the Andes. He heard back from Tiffany Doan, a biologist from the University of Central Florida who asked him to collect lizards instead.

“I had no interest in lizards or snakes at all, but it sounded like something fun I could do,” “It’s going to be one of those lifelong stories, discovering a species,” “I’ll always carry that with me.” – Grant Adams

It wasn’t long before they had their lizard, a species Doan had never seen before, and it quickly became obvious that the lizard had never been formally described. Doan’s studies formalized the lizard in the literature as Euspondylus paxcorpus.

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By Herp News

Invasive species are great hitchhikers. They float in the ballast of ships, lurk in luggage, stick to unwashed sports gear, and cling to the soles of hiking boots. Scientists focus on stopping them from spreading because, once a new species gets rooted, it is expensive to manage and nearly impossible to remove. Shipping and industry are the major pathways for invasive species, but studies have also shown that tourists can spread them into protected wilderness. Most tourism studies have focused on local cases. Now, new research in the journal PLOS ONE has explored the global ties between tourists and invasive species for the first time. The analysis showed that non-native species are significantly more common and more diverse in high-tourism areas worldwide, said Dr. Lucy G. Anderson, who led the study as a PhD researcher at the University of Leeds in West Yorkshire, U.K. “We know that cargo ships [and other] commercial pathways are really an important vector for invasive species,” Anderson told Mongabay. “People have said ‘and tourism,’ but when you look back through the references and studies no one’s really tried to quantify that.” She and a team of colleagues dug through the literature, compiling almost 5,000 studies that linked tourism to non-native species. They hoped to “take lots of experimental examples and see if there’s a pattern across the board,” Anderson explained. This map shows the locations of the 32 studies of invasive species included in Anderson’s worldwide analysis. Green dots represent research…

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Juan Santamaría International Airport. Photo by Freestylerob [dropcap]E[/dropcap]ach year millions of travelers stream through the gates of Costa Rica’s Juan Santamaría airport in route to one of the country’s many natural wonders. But often when tourists leave, a piece of the country’s biodiversity goes with them. Turtle shell bracelets, reptile-skin wallets, bird feathers and even live animals have all been snuck out of Costa Rica through the airport as souvenirs. But the uneducated tourist is just the tip of the illegal wildlife trafficking iceberg. Professional smugglers slip unknown amounts of wildlife out in passenger planes at Costa Rica’s main airport, and exporters are known to sneak illegal wildlife into legitimate commercial shipments. Wildlife traffickers of either type are rarely caught, and when a seizure is made, penalties are low. Security at the San José airport relies on x-ray machines and body searches to uncover whatever wildlife may be secreted away in suitcases, while customs officials are saddled with the enormous tasks of distinguishing souvenirs from contraband, and legal wildlife exports from fraudulent ones. In both cases, there is plenty of room for illegally transported wildlife to slip through the cracks. “Customs officials aren’t experts in particular species of animals,” explained Benito Coghi, the director of Costa Rican customs. “We know things slip through, we just don’t know the full extent.” The smugglers who get caught Last September, German tourist Maciej Oskroba headed for the check out counter at Juan Santamaría Airport carrying a bag full of dirty t-shirts, swim trunks…

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Although not common, red phase brown anoles are well documented in Florida populations.
This pretty little female brown anole visited our back deck yesterday. She caught the eye of an amorous male brown anole of normal color. As far as aberrancies go, orange headed female and all orange male brown anoles are not particularly rare. And each time I see one I am reminded of the first one I ever saw. An adult male, it was in a terrarium at a reptile dealership and had just been sold to a well-known herpetoculturist for the whopping sum of several hundred dollars. Since then I have seen a dozen or so males and about 3 times that many orange-headed females in the wild. But I was recently told that a vendor at an east coast herp expo had a number of orange phase brown anoles that he was offering at exorbitant prices.

Build it and they will come. Offer it and they will buy. And then there was P.T.Barnum’s supposed statement, but I won’t go there!

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A True Giant. This Komodo Dragon takes center stage in our Herp Photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user cowboyfromhell s! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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Tuatara Gallery photo with the late Rico Walder
The rare New Zealand Tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) doesn’t have a penis but it may go a long way to help scientists understand phallic evolution.

Researchers at the University of Florida in Gainesville found that the tuatara develop tiny nubbins as an embryo but the development of these nubbins stalls and they never form into a proper penis. Nubbins represent an early trace of the phallic development process. This initial growth suggests the phallus developed only once throughout the evolution of mammals and reptiles, according to the UF researchers.

Their research indicates that the tuataras lost a phallus, indicating that the basic penis evolved only once.

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By Herp News

Prionopelta xerosilva, named after the dry forests in which it exclusively lives in northwestern Madagascar. During a recently concluded study conducted over the last ten years, researchers from the California Academy of Sciences (CAS) working with the Madagascar Biodiversity Center (MBC) have discovered and described six new species of ants belonging to the genus Prionopelta. Commonly, known as ‘Dracula Ants’ for their unique feeding behavior, these new members of Prionopelta have been found to be tiny, ferocious social predators living within the subterranean, microscopic ecosystem of the forest floor soils in Madagascar. For much of the last decade, members of the MBC, led by entomologists Brian Fisher and Rick Overson from CAS conducted extensive sampling across Madagascar’s diverse habitat by sifting forest floor spoils to find the tiny, colorless ants. Malagasy scientists and trainees at the MBC assisted with the research and collected ants throughout the duration of the study as part of an ongoing effort to further understand, and educate others about, Malagasy biodiversity. P. laurae the smallest of the Malagasy Prionopelta, measuring around 1.5 mm in length and 0.2mm wide, is much smaller than the commonly known fruit fly, and skinner than many single-celled amoebae. Unique Sampling Method One of the main tools the team used for sample collection is the deceptively simple ‘Winkler’ trap. Organic material is gathered from the forest floor and suspended to dry in a special bag. As the organic material dries out, the natural behavior…

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A red morph specimen of Lehmann’s poison frog. Photo courtesy of Tesoros de Colombia. Lehmann’s poison frog (Oophaga lehmanni) is one of many beautiful frog species endemic to Colombia. It is has been subject to illegal trafficking for the wildlife pet trade, and is listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN. Considered the “holy grail” by frog enthusiasts worldwide, this species used to be so common that it littered the ground in its native habitat. However, a German-led documentary, filmed in 2013, that aimed to find a red morph of Lehmann’s poison frog could only find a single one in a remote part of its range. The dire situation faced by this and other endangered poison frogs in the country prompted Colombian animal scientist Ivan Lozano-Ortega to start an organization with the objective of ending illegal frog smuggling and simultaneously satisfying the appetite of voracious frog collectors worldwide. After many years of negotiations the group, called Tesoros de Colombia (“Treasures of Colombia”), recently obtained the required permits from CITES and the Colombian government to legally export its captive-bred Lehmann’s poison frogs for the international hobbyist market. The first Tesoros de Colombia export – the yellow-striped poison frog. Photo courtesy of Commons Free Use Rights. Lozano-Ortega recently spoke to Mongabay about Tesoros de Colombia, which he started in 2006 with a team of other conservationists to realize his dream of saving Colombian poison frogs from extinction. Offering sustainable and legally sourced frogs is…

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The first-ever successful elimination of a fatal chytrid fungus in a wild amphibian has been revealed by scientists, marking a major breakthrough in the fight against the disease responsible for devastating amphibian populations worldwide.

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What a great Indigo field shot for our Herp Photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user ACO3124 ! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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Photographing herps takes practice
Photographing herps is an art form that takes many years to master. Even after many years of practice I can always find something wrong with the best pictures I have taken and, like all of you, I wish I could take better herp pictures. But I am still practicing and learning, and getting a little better each time.

A lot of photographers think you need to have the best this, or latest that, to capture that epic picture. I have a different approach than many herp photographers I see out there. No matter how nice your camera is, someone else has a better one. But it’s not the camera that makes the photograph, it’s just a tool. Even the cheapest digital cameras can take a killer picture if you learn how to use it properly and learn to work within its limitations. So my first two points for now are that even a cheap camera can capture a killer picture if you take time to learn how to use it, AND if you have the most expensive camera out there you will still find something wrong with the pictures you take and will be plagued with the desire to improve.

I will discuss herp photography more in future blogs, but in the meantime enjoy this shot I took of a Green Tree Frog, Hyla cinerea. And as you can see, even with this photo there is a lot of room for improvement, and it is important that you always see things that way when you review your own pictures! …read more
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It’s a sad sight no self-respecting reptile hobbyist wants to see. Three pet Boa constrictors, purposely frozen and then dumped along a rural road. Sheriff’s deputies in northern Wisconsin are investigating a reptile mistreatment case after the reptiles were found frozen in a tote box along a road near Irma.

The Lincoln County Humane Society says it appears no one wanted the snakes and chose to kill them by filling the tote with water and deliberately freezing them. Temperatures were well above freezing when the snakes were found this week.

With all the reptile rescues and education programs, as well as regular animal shelters, there is no need to euthanize healthy snakes in this manner. If you have a reptile you can no longer care for please make an effort to place them with a rescue organization. If you have to euthanize a sick or injured reptile, please do so humanely, and please dispose of the remains properly.

To read more, please visit Fox6Now.com

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By Herp News

Road construction crews in southeastern Nigeria have begun work on a six-lane, 260-kilometer “superhighway” in Cross River State, which Governor Ben Ayade argues will be an economic booster shot for the region. Opponents, however, worry about the effects it may have on the nearby Cross River National Park. The Oban division of Cross River National Park holds some 3,000 square kilometers of lowland rainforest. It’s a proposed UNESCO World Heritage Site and recognized as a biodiversity hotspot because of the many unique species there facing pressure from humans. Its slopes are home to important watersheds, and they hold rare and endangered animals such as forest elephants, leopards, and primates like drills and Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees. Cross River National Park is also contiguous with Korup National Park across the border in Cameroon. The rarely seen and critically endangered Cross River gorilla (Gorilla gorilla diehli), numbering perhaps 300, inhabits a separate section of the park. The Cross River gorilla is the world’s rarest gorilla subspecies. It is found only in the forests along the Cameroon-Nigeria border. Photo in the Public Domain. The superhighway’s path is slated to cut through the park’s buffer zone. This will likely encourage communities to pick up and move there in search of greater economic opportunities, says Odey Oyama, executive director of the Rainforest Resource and Development Centre based in Cross River State. Construction of the road could have a devastating impact on that section of the forest, Oyama told mongabay.com. “If that happens, you…

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With its furry face and adorable antics, the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) attracts an equally giant wave of financial support. Zoos pay the Chinese government up to $1 million each year to host pairs of pandas, and conservation groups pour millions of dollars into protecting the species. Some see this effort to save the panda from extinction as a waste of precious money that could conservationists could use to help other species. But a study published recently in Conservation Biology suggests that shielding the giant panda’s habitat also benefits many other species found only in China. “What the Chinese government has done, over the last decade or so, is to very deliberately increase the area it has set aside for nature reserves,” said Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at Duke University and coauthor of the paper. “I think we were very pleasantly surprised by how effective the conservation was.” A giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) climbs a tree at the Bifengxia Giant Panda Breeding and Conservation Center in Sichuan, China. Photo by Binbin Li, Duke University Pimm and his colleague Binbin Li, also at Duke University, examined maps published by the IUCN showing the rough distributions of endemic mammals, birds, and amphibians – species found only in China. Such maps can be misleading, Pimm said, because they don’t always account for limiting factors like elevation or actual availability of habitat. So he and Li trimmed the ranges of the species appropriately to create updated maps. Then they…

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Researchers have identified the fungal culprit behind an often deadly skin infection in snakes in the eastern US. The research shows that Ophidiomyces ophiodiicola is the definitive cause of snake fungal disease, which will help researchers pinpoint why it is emerging as a threat to snake populations and how its impacts can be mitigated.

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This hatching Beaded Lizard in our Herp Photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user Kevin Earley will probably break the internet with it’s cuteness! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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A common liana snake en situ, Peruvian Amazon.
We had looked for years with no success for a common liana snake, Siphlophis cervinus, on the Amazonian (Peru) preserves that Patti and I regularly visited. We looked high and low, in trailside trees, in shrubs, and of course on lianas but to no avail. After all, this was known to be an arboreal, nocturnal, species so we scoured and rescoured leafed branches, bare branches. bromeliad cups, you name it. If it saw above ground level and reachable by us, we looked. So where did we find our first liana snake? It was crawling busily along atop fallen wet leaves in mid-trail a fair distance from any arboreal highways on Madre Selva Biological Preserve. About 20” long the slender snake was even prettier than it pix had led us to believe. Its busy pattern, a mosaic of yellow shades on black, orange highlights on black, and black reticulations on and orange vertebral line, was nothing short of spectacular.

But this first found terrestrial example has proven to be the exception. Although we still don’t consider this species common, since the first find we have averaged one Liana snake per trip. On one trip we were lucky enough to find 2.

But when compared to the dozens of calico snakes and rainbow boas we have happened across, the common liana snake has still proven far from a common find.

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The owner of a king cobra that went AWOL for over a month in Orlando Florida is appealing a ruling that he should no longer be able to own venomous snakes.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has ordered to revoke the “sanctuary status” of the facility, which the commission said was applied in error. The escaped king cobra, Ophiophagus hannah, went missing in early September and was not found until a month later when it turned up in a neighbor’s laundry room under a dryer.

The new details came one day after the State Attorney’s Office said the owner would be charged with three counts in connection with the venomous snake’s escape. He is charged with holding wildlife in an improper manner that caused it to escape, not maintaining proper housing and failing to report the escape immediately.

For more read the full story at UPI.COM
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By Herp News

The endangered Hyacinth Macaw is highly coveted by traffickers and collectors. Photo by Juliana M Ferreira. [dropcap]W[/dropcap]ildlife trafficking transit chains in Latin America are complex, secret, and as varied as the many common and threatened animal species targeted. After poachers illegally pluck wildlife from their habitats, the animals are passed on to middlemen, who move them along clandestine routes before selling them to anonymous consumers at home or abroad. Traffickers involved in the international trade frequently smuggle contraband across poorly secured borders into neighboring countries that lack strong trafficking laws, with the animals, or animal parts, shipped overseas from there. Routes and smuggling techniques shift regularly as traffickers play a cat-and-mouse game with enforcers. When one method is discovered by customs officials — such as sewing tiny tropical parakeets into a garment worn on a plane — smugglers contrive another to move their illegal cargo — maybe using a “mule” or local person to claim a valuable monkey as a “beloved pet” as a means of moving it across a border and into the lucrative pet trade. A parrot vendor offers the camera a big smile. Many local market dealers don’t see wildlife trafficking as wrong, and local authorities seem to agree; police often stroll through markets without making any arrests of illegal traffickers. Photo by The Photographer made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication Comprehensive data on the illegal wildlife trade in Central and South America…

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The US Department of the Interior says the Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel, one of the first species listed as endangered in the US nearly fifty years ago, is no longer at risk of going extinct. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), which worked together with states and landowners on conservation efforts to protect the species, will officially remove the squirrel from the list of Threatened and Endangered Wildlife under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) next month, according to a statement. The Delmarva fox squirrel (Sciurus niger cinereus) joins more than 30 other species that have been de-listed under the ESA after their populations recovered, including the bald eagle, American alligator and peregrine falcon. The ESA has been so successful in conserving imperiled wildlife, the FWS said, that it has prevented the loss of nearly every species that has been listed as threatened or endangered since 1973. The largest of all the tree squirrels, the Delmarva fox squirrel has silver to whitish-gray fur, an unusually fluffy tail and white belly. It is twice the size of the common gray squirrel. Mature adults can be as big as 30 inches — half of that being tail — and weigh up to 3 pounds. Delmarva Fox Squirrel. Photo by Guy Willey. Historically, the fox squirrel lived throughout the Delmarva Peninsula, formed by portions of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Habitat loss due to logging of forests for agriculture and short-rotation timber production as well as over-hunting at the turn…

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On November 3, Cameroonian activist Nasako Besingi was convicted of four criminal counts against a controversial palm oil company operating in the country. But a coalition of environmental and human rights organizations is denouncing the charges, urging authorities to stop what they call the “repression” of Besingi and other activists. Besingi is the director of the Cameroonian NGO Struggle to Economize our Future Environment (SEFE), a group galvanizing resistance to the recent development of palm oil plantations in Cameroon by producer Herakles Farms. After three year of legal battles, he was recently convicted of two counts each of defamation and propagation of false news against the U.S. agribusiness company. He was sentenced to pay a fine of $2,400 or face up to three years in prison. But a group of six international organizations, including Greenpeace Africa and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), refute the legitimacy of the charges. In a statement, EIA referred to the judgment as “a great threat to freedom of expression in Cameroon.” Nasako Besingi, director of the Cameroonian NGO, SEFE, speaks during a press briefing at the National Press Club about the impacts of the Herakles Farms Palm Oil plantation development on the community and environment in his native Cameroon. The image behind him is an aerial view of one of the plantations. Photo courtesy of Greenpeace. The object of contention is a group of industrial palm oil plantations in northwest Cameroon, near its border with Nigeria. Run by Herakles Farms, a…

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The Green Macaw (Ara ambiguus) is an Endangered species. Traffickers hunt it on the banks of Nicaragua’s San Juan River. Captured birds are often transported for sale to San Salvador more than 1000 kilometers away. From there some birds are moved north through Mexico into the United States. Photo credit: Carlos Chávez. They call it the Central Market. It is the heart that breathes life into the Salvadoran capital, San Salvador. It is impossible not to feel lost in this huge maze of dealers where the purchase of almost anything is possible, ranging from “magic” potions to cure any ill, to broken jukeboxes, or wild animals, especially parrots that say “hello” inside their narrow cramped cages. No one has been able to stop illegal trafficking here. No one. In the last five years, the Salvadoran environmental police have moved in occasionally to inspect the Central Market. Nearly every raid results in the confiscation of a few species that are close to extinction, especially psittaciformes: parrots, parakeets and macaws. In April 2012, 58 birds were rescued; in March 2014, 32 more; in March 2015, 23. According to the estimations of the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (known as MARN), more than 300 birds are confiscated every year. Some are released into the forest; some others are rehabilitated in an animal shelter in the west of El Salvador. No one knows how many birds and other animals escape the notice of police. Recently the MARN set up fences in San Salvador…

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The Indian star tortoise (Geochelone elegans) is a little-known, but common, victim of illegal wildlife trade. In 2014, at least 55,000 wild tortoises were poached from just one “trade hub” in southern India, a recent study published in Nature Conservation has uncovered. “We were most shocked at the sheer scale of the illegal trade in this species,” Neil D’Cruze, lead author from the University of Oxford and Head of Research at World Animal Protection, UK, told Mongabay. “A great deal of suffering is involved too — stuffed into sacks and suitcases, cracked shells stress and associated disease is rife and many do not survive the arduous smuggling process.” The Indian star tortoise is popular as a pet and a spiritual symbol, largely because of its striking shell that has a star-like radiating pattern of yellow and black. However, no one had taken a closer look at where the tortoises were coming from, D’Cruze said. The star tortoise is a popular pet mainly because of the attractive star-like radiating pattern on its shell. Photo by Neil D’Cruze for World Animal Protection. The star tortoise’s status in the wild was last assessed 15 years ago in 2000, he added, when it was categorized under ‘Least Concern’ on the IUCN Red List. Concerned about the tortoise’s current status in India’s wilderness — where they typically occur in grasslands and scrub forests — D’Cruze and his team initiated a 17-month investigation in two Indian states to try and find some answers. The…

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Hopefully this adorbable shot of an Elongated Tortoise in our Herp Photo of the day, uploaded by kingsnake.com user TylerStewart will help brighten your Monday! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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Gallery photo by user Dean Alessandrin
Police are trying to track down a Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) stolen from the Pierrelatte crocodile farm in the Drôme département of southeastern France. The monitor lizard was one of four on loan from the Barcelona Zoo where it was born in captivity.

“This is the work of an enthusiast, or at least someone who was acting on orders,” farm manager Samuel Martin

The dragon, which weighed around 12 pounds and measured 4 feet long, was the only reptile taken by the thieves who used a cloth over the lizard’s eyes to prevent it from panicking.

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White-faced saki monkey (Pithecia pithecia). Photo by Rhett Butler. It’s being called the “landmark” conservation policy [ThinkProgress] President Obama recently released a presidential memorandum declaring that development projects on America’s public lands, such as energy and mining, should result in in net benefit for the nation’s rivers, lands, and wildlife resources. Peru creates ‘Yellowstone of the Amazon’ [Mongabay] After more than a decade of discussion and planning, Peru on Sunday will officially designate Sierra del Divisor National Park, a 1.3 million hectare (3.3 million acre) reserve that is home to uncontacted indigenous tribes, endangered wildlife, and one of South America’s wildest landscapes. The people have spoken and SeaWorld has listened [Washington Post] What has been viewed for many years as an iconic experience at SeaWorld San Diego, will soon be no more. As a result of the ongoing public criticism, the amusement park has announced they will phase out the “theatrical” killer whale show by 2016. What’s going down in Greenland will affect us all [Grist] This major glacier in northeast Greenland started to melt rapidly in 2012 and now it’s beginning to crumble into the sea. Scientists say the glacier holds enough water to raise global sea levels by half a meter. Stream on Mendenhall Glacier. Photo by Rhett Butler. Pollution levels have turned China into an eerie doomsday scene [The Guardian] Residents of north-eastern China have locked themselves indoors after their homes were enveloped by record high levels of smog.…

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On the week of October 9th, a 10-man ranger patrol team was ambushed by wildlife poachers equipped with heavy artillery as they searched for an elephant tracking collar in Garamba National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo. Most of the unit escaped, but four men were killed in the attack, bringing the ranger death toll in Garamba to eight just this year. As similar stories play out across Africa, it’s easy to see why reserve managers have turned to military technology, including drones, to combat poaching of high-value wildlife.Drones to the Rescue?The use of drones, a.k.a. Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), is among of the most sophisticated of the proposed solutions to the poaching crisis, and certainly the headline-grabber. Conservationists have called for deployment of UAS’s to the front lines of the poaching crisis, in order to enhance surveillance of protected areas and detection and pursuit of elephant and rhino poachers. White rhino in Kruger National Park, South Africa, a target for poachers. Photo credit: Rhett A. ButlerRecent press coverage on the transformative nature of UAS’s to protect wildlife, however, is often misleading or thin on evidence that the devices work as intended. Unmanned Aerial Systems are complicated, and reporters are not UAS experts; reports by manufacturers of successful field applications are frequently unsubstantiated by data. These rarely consider that the deterrence resulting from applying a novel technology is likely to be short-lived, once poachers recognize the UAS’s shortcomings. These claims have thus generated confusion and unrealistic…

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A group of scientists from the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) and World Animal Protection is on the prowl for new tools to help protect wild tigers. Today, they launched a competition called “Think for Tigers,” which urges anyone associated with academic institutions, NGOs, governments and tech companies to propose an “innovative idea, product or solution” that could help scientists and park personnel monitor or track tigers in the wild. Tiger and cub in the snow. Photo credit: Dave Pape, licensed under Public Domain via Commons The population of wild tigers has dwindled to a mere 3,200 individuals that are confined to four percent of their former range. The species is listed as “endangered” by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and two of the current tiger subspecies are critically endangered. Poaching, habitat loss and fragmentation, overhunting and other threats have contributed to the startling decline of the biggest of the big cats. “Tigers are in trouble. They are threatened by poaching for illegal trade, habitat loss and conflict with people. Researchers and rangers are working around the clock to protect them, but the threats are increasing and time is running out,” David Macdonald, founder and director of Wild CRU and Think for Tigers project director, said in a press release. Researchers currently depend on an array of tools and techniques to keep tabs on wild tigers, ranging from the traditional to the high tech. The tiger toolbox includes monitoring natural signs, such as…

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The world’s largest amphibian sounds like a work of fiction: virtually unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs, and reportedly growing as long as a man, the Chinese Giant Salamander (Andrias davidianus) is clinging to survival in the wild in a few fast-flowing rivers scattered across the highlands of China. Meanwhile, the aquaculture industry is breeding the animal in large numbers in captivity for the gourmet food market.The Chinese Giant Salamander is a fully aquatic amphibian that grows to a maximum length of 1.8 meters (almost 6 feet). More typically measuring about 1 meter (3.28 feet), it breathes through its mottled brown, rough, wrinkled skin, and has a broad, flat head, and tiny eyes. Poor eyesight means that this large animal relies heavily on smell, touch, and the sensing of vibrations — via special sensory nodes in its skin — to catch prey of fish, frogs, and insects.Females lay strings of hundreds of eggs in dens, or underwater cavities, which are then guarded by male den masters until the eggs hatch a couple of months later. Measuring just 3 centimeters (1.18 inches) long when they emerge from the egg, the salamanders grow slowly to their adult size, reaching sexual maturity when they are about 15 years old.An ancient animal disappearing from wild riversPart of a lineage stretching back 170 million years, these ancient creatures are “living fossils” now at risk of extinction in the wild due to a deadly combination of over-exploitation, disease, and habitat loss. Long generation times make…

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Nature isn’t quite so natural anymore. Our interaction with the world around us has changed it drastically, and nowhere more so than in cities, vast artificial landscapes lacking in biodiversity. However, cities are also evolutionary hotspots, home to moths that changed color to camouflage themselves amongst pollution-stained trees, “superworms” that can munch on heavy metals, and birds that changed their tune to battle with noise pollution. Species are changing their bodies and behavior to fit into the human environment.According to a recent review paper published in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, these changes may be occurring much quicker than scientists imagined to be possible.“What the evidence is saying is that ‘rapid evolution’ is occurring,” Marina Alberti, the author of the study and a professor of urban and environmental planning at the University of Washington in Seattle, told mongabay.comAs we build our cities we tinker with ecosystems, creating conditions that force species to adapt. In doing so we unleash change in wildlife communities. Previously scientists thought such change took a long time to occur. However, Alberti writes that “human-driven trait changes occur roughly twice as fast as those driven by [natural] forces,” according to research cited in her paper.According to Alberti, if current evidence about the pace of change is correct there will be “significant implications for ecological and human wellbeing on a relatively short time scale.”In urban areas we change the number of species and their diversity, but we also create habitats — or a lack of them…

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Phenological mismatches, or a mistiming between creatures and the prey and plants they eat, is one of the biggest known impacts of climate change on ecological systems. But a new study finds that one common migratory songbird has a natural flexibility in its breeding time that has helped stave off mismatches, at least for now.

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