By Herp News

A leafcutter bee, one of the species benefiting from wildlife-friendly farming. Photo by Brigit Strawbridge. Commercial farms can benefit from creating exclusive spaces for wildlife on field edges, a new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B has found. “It is possible to achieve BOTH wildlife conservation and maintain — and in some cases increase — food production on a modern, commercial farm,” Richard Pywell from the Natural Environment Research Council’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford, UK, told Mongabay in an email. Instead of looking at the role of preexisting semi-natural habitats within crop fields as many past studies have done, Pywell and his colleagues investigated the value of actually creating wildlife-friendly habitat on low-yielding edges of fields that have been removed from food production. For six years, between 2005 and 2011, the team studied yields of wheat, oilseed rape, and beans on 56 fields in central England. Creation of wildflower habitats on small areas of less productive land at the field edge to attract crop pollinators. Photo by Heather Lowther, CEH. They removed three to eight percent of usable cropping land from the edges of some of these fields, and instead grew native plants and wildflowers there to attract wildlife like bees, beetles, and birds. Then they compared crop yields from these fields with yield from other fields lacking such wildlife-friendly habitats. The team found that in fields without wildlife-habitat margins, crop yields were much lower at…

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Photo: A photo obtained from the Christian-Albrechts-Universitat of Kiel shows a South-American horned frog (genus Ceratophrys), waiting for its prey

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-06-super-sticky-frog-scientists-tongue-tied.html#jCp
It was previously thought that a frog’s tongue got it’s stickiness from the saliva, but recent research suggests something completely different.

“The experimental data shows that frog tongues can be best compared to pressure-sensitive adhesives that are of common technical use as adhesive tapes or labels,” according to the study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Read more on this study at Phys.org. …read more
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By Herp News

Warning: Some images below may contain graphic content. At best numbering roughly 2,800 individuals, the Sumatran elephant (Elephas maximus sumatranus) is critically endangered. Yet population data has been notoriously difficult to gather due to the rarity of sightings and the small size and isolation of the areas in which the elephants live, complicating conservation efforts. A new study based on an unusual technique of analyzing DNA in elephant dung provides an assessment of the largest known elephant population in central Sumatra, Indonesia, that of the Bukit Tigapuluh landscape. The new study, published in mongabay.com’s journal Tropical Conservation Science, is part of an island-wide effort to establish basic elephant population data to help with conservation planning. Most previous Sumatran elephant population estimates for Bukit Tigapuluh are outdated or unreliable, underscoring the need for a new assessment, the authors write. A group of Sumatran elephants searches for food in a pulpwood concession in the RiauJambi survey area of Bukit Tigapuluh. Photo by Frankfurt Zoological Society / Alexander Moßbrucker & Albert Tetanus. “Certainly, information alone cannot save elephants from extinction, but national and local conservation strategies based on incomplete and/or outdated data would likely fail as scarce conservation resources would not be adequately allocated and important conservation needs and opportunities may be overlooked,” the study states. The researchers gathered fresh elephant dung from sampling blocks established in two 900-square-kilometer survey areas that they believe all the area’s elephants pass through. By analyzing DNA from the dung samples “using methods…

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By Herp News

We hunt for food, and we hunt for fun. But we are unlike other natural predators, according to a study recently published in Science.  We are “super-predators”, researchers say. Cape Buffalo Trophy. Photo by Lord Mountbatten, Wikimedia Commons. Most natural predators on land — like lions, bears and tigers — prefer to hunt juvenile prey animals for food. But on analyzing a global database of over 300 studies, researchers found that humans kill 14 times more adult prey than other predators. Humans also hunt carnivores at nine-times the rate of other predators, they found. “We kill those carnivores not for food, but for trophies and — sometimes — to eliminate them as competitors,” Chris Darimont, lead author of the study from the University of Victoria, told Science news. “Because they naturally don’t face much predation, they have not evolved ways to successfully avoid humans or reproduce fast enough to make up for human-induced losses.” Moreover, the formerly dangerous act of searching for, pursuing and capturing large-sized prey is now easier due to advanced killing technology, authors write in the paper. “Hunters ‘capture’ mammals with bullets, and fishes with hooks and nets. They assume minimal risk compared with non-human predators, especially terrestrial carnivores, which are often injured while living what amounts to a dangerous lifestyle,” Darimont told reporters, according to the BBC. Killing of Cecil, the lion, by a trophy hunter on July 1 generated widespread public outrage. Photo from Wikimedia Commons. Humans hunt a…

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Everyone feels just like this little chameleon does here in our herp photo of the day uploaded by kingsnake.com user 1Sun every once in a while! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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Photo: The News-Press
University of Queensland has decided turtles look good in clothes. They have altered the design of rash vest to fit both hatchling and adult sea turtles to learn a bit more about the dietary needs of Loggerheads by collecting a full fecal sample.

Mr Coffee said the information could be used to identify and protect habitats.
“The idea is that I’ll be sampling nesting females as well,” he said.
“So I’ll be taking blood and skin from nesting females over the summer period at Mon Repos and Heron Island and be hoping to use … analysis on those and figure out where they were foraging before they came to nest.

To get the full poop on this article, visit ABC.net. …read more
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The red pygmy rattlers of Hyde County, NC are among the world’s most beautiful snakes.
It was exactly 5:45PM and the temperature was 84F when we turned from the pavement onto a secluded dirt road in Hyde County, NC. It was a sunny mid-August afternoon and the humidity was high. Moments earlier we had photographed a 4-foot long canebrake rattler lying quietly in the then traffic free oncoming lane, but it was not for canebrakes that Jake and I had made the drive. Rather, it was the hope of seeing a red phase Carolina pygmy rattlesnake, Sistrurus m. miliarius, that had drawn us northward those several hundred miles. We had allowed 2 nights for the search.

Within 15 minutes of finding the canebrake we were back in the car. Decision time was upon us. Should we remain on the sun-warmed paved road or turn onto the cooler, shaded intersecting dirt road that stretched off far into the distance. The dirt road won out and it proved to be a good decision. Within five seconds of having made the turn we found the target, a beautiful adult red phase pygmy. It lay fully stretched just inches from an acre of tall grasses. Indeed the deities of herping were smiling on us! We had found our main target on the first evening and could now concentrate on our newly stated target 2 the next night. From this, the Sandhills phase of the Carolina pygmy, we were separated by several hundred miles. But at least the destination was closer to home. Have I ever mentioned how big the Carolinas seem when driving east to west?

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By Herp News

Thanks to a thin layer of tissue that covers the heart called the epicardium, zebrafish are able to regrow damaged cardiac tissue. New research has shown that the epicardium is able to heal not only the heart, but also itself, when damaged, and it revealed the signaling molecule responsible for initiating the healing process. The discovery could eventually help researchers find ways to regrow human heart tissue, which would aid in the recovery of heart attack victims, among other cardiac patients. In 2002, Kenneth Poss, now a cell biologist at Duke University, along with two colleagues, discovered that zebrafish (Danio rerio) possess the power to regenerate damaged heart muscle. This led to an “investigation of how and why heart regeneration happens,” Poss told Mongabay. “In the past few years, our work, and those of others, [has] implicated a thin cellular covering of the heart called the epicardium as being important in repair of injured heart muscle,” Poss explained. Poss’s most recent study, published in Nature, further explored the epicardium’s role in regeneration. Poss and three colleagues illustrated the importance of the epicardium by observing the rate of heart regeneration in zebrafish in which the researchers had damaged just the heart tissue versus those in which they had also destroyed the epicardium. Male and female adult zebrafish. Photo by Tohru Murakami / Flickr As expected, fish with an injured epicardium showed delayed healing of their other heart tissues. But the researchers were surprised to find that before…

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By Herp News

Thanks to a thin layer of tissue that covers the heart called the epicardium, zebrafish are able to regrow damaged cardiac tissue. New research has shown that the epicardium is able to heal not only the heart, but also itself, when damaged, and it revealed the signaling molecule responsible for initiating the healing process. The discovery could eventually help researchers find ways to regrow human heart tissue, which would aid in the recovery of heart attack victims, among other cardiac patients. In 2002, Kenneth Poss, now a cell biologist at Duke University, along with two colleagues, discovered that zebrafish (Danio rerio) possess the power to regenerate damaged heart muscle. This led to an “investigation of how and why heart regeneration happens,” Poss told Mongabay. “In the past few years, our work, and those of others, [has] implicated a thin cellular covering of the heart called the epicardium as being important in repair of injured heart muscle,” Poss explained. Poss’s most recent study, published in Nature, further explored the epicardium’s role in regeneration. Poss and three colleagues illustrated the importance of the epicardium by observing the rate of heart regeneration in zebrafish in which the researchers had damaged just the heart tissue versus those in which they had also destroyed the epicardium. Male and female adult zebrafish. Photo by Tohru Murakami / Flickr As expected, fish with an injured epicardium showed delayed healing of their other heart tissues. But the researchers were surprised to find that before…

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By Herp News

What’s the best way to save life on Earth? Should we set aside huge blocks of wilderness and intensively farm the rest or should we create a mosaic ecosystem – i.e., a quilt-like mix of farms, forests and everything in-between? Conservationists, ecologists and farmers have been passionately debating this dichotomy – what they call either “land sparing” or “land sharing” – for decades. It’s not an ivory tower argument: with seven billion human mouths to feed (and rising daily) and a global extinction crisis on our hands, the answer has massive real-world applications. Last month, a new study in Current Biology took a novel view of the debate by asking not what was best for birds in general, but what was best for preserving the full-breadth and depth of bird evolution, something scientists call “phylogenetic diversity.” Land Sparing for Phylogenetic Diversity The study, headed by David Edwards with the University of Sheffield and James Gilroy with the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, found that land sparing (i.e., big parks coupled with intensive agriculture) was the best way forward for preserving birds’ great evolutionary heritage – at least in Colombia’s avian-rich Chocó-Andes ecosystem. “The Chocó-Andes are a hotspot of endemism and have been widely impacted by low-intensity farming, making this one of the most threatened faunas on Earth,” Edwards said in a press release. “It is vital to consider how best to farm here, but also to use this region as a model for how best to farm in other locations.”…

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Northern muriqui monkeys from the wild population in RPPN Feliciano Miguel Abdala, previously known as the Estação Biológica de Caratinga. This privately owned ranch is the site of the longest-running large mammal research project in Brazil, led by University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist Karen Strier for 33 years. Photo courtesy of Carla B. Possamai/Universidade Federal de Espirito Santo [dropcap]M[/dropcap]uriquis often start their day by hugging one another. The Brazilian monkeys can become so entwined in lanky arms and prehensile tails, around tree limbs and each other, that it’s hard to tell them apart. Their sociability doesn’t end there. These primates don’t fight over food, sex or sleeping arrangements — an easygoing lifestyle that earned them the moniker “hippie monkeys.” However, such peaceful ways belie the muriqui’s fight for survival. Tucked up in the trees of the Atlantic forest — a once-green corridor stretching along the east coast of Brazil, now largely deforested — the northern muriqui (Brachyteles hypoxanthus) has clung to the IUCN’s Critically Endangered list for more than 25 years. Just this year, the southern muriqui (Brachyteles arachnoides) joined them on that list. Like many endangered species, the combined pressures of deforestation, fragmented habitats and hunting have steadily driven populations downward. By best estimates, less than 2,000 of both muriqui species remain. A sooty-faced Southern muriqui (Brachyteles arachnoides). These monkeys are found south of Rio de Janeiro to Paraná, with 90 percent of the population in São Paulo State. Facial pigment is…

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Isn’t this Jungle Carpet Python crazy looking?! It is one of a kind and a Super Form from what the Ball Python Crowd refers to as a, “Dinker Project.”

I noticed that the mother of this snake looked just a bit odd when it was a baby. I bought her, bred her, and then bred one of her male offspring back into her to get a super form of the co-dominant gene that she carried. I know a lot of kingsnake.com users attend Reptile Shows so I will share my story about buying the mother of this snake.

All morning long I was busy at this show vending at my table and I was unable to make a round until around lunch time. When I arrived at one of the better Carpet Python vendor tables there was a crowd standing around looking at a baby JCP in a deli cup marked $350.00. They were all commenting under their breath about the little snake, but for me there was no discussion. I peeled off the cash, handed it to the vendor, and then picked up the cup with the snake.

All the guys said, “WHOA!! I was thinking about buying that” . The vendor looked at me and said, “That snake will turn out to look normal and so will all the babies.” I made two replies. To the crowd I responded, “You can keep thinking about buying it, but I just bought it.” To the vendor I said, loud enough for all to hear, “If this $350 female JCP turns out to be normal I will more than break even selling her normal babies.” There are lessons to be learned in all of this but don’t ask me what they are. I am just trying to have fun and I am relegated to but one of these crazy looking JCP after about 10 years of effort. …read more
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Photo: Robin Moore/ILCP
Called the “Golden Wonder” by conservationists, the Jackson’s Climbing Salamander, Bolitoglossa jacksoni, has not been seen since 1977. This field report chronicles the search for the Golden Wonder, as well as many other great and rare amphibian finds.

“When I spied that oh so familiar pose of a Long-limbed Salamander basking in the rain with feet splayed and spine bent with that beautiful long tail hanging down, I was thrilled. It really brought back much of what it had been like in ‘76; going out night after night in the rain. Finding this salamander is as rewarding as it was years ago.”

To read the full account, visit National Geographic. …read more
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This sassy lil watersnake had to stop and eat a toad in the yard before the photographer captured it for our herp photo of the day uploaded by kingsnake.com user dinahmoe ! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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By Herp News

Higher temperatures result in Swedish sand lizards laying their eggs earlier, which leads to better fitness and survival in their offspring, according to new research.

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Higher temperatures result in Swedish sand lizards laying their eggs earlier, which leads to better fitness and survival in their offspring, according to new research.

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By Herp News

A recent article published in the journal Biological Conservation details a research study led by University of Wisconsin physical anthropologist Dr. Stephanie Spehar which utilized game camera traps to identify and estimate the numbers of orangutans in the Wehea Forest of East Kalimantan, Borneo. The researchers believe the cameras may provide more accurate population counts to assist in future conservation efforts. The study team set up networks of game cameras within the 38,000 hectare Wehea Forest wilderness of mostly undisturbed rainforest surrounded by logging concessions. The team chose two distinct areas for camera placement — dense primary forest with a closed tree canopy, and a secondary forest last logged in 1996. The study sought to test whether camera trapping methods, so successful with other elusive species such as the clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi), could be used to count orangutans. Curious orangutans often approach the camera for a closer look. Photo by Brent Loken Prior to the study, the most reliable method for estimating orangutan population numbers was to count the number of orangutan nests in a certain area. “Orangutan nests look like large bird nests and are used for sleeping during the night and sometimes for resting during the day” describes Brent Loken, a team member and doctoral candidate at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, who spoke with mongabay.com regarding the study “They mainly build a new nest each day but sometimes return to old nests to rest. Babies typically sleep with mothers and mothers often…

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Happy Rattlesnake Friday! We are seeing red with this gorgeous shot of a Pygmy Rattlesnake our herp photo of the day uploaded by kingsnake.com user Tamers1 ! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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By Herp News

In June, a unique graduation ceremony was held in the city of Bhopal in central India. Fourteen dogs and their 28 handlers performed brief drills to display their newly acquired skills at detecting illegal wildlife products during a parade held at the 23rd Battalion of Special Armed Reserve Forces’ Dog Training Centre. The 14 newly trained wildlife protection and anti-poaching squads would soon join India’s 11 existing dog squads to sniff out wildlife contraband across the country. The ceremony was attended by representatives from seven “tiger states” home to significant populations of wild tigers (Panthera tigris), which are subject to intense poaching and international trade, including Assam, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and Uttarakhand. Sniffer dogs during training. TRAFFIC India has trained 25 sniffer dogs and their handlers since 2008, including a new batch of 14 dogs that graduated in June. Photo by Shaleen Attre/TRAFFIC. In addition to the new dog squad recruits, India has stepped up other measures to combat its significant black-market trade in wildlife, which has been poorly documented and loosely enforced. The measures include a new emphasis on training law enforcement officers to fight the illegal trade and forestry personnel to guard against poaching. While the efforts do not appear to be part of a larger initiative to combat wildlife crime, and data on the number of arrests and convictions remain scarce, experts say they indicate that the country is beefing up its wildlife-crime-fighting capacity. Sniffer…

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A Chinese national dubbed the “Queen of Ivory” has been arrested in Tanzania. Yang Feng Glan, 66, was arrested after returning from Uganda to Tanzania. She has been charged with smuggling 706 elephant tusks with a street value of $2.5 million and faces a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison. Tanzania has been widely criticized by conservationists and environmentalists for its failures to reign in the ivory trade, which has decimated elephant populations both inside its borders and in neighboring countries. The Elephant Action League credited Tanzania’s National and Transnational Serious Crimes Investigation Unit (NTSCIU) with her apprehension. “It’s the news that we all have been waiting for, for years,” said Andrea Crosta, co-founder of the Elephant Action League and WildLeaks, in a statement. “Hopefully she can lead us to other major traffickers and corrupt government officials. We must put an end to the time of the untouchables if we want to save the elephant.” Earlier this week the Born Free Foundation estimated that 24,000 have been killed so far this year for their ivory. African elephants in Namibia. Photo by Rhett A. Butler

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We occasionally see adult Florida rough green snakes in the cat briars along the fencelines.
I was creeping along on the riding mower a few afternoons ago when just ahead of the right front tire I notices a lengthy piece of grass make a shivery-sinuous movement. Hmmmmm. Either the grass was reacting in a frightened manner at the thought of being decapitated by the whirling blades or there was something there that needed scrutinizing. Choosing the latter of these 2 options I slammed on the brakes, crawled from the seat, moved a step ahead of the idling machine, stooped down and saw—-nothing! I stood, was just about to hop back on the mower when I happened to see a little pink tongue flickering. Once the tongue was seen the rest of the creature, all 7 inches of it (a hatching Florida rough green snake, Opheodrys aestivus carinatus wonderfully camouflaged by the grass blades) was easily seen. I was sure glad I had stopped.

Over the years I had seen several adult rough green snakes amidst tangles of cat briar, blackberry canes, and Virginia creeper along the fence line, but this was the first hatchling I had seen in the yard. I sure hope it will not be the last.

Click below for more pictures

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Just days after capturing the once-missing king cobra from a local garage, Florida wildlife officials on Friday confirmed their intent to revoke the owner’s license to own the venomous snake in a revocation letter, sent a day before the king cobra was captured.

“Allowing you to continue to possess your venomous reptiles after three escapes would send a message that there will be no consequences for serious rule violations,”

The owner of the cobra has held permits to keep various exotic and potentially deadly animals for years, but records show numerous violations for not properly containing the animals including being cited in 2001 after another king cobra escaped from a house in the College Park area of Orlando, and in 2004 when an albino diamondback rattlesnake escaped and ended up in a neighbor’s yard.

Read more at the Orlando Sentinel …read more
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A missing King Cobra that went on walkabout over a month ago has turned up underneath a clothes dryer at a neighbors house a half mile from it’s cage. Found Wednesday night Orange County Animal Control officials and the wife of the snake’s owner confirm the snake is the one that escaped 35 days ago and it has been returned to its owners.

“Every time I put something in the dryer this hiss sound happened.” – Cynthia Mullvain

The cobra’s owner, Mike Kennedy, is facing charges for failure to immediately report the escape and has pleaded not guilty.
To read more check out the article at http://wfla.com/2015/10/08/missing-king-cobra-snake-found-in-orange-county-home/ …read more
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Is there any thing more classic than this chameleon tongue shot in our herp photo of the day uploaded by kingsnake.com user 1Sun ! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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By Herp News

In the fight to protect the extraordinary biodiversity of Papua New Guinea’s rainforests, some conservationists are collecting a unique set of data: the sounds of the forest. Scientists with The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Princeton University are using acoustic sampling recorders in the Adelbert Mountains, a remote range on Papua New Guinea’s north coast, to help them assess how effective their local land use planning efforts have been at protecting the region’s wildlife. Subsistence agriculture is a major driver of deforestation in Papua New Guinea, so TNC has worked with communities in the Adelbert Mountains for the past decade and a half to help allocate different areas of land for development, hunting, gardening, forest use and conservation, TNC’s Justine Hausheer said in a blog post. Anecdotal evidence suggested that the system was working, Hausheer explains, but TNC scientists wanted harder evidence that the conservation areas were large enough to sustain key species like birds-of-paradise and the bandicoot. But the bioacoustic data they are collecting is not just to monitor specific species. Taken together, all of the sounds of the forest over a 24-hour period, from insects buzzing and birds chirping at sunrise to frogs croaking and mammals grunting as they go about their day, can be used to monitor overall forest health. “All of the animals we are hearing are vocalizing at slightly different frequencies or with distinct acoustic patterns,” Eddie Game, TNC’s lead scientist for the Asia Pacific Region, said in a blog post. “They all have their own…

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A sneezing monkey, a walking fish and a jewel-like snake are just some of a biological treasure trove of over 200 new species discovered in the Eastern Himalayas in recent years, according to a new report by WWF.

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Photo: Lauren Kurkimilis/Marine Corps via AP

Near Twentynine Plams Marine Corps Base, 35 Desert Tortoises were recently released in an effort to repopulate the Mojave Desert at a ceremony with Marine Corps officials, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and researchers from the University of California Los Angeles.

Biologists have been raising tortoises over the past nine years at a six-acre facility to help boost the population that was nearly decimated by a respiratory virus in the late 1980s.

Read more at Marine Corps Times. …read more
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Photo: Lauren Kurkimilis/Marine Corps via AP

Near Twentynine Plams Marine Corps Base, 35 Desert Tortoises were recently released in an effort to repopulate the Mojave Desert at a ceremony with Marine Corps officials, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and researchers from the University of California Los Angeles.

Biologists have been raising tortoises over the past nine years at a six-acre facility to help boost the population that was nearly decimated by a respiratory virus in the late 1980s.

Read more at Marine Corps Times. …read more
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By Herp News

How can species reintroduction projects ensure success? One way is to accurately monitor the target species and their habitat. A team working to bring back the endangered black-footed ferret to the plains of western North America is deploying unmanned aircraft systems (UASs, UAVs or drones) to strengthen monitoring of the species’ habitat. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) partnered with Behron and Associates, Idaho State University, the Fort Belknap Fish and Wildlife Department, Eagle Digital Imaging and ESRI to deploy UASs to monitor black-footed ferrets (Mustela nigripes) habitat. Kristy Bly, senior wildlife conservation biologist at WWF’s Northern Great Plains Program, explained to Wildtech that the team is assessing whether drones can be used to effectively monitor black-footed ferret habitat in a study area on the plains of the 675,147-acre (273,222 ha) Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana. In early 2013, WWF and the Fort Belknap Fish and Wildlife Department reintroduced the ferrets to the Ft. Belknap prairie dog colony complex that they had occupied years before. (A complex is a group of prairie dog colonies grouped together within a mile of one another.) A black-tailed prairie dog colony extends across the harsh, windswept landscape of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation. © Conservation Media/WWF-US The decimation of the prairie dog Only around 300 black-footed ferrets still live in the wild; the species is listed as Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. The ferrets rely on prairie dog (Cynomys spp.) burrows for shelter and are obligate predators of…

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Tracked by their calls at night, two species of narrow-mouthed frogs have been recorded as new in a research that took place in the Raja Ampat Islands, western New Guinea. During the examinations it turned out that one of the studied specimens is a hermaphrodite and another one represents the first record of the genus Cophixalus for the Misool Island.

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This great shot of a pair of Bufo bufo in the middle of amplexus helps ring in this Wednesday in our herp photo of the day uploaded by kingsnake.com user Krallenfrosch ! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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Note the difference in blotch size of these 2 Sandhill pygmys.
Back and forth. Back and forth. North 10 miles. South 10 miles. Than over again—and again. Occasionally we changed our route to an intersecting sand road for a few miles. We had only one night left on this trip and we were on a quest in unknown (for Jake and me) territory. The targets here were the sandhill phases of the Carolina pygmy rattlesnake, Sistrurus m. miliarius.

Although it hadn’t looked all that far on the map, I’m here to tell you it was a long drive from Hyde County NC to the sandhill region of northcentral SC! Once Jake and I had succeeded in finding and photographing a red phase pygmy in Hyde County, we had decided that in the remaining time we needed at least one more feasible target. Thus began the quest for sandhill pygs that found us now in the land of sand pines, cacti, thornscrub, fox squirrels, beautiful little pothole ponds (which, we were told were replete with broken-striped newts (of which we found exactly none!)—and the sandy countryside (again we were told) was acrawl with pygmy rattlers.

The afternoon waned, sunset neared, passed, and darkness enveloped us. Bats wheeled and darted in front and overhead and still we drove. We turned onto a paved side road, drove up a few miles and reversed direction. I looked at what seemed to me a black marked white stick at the road edge. Jake did a double take and hollered “STOP. Back up. That was a snake!”
And sure enough it was a little dark blotched silvery white pygmy, the first of 4 seen that night. Photos were taken and we headed southward. It had been a great trip. Thanks, Jake.

Continue reading “Sandhills Phase Pygmy Rattlers” …read more
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By Herp News

Researchers have discovered a species of rodent in the mountainous interior of Sulawesi, a Indonesian island known for its high rates of endemism. The new species, dubbed Hyorhinomys stuempkei, is noted for its especially long urogenital hairs — better known as pubic hair — according to a description published in the Journal of Mammalogy. The hog-nosed shrew rat averages 45 centimeters (1.5 feet) in length and weighs about 250 grams (half a pound). Beyond its unusual urogenital hairs, the species is characterized by “extremely large” ears and its “large, flat, pink” nose. Hyorhinomys stuempkei was captured in an overnight trap on Sulawesi’s Mount Dako in early 2013 by a team led by Museum Victoria’s Kevin Rowe, a mammalogist who has discovered other rats in Sulawesi, including the two-toothed Paucidentomys vermidax and Waiomys mamasae, a carnivorous water rat. There are now 8 species of shrew rat described in Sulawesi. Hyorhinomys stuempkei. Courtesy of Museum Victoria CITATION: Jacob A. Esselstyn, Sam S. Achmadi, Heru Handika, Kevin C. Rowe. A hog-nosed shrew rat (Rodentia: muridae) from Sulawesi Island, Indonesia. Journal of Mammalogy. Volume 96, Issue 5 Pp. 895-907. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jmammal/gyv093 895-907 First published online: 29 September 2015

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This stunning Trimeresurus vogeli is just hanging around in our herp photo of the day uploaded by kingsnake.com user Vittorio_K ! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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A python, reported to be 20 feet in length, critically injured a pet store owner in Newport Ohio in an apparent feeding mishap. According to media reports store owner Terry Wilkins was feeding the snake when it latched onto his arm and wrapped around his head, neck, and torso. Wilkens was not breathing when officers arrived to free him but he did resume breathing before he was taken to University of Cincinnati Medical Center.

“It was only by the grace of God that one of the officers knew how to deal with snakes,” – police chief Tom Collins

The owner appears to be recovering after two officers pried off the 125-pound python that was wrapped around his head, neck and torso, according Collins.
The snake is currently alive and being held at the store where the incident occurred. Police are working with animal control to determine if the animal will need to be removed from the shop.

Click here to read more at WCPO Gallery photo by ahas
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In what is likely to be the first of a number of reptilian additions the Black Pine Snake, Pituophis melanoleucus lodingi, has been added to the USFWS Threatened and Endangered Species List. Found in southwestern Alabama through southeastern Mississippi into eastern Louisiana, Black Pine Snakes are the only melanistic pine snake, ranging in coloration from an overall black and brown banded snake to a nearly jet-black animal. A threatened designation means a species is at risk of becoming endangered within the foreseeable future. The snake’s threatened status allows the USFWS to include exemptions allowing certain management activities to continue to occur with protection from the loss, injury or harassment.

“We crafted the exemptions to provide landowners flexibility to manage for their objectives while still affording conservation benefits to the black pinesnake,” – Cindy Dohner, USFWS Southeast Regional Director.

The Black Pine Snake’s decline is primarily attributed to the loss and degradation of the longleaf pine ecosystem because of habitat fragmentation, fire suppression, conversion of natural pine forests to densely stocked pine plantations, and agricultural and urban development. Other threats to the snake’s survival include road mortality and killing by humans.

The Black Pine Snake was added to the US Fish and Wildlife Services list of candidates for federal protection in 1999, and the Service published a proposed rule to list the black pinesnake as threatened on October 7, 2014. The black pinesnake final listing becomes effective on November 5, 2015 which is 30 days after its publication in the Federal Register on October 6, 2015. The decision is part of the Service’s effort to implement a court-approved settlement under an agreement aimed at significantly reducing it’s current litigation-driven workload.

To read the USFWS Press Release click here. Gallery photo by user noMad627 …read more
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By Herp News

Most people know and love marsupials like kangaroos and koalas, but some members of this infraclass are virtual unknowns — despite facing similar extinction threats — and being just as cute. One example is an underappreciated group of small wallabies called bettongs, rabbit-sized bouncers once widespread across Australia but now reduced to just a few small colonies and captive populations. The tale of the bettong isn’t an uncommon one in Australia. The giant island country has the world’s worst mammal extinction rate. One in three of the mammals that have gone extinct worldwide in the past 400 years were Australian species. Today 30 percent of the country’s endemic mammals are threatened with extinction. A just released bettong takes to the air. Photo by Stephen Corey. Rob Brewster, the Director of Rewilding Australia, a nonprofit working to restore the country’s endangered native species and habitats, explains that in the last few hundred years things have gone downhill for almost all endemic critical weight species — those between 35 grams and 5.5 kilograms (roughly ranging from 1 ounce to 12 pounds). The bettong is no exception, sitting at an average 1.2 to 1.9 kilograms (2.7 to 4.2 pounds). “Bettongs are like a furry Mars bar to foxes and feral cats,” says Brewster. “Causing their massive decline some 150 years ago. It didn’t help that settlers tended to shoot anything that hopped or dug — bettongs do both.” Bettongs on the ropes, and bettong hopes Europeans brought foreign predators…

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Photo: Eric Sharp, Detroit Free Press
Despite being up for consideration of listing on the Endangered Species Act since 1999, the Eastern Massasauga has remained unprotected. Now it appears that will change. Known for their docile nature, the massasauga rattlesnake has it’s greatest known population density in the state of Michigan, but as with most endangered species, habitat destruction has started putting extreme pressure on the current populations.

The biggest threat to the snake, across its range from Missouri to New York, is loss and degradation of habitat, Kingsbury said.

“The snakes don’t travel as far as other animals do from habitat patch to habitat patch,” he said. “Anytime you have paved roads, a farmer’s field, a residential area, they will be barriers to the snake, and it will turn around and head back from where it came.”

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Is it any wonder that Bearded Dragons are still one of the most popular pets in the reptile community? Not when you see this cute guy in our herp photo of the day uploaded by kingsnake.com user JFKDragons ! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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By Herp News

Tackling the illegal trade in wildlife requires tremendous concern for the welfare of other species and a passion for change. Ofir Drori, founder of EAGLE (Eco-Activists for Governance and Law Enforcement), embodies both of these traits. Mongabay recently interviewed Drori about how his organization strives to combat corruption and save species endangered by the illegal wildlife trade in Africa. Globally, wildlife poaching and organized criminal trade in wildlife have escalated over the past 10 years, decimating populations of large mammals, particularly those with high-value body parts such as tusks or horns. Criminal syndicates increasingly control these activities and have become better armed and organized as the illegal trade—estimated at over US$18 billion per year—becomes more profitable. These violent organized criminal groups use their illegal revenue to strengthen their organizations: employing more local poachers, buying impunity, bribing corrupt officials and broadening their distribution networks. Three wildlife traffickers arrested in Benin in June 2015, with 4 elephant feet, 2 leopard skins and scales of 2 pangolins, as well as 50 chameleons, heads and skins of crocodile, skins of antelopes and civets and baboon heads. Photo credit: EAGLE To tackle a problem of this scale and gravity, Drori suggests that “the best approach to protecting species is to ensure the perpetrators involved in wildlife trafficking are prosecuted,” a solution he says is long overdue and for which he founded EAGLE (previously Last Great Apes Organization, or LAGA), in 2003. What does EAGLE do? EAGLE tackles wildlife crime through innovative…

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