By Herp News

The dense undergrowth of tropical forests presents a mysterious prospect to wildlife researchers. Often what is easily spotted does not represent the whole, and scientists in the past could spend months, or even years, studying a species before ever observing it. Now traditional data collection methods are being augmented by advanced technologies such as camera traps — motion sensitive still and video cameras that can unobtrusively capture animal behavior. Samantha Zwicker, a Masters student and PhD candidate in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington, is using camera traps to analyze animal behaviors as they are impacted by human presence and development in one of the wildest parts of Peru. Her study, as featured in the institute’s bulletin, focused on four indigenous cat species and the factors dependent on their movement, including land use, habitat type and distance from human activity. A female jaguar (Panthera onca) pauses on the trail to eat some grass. Just like domestic cats, big cats eat small amounts of grass to help them bring up fur-balls. Deforestation and hunting remain the two major threats to jaguars across their range, causing them to become listed as near-threatened (IUCN). Photo by Samantha Zwicker. In this exclusive interview with Mongabay, Samantha Zwicker explains the unique aspects of her work: Mongabay: What attributes of your study do you consider revolutionary? Samantha Zwicker: Most camera trapping studies take place in parks, reserves, and sanctuaries because these areas are more accessible, well…

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Gotta love the up close head shot of this Tokay Gecko in our herp photo of the day uploaded by kingsnake.com user The_Reptiles_Den ! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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Photo: Freshwaters Illustrated/Dave Herasimtschuk/USDA.
In the race to save our dying amphibians, a fish endocrinologist developed “Cupids Syringe” also known as Amphiplex. The hormone based chemical helps to encourage better captive breeding.

Trudeau knew that the hormone systems controlling mating were nearly identical in fish and mammals, and he reasoned that they should be similar in amphibians, too. Taking a page out of the fish reproduction playbook, he combined a hormone that stimulates cells in the pituitary gland with a chemical that blocks the neurotransmitter dopamine, which can interfere with breeding. This combination had been used extensively in fish, to encourage breeding stock for the aquaculture industry. But it hadn’t yet been tried in amphibians. Before Amphiplex, only individual hormones, sans dopamine blockers, had been used on captive amphibians, with mixed success.

To read the full article, visit Mongabay. …read more
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Tank, sphagnum, light, and sturdy plants provide an easily built and maintained amphibian terrarium.
All that is needed to make a very pretty terrarium for horned and other bulky frogs with limited leaping ability is the tank (ours is a 40 gallon), a complete cover (with horned frogs a cover may not be needed) but if arboreal species are housed within not only is a cover needed but a suitable perch should also be provided, a suitable light, enough good quality unmilled sphagnum moss to provide a 3” deep bottom cover, a few hardy plants (I prefer philodendrons, “pothos” or similar nearly indestructible species, and, of course, the frog inhabitant. Since the sphagnum will be kept damp and clean, unless you are intending to breed the species a water container is optional. If a water container is provided be sure the water is kept clean. Ditto with the sphagnum bottom cover. To prevent the sphagnum from being ingested by a hungry frog, food items may be proffered on forceps or from the fingers (the latter sometimes and with some species not being an especially good idea!). With an escape proof top this setup also works well for salamanders.

From this point on pictures will probably be the most descriptive. I hope you enjoy your frogs as much as I do mine.

Continue reading “A Very Simple Terrarium for a Very Phat Phrog” …read more
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By Herp News

Mark Hebblewhite’s love of wildlife began paying off when he got a job as a Hudson Bay park ranger as an 18-year-old. Now an associate professor in the wildlife biology program at the University of Montana, Hebblewhite studies the delicate balance among predators, prey, the environment and humans. His work carries on the legacy of wildlife biology luminaries, such as the identical twins John and Frank Craighead, who together developed the first radio tracking collars used on grizzly bears. WildTech spoke with Hebblewhite about his work, the technology he uses and the future of wildlife biology. Tell us a bit about the kinds of questions you try to answer in your research. I think that in those early years of wildlife biology there was a keen focus on basic natural history ecology. The kind of stuff that gets all of us excited: Why do animals do what they do; why do animals migrate; why do animals eat certain things? So at its core that still forms a lot of the questions and the problems I work on. But increasingly in the 21st century, there are almost no places left on the planet where you can ask those questions about what makes animals do what they do without having to think at the same time about how they mitigate or reduce the negative impacts of humans. 21st-century conservation is about how we understand the impact of humans on wildlife around the globe. Even the most pristine ecosystems that we think about…

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By Herp News

The Wildlife Conservation Society has a long, proven track record of environmental stewardship. So when the New York City-based group recently announced an ambitious new global conservation strategy, Mongabay got in touch with WCS president and CEO Cristián Samper to get more details. WCS has identified 15 of the world’s largest wilderness regions and laid out a strategy for how to protect them from climate change and other human-induced environmental pressures — and in the process, save half of the world’s biodiversity. Conserving those 15 priority regions, ecologically intact wild places on land and at sea, is the crux of the group’s WCS: 2020 Strategic Plan. The group says that it hopes to reverse the population declines of six priority species across their entire range: elephants, apes, big cats, sharks & rays, whales & dolphins, and tortoises & freshwater turtles. Dr. William Laurance, a Distinguished Research Professor at James Cook University in Australia and a world-renowned tropical forest conservation expert, told Mongabay that many of the regions WCS has selected are obvious priorities, such as the Lower Mekong Basin in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam; the Southeast Asian Archipelago (including the forests, coastlines and reefs of Indonesia and Malaysia); MesoAmerica and the Western Caribbean; the northern Andes/Orinoco/Western Amazon; and Madagascar/western Indian Ocean. Image via Wildlife Conservation Society. Other regions seem less urgent to Laurance, such as the North American Rocky Mountains and Eastern North American forests. “Not that these latter areas are unimportant,” he said,…

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Photo: Annette Ruzicka/Bush Heritage Australia
The habitat of the Australian Legless Lizard population in Canberra is set to be razed in preparation to build an RV park for tourists to rest their weary heads. Conservationists from Bush Heritage Australia are working to save one of the last remaining groups of this species.

To capture these legless lizards – the name comes from legs that disappeared through evolution leaving just a scaly protrusion – Bush Heritage has purchased roof tiles in bulk.

About 800 have been strewn across the area for the proposed caravan park. The idea is simple but effective. Reptiles like to press themselves against heated surfaces to get warm. As the sun heats the tiles, legless lizards will wriggle underneath them.

To read the full article, visit The Guardian. …read more
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By Herp News

In the 250-million-year evolutionary history of turtles, scientists have seen nothing like the pig nose of a new species of extinct turtle discovered in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

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The name says it all. Check out this stunning Cherry Bomb Blood Python in our herp photo of the day uploaded by kingsnake.com user jsignoretti every once in a while! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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By Herp News

A German national was apprehended at the international airport in Jakarta as he tried to smuggle eight earless monitor lizards from Borneo out of the country. It was not the first indication of a German connection to the international trade in Earless Monitor Lizards (Lanthanotus borneensis), a small, orange-brown creature with beaded skin, subterranean habits and translucent “windows” on its lower eyelids. “In July 2015, a USA-based trader selling the species claimed the animals had been imported from Germany and captive-bred there—presumably to circumvent the US Lacey Act,” said a statement from TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring network. The Lacey Act bans trafficking in illegal wildlife. None of the countries with territory in Borneo has permitted the export of the lizard, “so parent stock in any breeding facilities has not been legally obtained,” according to TRAFFIC. “International investigations are essential to debunk the myth that reptiles are being ‘captive bred’, whereas in reality claims of captive breeding are frequently used as a cover to enable the animals to be traded internationally, unchallenged,” said Sarah Stoner, TRAFFIC’s senior wildlife crime analyst. Reptile collectors in Europe, where the animal can sell for thousands of euros, have referred to it as a “holy grail,” according to a TRAFFIC study that began in 2013 and documented a sudden uptick in international interest in the species. A posting about the earless monitor lizard on Facebook. Image courtesy of TRAFFIC Meanwhile, two infant Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) that were confiscated from smugglers…

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One of the most common amphibians out there, this Albino Clawed Frog is just hanging around in our herp photo of the day uploaded by kingsnake.com user bradtort every once in a while! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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Photo: Inside EditionA pair of conjoined twins were able to be successfully separated by their breeder.

“To my surprise, the reason the baby couldn’t exit was because it was attached to its twin,” he told INSIDE EDITION. “I helped them out of the egg and discovered they were joined at the yolk sac which is basically the equivalent to an umbilical. Immediately we knew we had a bit of a challenge on our hands.”

To read the full article and see the video, visit Inside Edition. …read more
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By Herp News

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]onservation success stories are rare. Too often we read of the losing battles: local extinctions and irreversible biodiversity losses, often at the expense of shortsighted exploitation-for-profit schemes. Refreshingly, the plight of the maleo is different. This story is one of conservation success. Maleos are, by all accounts, weird birds. They are chicken-like creatures with duotone plumage; a minimalist contrast of coal-black above and soft, peach-pink below. The bare, multi-colored skin of their heads — somewhat reminiscent of a vulture — is capped by a strange, bulbous protrusion called a casque. This adornment has affectionately been described as a football helmet or a walnut, or less affectionately as an engorged tick. Maleos are megapodes — mound-builders — members of a 26-species family of ground-dwelling birds peppered across the islands of Australasia, many endemic to their respective landmasses. Adult maleo. Photo by Julie Larsen Maher, WCS The megapode we are concerned with here is Macrocephalon maleo, found only on Sulawesi; the fourth-largest island in Indonesia and the eleventh-largest island in the world. Sulawesi, just east of Borneo, is a collection of peninsulas: four spokes of sand and inland forest attached to a hub of tall, imposing mountains. Indonesia has the dubious honor of hosting more species threatened with extinction than any other country on Earth, and the maleo is among them. It went from Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List in 2000 to Endangered in 2002, and has stayed there since. IUCN’s most recent estimates put the total…

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What better way to start out this week than with this cute Nile Monitor in our herp photo of the day uploaded by kingsnake.com user Mantafish every once in a while! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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Photo: The News-Press
Despite being an apex predator, one unlucky Alligator learned there are things scarier than him, like a golf cart.

The gator’s plan for a nice meal was all set in motion when the turtle found itself surrounded by the alligator’s teeth. The turtle remained incarcerated by the alligator’s gaping mouth until a golf cart scooted close enough to scare the gator back into the lake, Backman says.

To read the full article, visit USAToday. …read more
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Photo: The News-Press
Despite being an apex predator, one unlucky Alligator learned there are things scarier than him, like a golf cart.

The gator’s plan for a nice meal was all set in motion when the turtle found itself surrounded by the alligator’s teeth. The turtle remained incarcerated by the alligator’s gaping mouth until a golf cart scooted close enough to scare the gator back into the lake, Backman says.

To read the full article, visit USAToday. …read more
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Photo: StevenDavidJohnson.com and Wild Virginia

A Virginia pipeline may need to change it’s route to avoid potential impact on two special of Salamanders, the Cheat Mountain salamander and the Cow Knob salamander.

It recommends changing the route of the pipeline to avoid as much of the salamanders’ habitats as possible, possibly going south of South Sister Knob and Chestnut Ridge or north of Romney, West Virginia.
Another proposal would have the pipeline construction crews bore through Shenandoah Mountain, but that would not eliminate impacts on the habitats of the two species.

To read more visit Newsplex.com. …read more
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By Herp News

The latest weird effect from climate change [Washington Post] Climate change is affecting wildlife in a lot of serious, and sometimes even weird, ways. Scientists have revealed another weird effect: climate change may be disrupting the sex ratio among baby sea turtles. Is this planned killing of 18,000 necessary? [Mongabay] The government believes that bats have become a “pest,” and a culling event to reduce bat population by 20 percent is scheduled to start mid-October. Conservationists say this decision to cull is not backed by scientific evidence, may drive the species to Endangered status, and is “unacceptable.” The list no one wants to be on, and how it works [Smithsonian.com] It wasn’t that long ago when the concept of an endangered species didn’t even exist. Today, both the ESA and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources’ Red List define endangered species and identify extinct ones. A Female Fiji Iguana. Fiji is one of the Pacific island nations requesting future help for climate change consequences. Photo by Rhett Butler. These nations are already pleading for help in preparation of climate change [The Guardian] Pacific island nations have started begging wealthy countries to help their people migrate and find work if they are forced to flee their homelands because of the effects of climate change. Why this country is losing their birds in shocking numbers [Mongabay] New research in Ghana’s highly-biodiverse Upper Guinean rainforests has found that logging has taken a tremendous toll on wildlife.…

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By Herp News

The government of Mauritius has announced its plans of culling 20 percent of the endemic and vulnerable Mauritius fruit bat (Pteropus niger) population on the island. The government hopes that fewer bats will help reduce damages to fruits like mangoes and litchis in orchards and boost revenue for fruit farmers. The culling will start mid-October and will go on for three weeks until the “target is attained,” Mahen Kumar Seeruttun, Minister of Agro-Industry and Food Security, said at the sixth National Assembly of the Mauritian Parliament held on October 6. But conservationists are calling this decision “unacceptable” and “disgraceful.” “Culling is the most insensible, unscientific action that can be taken at this stage, as it will, at a cost, harm both the fruit producers and the native threatened biodiversity of the country,” Vincent Florens, Associate Professor of Ecology at the University of Mauritius, told Mongabay. The cull could be disastrous for the native bat species, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) added in a statement. “The implementation of a cull will very likely result in an up-listing of the species from Vulnerable to Endangered or Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List, which will damage the reputation of Mauritius as a world leader on conservation,” the statement notes. Mauritian government plans to cull fruit bats to “reduce damage to mango and litchi fruits in orchards.” Photo by Jacques de Speville. Is the cull based on scientific evidence? In 2013, the National Parks and Conservation Service (NPCS)…

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Happy Rattlesnake Friday! All venomous snakes need our support! This Cottonmouth is screaming it from the field in our herp photo of the day uploaded by kingsnake.com user BowieKnife357 ! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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Photo: Fox News
Despite their best attempts to track global venomous snake bites, many Asian countries are unable to properly count the number of people envenomated annually. Due to the lack of available health care in some regions as well as the inability to pay for it leads many bites to not be counted.

Citing new evidence from a study in India and Bangladesh, the experts said around 46,000 people died annually of snake bites in India, plus another 6,000 in Bangladesh. The WHO estimates the annual death toll in India from snake bites is 10,000.
“Snake bite … is almost completely ignored and grossly underestimated,” said Alan Harvey, head of the International Society of Toxinology, who led the meeting.
“WHO and governments need to … rank snake bite where it belongs — as a very real public health and medical concern which needs funding, training and focus.”

To read the full article, visit Fox News. …read more
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By Herp News

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen Dale McGinnity rushed to the Nashville Zoo at 3 a.m. one morning in 2011, it was to witness the culmination of a six-year effort. One of the zoo’s eastern hellbenders (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis alleganiensis) was finally laying eggs. These giant salamanders, along with the other hellbender subspecies, the Ozark hellbender (C. a. bishopi), can grow to over two feet long, making them North America’s largest salamander species by far. But both subspecies are rapidly disappearing from the wild, and scientists were scrambling to figure out how to breed the animals in captivity as a way to replenish wild populations. McGinnity and his colleagues immediately got to work, artificially fertilizing the eggs with sperm from male hellbenders. The scientists knew what to thank for these small, slimy bundles of joy: four days earlier, McGinnity had injected the zoo’s female hellbenders with a new compound, essentially a love potion for amphibians that causes them to mate or to release their eggs or sperm. It was designed specifically for species that were reluctant to breed in captivity. Just call it “Cupid’s syringe.” The elixir in question, called Amphiplex, was concocted by Vance Trudeau at the University of Ottawa. Originally a fish endocrinologist, Trudeau felt compelled to redirect his expertise in the early 2000s when reports of startling drops in amphibian populations started to roll in from around the world. “I’m an endocrinologist, I know a lot about spawning,” he said to himself at the time. “Why don’t I try to do something?” [caption…

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By Herp News

Because sea turtles don’t have an X or Y chromosome, their sex is defined during development by the incubation environment. Warmer conditions produce females and cooler conditions produce males. The shift in climate is shifting turtles as well, because as the temperature of their nests change so do their reproduction patterns.

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Hope you enjoy a little something out of the wild with this Mud Snake in our herp photo of the day uploaded by kingsnake.com user Godfrey every once in a while! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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Photo: Don Lyman
Despite being listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List, the Blanding’s Turtle is not federally protected in the US, although some states have regulations in place. Biologist Jared Green of Assabet River National in Hudson, Massachusetts, however wants to help increase their numbers in his state. The program hit a major milestone this spring releasing their One-thousandth turtle.

Biologists hope that building a strong population of Blanding’s turtles at Assabet River will help offset population losses being experienced by the turtles elsewhere.
Although there are some big Blanding’s turtle populations in the Midwest, most populations in the Northeast are less than 50 turtles, Butler says. The only large population is at Oxbow NWR, where an estimated several hundred Blanding’s turtles make their home. “That’s virtually unheard of east of the Mississippi,” explains Butler.

Read more at Earth Island Journal. …read more
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Beautiful in any setting, this Inyo Mountains slender salamander seemed especially so against the desert background.
“Next right” Gary said. “It’s just a mile or two up the road.”

”OK. Whoops you mean here?”

“Yes. I guess we’ll have to roll the boulders.”

So we huffed, puffed, strained, and somehow moved the huge rocks just enough to allow the car to sneak carefully through.

Ahead of us was a rocky trail that seemed to go a few hundred feet into the desert, up a rise, and then peter out entirely.

With Gary directing we got to the end of the trail. Then carefully avoiding rocks we managed to go a few hundred feet farther.

“We walk from here.”

And walk we did. Over the rise, then down to an orchid laden desert spring, along a marsh, and following the run, to a desert wonderland, a willow surrounded waterhole thickly edged with flat fist-sized rocks.

“Go to it” Gary said, “but be sure to replace the rocks as close to the original position as possible.”
So I did and I did, and within minutes I had uncovered, photographed, and returned to its hiding place one of the most beautiful salamanders I have yet seen, a light phase Batrachoseps campi, Inyo Mountain salamander. These deserts are just alive with amphibian surprises. Thanks again, Gary.
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By Herp News

A black Kite flies over burned forest in Ghana. Photo by Nicole Arcilla. Thousands of studies have measured the impact of logging on tropical biodiversity, but few have looked at illegal logging. This, despite the fact that illegal logging represents anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of total timber harvesting in tropical countries, according to the United Nations Environment Program. But new research in Ghana’s highly-biodiverse Upper Guinean rainforests has found that a combination of illegal and legal logging has taken a tremendous toll on birds. The researchers, headed by Nicole Arcilla, a postdoctorate researcher with Drexel’s College of Arts and Sciences, found understory bird abundance fell by more than half in just 15 years. “The numbers don’t lie and they don’t have a political agenda. These numbers are shocking,” said Arcilla, whose paper was published in Biological Conservation. Understory birds are species that live primarily between the canopy and the forest floor, largely feeding on insects. The team collected data on these birds from 2008 to 2010 in forest heavily impacted by illegal logging, comparing them to previous data collected from 1993 to 1995. They found that during the fifteen-year gap, logging – both legal and illegal – increased by 600 percent, decimating the understory birds. “Whereas analysis based on data collected in 1993–1995 estimated a partial post-logging recovery of the understory bird community at that time, data from 2008–2010 showed no indication of post-logging recovery, likely due to ongoing illegal logging following intensive legal…

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This cultivar is a Super Genetic Banded Paradox Albino Ball Python (Python regius). I had the honor of hatching the first example of this new morph earlier in 2015. People who know me and follow my posts here, on my site, and on social media are aware that I have been hatching a whole lot of Paradox Ball Pythons, especially Paradox Albinos. Friends joke that I must be putting something in my water, but the fact is that after many years and much effort I have hopefully made an advance in how to produce Paradox Ball Pythons.

The Paradox Gene is not fully understood and I am not trying to claim that I fully understand it. What I am saying is that results speak for themselves and that it took more than luck for me to produce Paradox Albinos and other Paradox Ball Python Morphs every year for the past 5! I expect to hatch more in 2016 barring thermostat or incubator malfunctions! …read more
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By Herp News

In a major wildlife trafficking crackdown, the Beijing Forest Police have confiscated around 1,773 pounds of ivory, 24 pounds of rhino horn and 35 bear paws, worth about $4 million, according to a statement by TRAFFIC. They have also arrested 16 suspected members of the involved wildlife smuggling ring. Beijing Forest Police confiscated around 1,700 pounds of ivory. Photo courtesy of TRAFFIC. This is the biggest seizure so far in terms of the scale of the smuggling operations behind it, Beijing Forest Police told reporters at a press conference on October 12, according to TRAFFIC. “The Beijing Forest Police operation is a clear demonstration of the Chinese Government’s commitment to crack down on illegal wildlife trade and support international efforts to protect endangered species. As a Chinese proverb aptly says: ‘Action is far more powerful than words,” Zhou Fei, Head of TRAFFIC’s China Programme, said in the statement. The police crackdown, which lasted three months, uncovered that ivory was being smuggled from Japan to mainland China via HongKong. The gang used antique shops in places like Beijing and Guangdong as cover for their operations, according to TRAFFIC, and used online illegal trading and couriers for distribution of the smuggled goods. “It is possible all the wildlife products in the case originated in Japan, where the popularity of legally owned items such as ivory and rhino horns from the 1980s and earlier has plummeted and people have been selling family heirlooms and other goods into the marketplace,” TRAFFIC…

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What a great shot of this clutch of subocs in our herp photo of the day uploaded by kingsnake.com user pecoskid ! Be sure to tell them you liked it here!

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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.

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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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