But Saturday's VIPs were eight ploughshare tortoises flown in from Hong Kong in padded crates. Among them is a female of breeding age, which Eric Goode and his associates at the nonprofit Turtle Conservancy's Behler Chelonian Center hope to mate with the only male ploughshare tortoise of breeding age in North America.

"That male, which is en route from a zoo in Texas, hasn't seen a female ploughshare tortoise of breeding age in more than 25 years," Goode said as he marveled at the new arrivals in a quarantined pen. "We're hoping for the best. These creatures have seen nothing but bad luck, corruption and greed in captivity."

Some would call that an understatement. With fewer than 300 left in the wilds of Madagascar, the ploughshare tortoise holds the dubious distinction of being the rarest tortoise on Earth. They are heavily targeted by global animal traffickers, and the high-domed creatures fetch tens of thousands of dollars on the Asian black market, conservationists say.

Until recently, attempts to breed the ploughshare tortoise outside of Madagascar failed miserably. In the early 1980s, a male died shortly after zoo workers in Honolulu used an electric device to procure semen from the animal. A female that it was supposed to have mated with had her ovaries removed during a botched operation.

After the tour, the kids enjoyed a “Show and Tell” session with the education officers. A baby Caymen croc, a baby Indian Rock Python and a baby Black Pond Turtle were displayed and the children were able to observe at close quarters what they would have missed if they saw them from afar. Their characteristics and parts of their body were explained — they got to see the webbed feet of the turtles and examine it closely and learnt the importance of having it. The sinewy muscles of the baby python was exclaimed over — for they now understood how it could coil and twine around things with such strength and move. They noticed the third eye of the baby croc, which closes under water.

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Getting back to the Croc Bank, after a little rest the kids got down to setting up a fresh water aquarium for the turtles. They checked the water levels and kept little pots and vegetation for the turtles to nibble and hide under. They also put in tiny fish. It was now time for some painting, which actually was to create an artificial butterfly garden. The concept was to paint the flower have a vial of honey inserted in the centre so that butterflies would get attracted to it. Play time in the beach was followed by the finale — where certificates and prizes wee distributed with a special Croc Bank Kit.

It was an unique experience for these kids, an experience which made them understand and appreciate the natural world and also the importance of conserving it with everything they've got.

While scientists in several states are studying the effects of the oil spill on loggerhead and other sea turtles, the Kemps ridley have been of particular concern. The Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20, 2010 happened when they typically would have been in the area. Most of the 456 visibly oiled turtles rescued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last year were Kemps ridleys.

At the peak of nesting season, their numbers looked good. As of May 24, 155 Kemps ridley nests had been spotted on Texas shores — more than in all of last year and more than had been counted by that day in 2009 and 2008. The same is true for some other sea turtle species, although they have just started to nest so it might be too early to have confidence in those numbers.

And because sea turtles don't reach reproductive age for at least a decade, the full effects of the oil spill might not be known for years.

"There is fear that some of the turtles that took the year off from nesting or after the turtles were done nesting during the 2010 year, that they entered the waters where the oil had been present," said Shaver, explaining that the reptiles often forage off the hard-hit Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi coasts before or after nesting along the Texas Gulf Coast.

"There is concern that perhaps those turtles have been impacted from the oil and could then have problems with their reproduction," she added.

The museum's tuatara surplus is the result of Mr Hazley overcoming many captive-breeding problems and he is getting 20-30 fertile eggs each year.

"With the new acrylic roof I got from Germany that let's all the UV (ultra-violet light) through, I'm getting a 90% survival rate rather than a 90% failure.

"I'm sending eggs to Victoria University from now on because I'm saturated."

Mr Hazley would like to liberate some of his animals on a tiny pest-free island in Foveaux Strait.

"It would be just [big] enough to put a few animals on to see how they are going to do."

Mr Hazley said he had been talking to interested parties about the possibility for 20 years but there had been little progress.

He believed it was not the museum's job to make the project happen.

"It's more of a Doc or iwi thing. Somebody else needs to drive it. I can breed the animals for it but no-one's out there wanting to drive it."

She was sweet 17, profoundly pregnant; and yet floated effortlessly, adrift in the warm waters off the east coast of India. The Olive Ridley sea turtle was waiting for darkness to envelope her. She was pregnant for the first time and would breed many more times in her life span of 100 years. Stealth was not her intention as she waited 700 yards from the sandy beach at the mouth of the Rushikulya in Orissa. A few yards away, another female turtle joined her, then a third, followed by a dozen, then hundreds and thousands. They gathered as if for a colossal hen party, instinctively following an uncanny ritual that happens in the dead of the night.

All the expectant mother turtles slowly crawl towards the virgin beach. “Look, there comes the first fat lady,” said turtle researcher Sajan John, holding a tiny torch, as I peered into the darkness. I was witness to an Arribada, which means “Arrival” in Spanish. Arribada is the astounding nesting inclination of the Olive Ridley turtle. Large groups of turtles gather off the seashore and, in a short span of a few nights, they invade the beaches in regular intervals to lay eggs in collective clutches. The nesting density is so high that previously laid eggs are unwittingly dug up by other turtles to lay their own eggs! Each clutch has at least 70-100 ping-pong sized white eggs stacked in a tubular pit excavated in the soft sand.

Thin permeable skin is both the cornerstone and the millstone of amphibian evolution. On the one hand skin provides a useful site for gas exchange; on the other, free water movement across skin confines amphibians to freshwater. Indeed, of the 6,500 recognised amphibians, only the crab-eating frog can enter the sea.

Unlike other amphibians, which rapidly dehydrate in seawater, crab-eating frogs absorb urea across their urinary bladder in order to eliminate the osmotic gap between body fluids and seawater. Seawater acclimation requires several days, leaving the frogs with two equally disagreeable options — they can take up salt and lose water to the sea, or face desiccation on land.

The vulnerable species is one of two members of the only genus on Earth that rears its young inside of its vocal sac, a job taken on by the males.

"They have a small opening below their tongue. … After [the eggs] hatch, he takes the tadpoles into his mouth and manipulates them through that opening and into his vocal sac," Danté Fenolio, a conservation scientist with the Atlanta Botanical Garden, explained to me today.

"For about 60 days, they go all the way through to development inside his vocal sac. At that point when they are ready, fully developed, he coughs up fully formed miniatures of the adult."
Fenolio is working on a captive breeding project with the National Zoo and Universidad Catolica in Santiago to build a so-called assurance population of the frogs that can be released into the wild once, or if, environmental threats to their natural habitat are thwarted.

Examining tropical frog populations in Costa Rica, Australia, and Brazil's Atlantic Forest, the researchers found "that paradoxically, habitat loss is negatively associated with occurrence, prevalence, and infection intensity of [chytridiomycosis] in amphibian populations in the tropics." The finding goes against research of other animal diseases, which usually find that risk of disease increases in disturbed habitats.

In this case the researchers suspect that either the lethal disease depends on the ecosystem having an undisturbed microclimate, or that a decline in amphibian diversity and abundance—due to habitat loss—slows the spread of the disease.

The finding also explains why the presence of chytridiomycosis is often seen in higher altitudes where forest is less disturbed.

The interaction of the fangs and flesh of the bitten animal form a channel along which the venom flows. The flesh acts like blotter paper to wick the venom in. The suction created by the blotting effect helps the venom keep flowing. The wicking of venom into flesh also means that the snake doesn't need to expend energy to pump the venom in.

J. Leo von Hemmen, a biophysicist at the Technical University of Munich, Germany and Bruce Young, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, started their research after noticing that only a seventh of venomous snakes, such as rattlesnakes, have hypodermic needle-like fangs.

Many venomous snakes and lizards have much simpler set-ups, often only grooves in the fangs, and yet are effective hunters. The fangs of the mangrove snake and banded snake were both examined by the researchers to understand how venom flows.

The physical properties of the venom itself allow venom to get past even bird feathers, which usually deflect liquid. Snakes that regularly eat birds were found to have deeper channels in their fangs, which increased the ability of the venom to evade feathers.