Sources said that most of the CHCs do not have anti-venom vaccine. As a result, doctors have to refer patients to district hospital. "If the course is not started timely, the patient dies a painful death within three hours of the bite," added.

In the last 24 hours, around four cases of snake-bite were reported from Akbarpur, Derapur and Rura areas. Soni, wife of Kallu of Nariha village, was admitted to the district hospital on Tuesday. The incident occurred while she had gone to fetch something inside her room on Tuesday evening. The doctors stated her condition to be critical.

[...]

A doctor at the CHC said that there is shortage of anti-venom vaccines and that they have been facing hardships while treating patients. "If not treated timely, the snake bite can be fatal" he said. The market price of an anti-snake venom is around Rs 1,000, it is given free of cost at the hospital to urban as well as rural patients.

On an average, two to three patients of snake-bite visit Kanpur Dehat district hospital daily. Since July, the doctors at most of the CHC's have been referring patients to district hospital.

The ecologist will carry tools including a stopwatch and oxygen meter as she seeks frog habitats, collects water samples and records the abundance of northern leopard frogs across a 90,000-square-kilometre area south of Drumheller.

Randall recently embarked on six weeks of summer field research as part of a study launched in 2009 by the Calgary Zoo’s Centre for Conservation Research.

Through intensive fieldwork and mathematical modelling, the six-year project aims to gain a better understanding of northern leopard frog population dynamics.

The handsome and charismatic spotted amphibian, which can grow to the size of a human fist, is considered a threatened species in Alberta and an endangered species in B.C., said Randall.

[...]

“People have advocated that amphibians act a bit like the canary in the coal mine. Whatever is affecting them now, as those changes become more drastic and abundant, they will affect other things,” Russell said.

Kris Kendell, a senior biologist with the Alberta Conservation Association, is the co-ordinator of the Alberta Volunteer Amphibian Monitoring Program, which encourages “an army of citizen scientists” to submit their observations.

Nicholas Hillier, 23, was arrested Saturday afternoon on charges of burglary of a residence and grand theft, Alachua County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Art Forgey said.

Hillier and victim Charlotte Felner previously had met when they traded a pair of snakes. Felner said Hillier showed an “unusual amount of interest” in her blue iguana, deputies said, and told her he sold iguanas to vendors because they are easy money.

At around 9 a.m. on Friday, Felner called the Sheriff’s Office to report that her reptiles, estimated to be worth a total of $1,100, had gone missing overnight.

“I woke up that morning, and one of my roommates said, ‘Didn’t you have more cages out on the porch?’” Felner told The Sun. “I ran outside and saw my cage wasn’t out there.

In the past 20 years, frogs and other amphibians have been dying in alarming numbers. More than 40 percent of amphibian species are threatened with extinction, according to the most recent IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The main causes are habitat destruction, climate change, and a sinister new fungal disease called chytridiomycosis. But despite this, or perhaps because of it, there’s been a surge in discoveries of new species in recent years.

“Once it became apparent that amphibians were declining, there was a great interest in amphibians,” said biologist David Wake of the University of California, Berkeley, who founded Amphibiaweb, a database to catalog new amphibian species. ”When we started it in 2000, we thought that the age of amphibian discovery was pretty well done,” said Wake. But now, about 2.5 new species are added every week.

Researchers at James Cook University in Cairns are to study the medicinal properties of funnel-web spider and tarantula venom, in particular its influence on breast cancer cells.

Queensland Science Minister Ros Bates said the research was on the back of international studies that suggested certain toxins in spider venom could block cancer-causing enzymes. This information first came to light with the publication of a paper in 2007 in the journal DNA and Cell Biology.

"They are looking at ways in which the venom may be able to block or kill breast cancer cells - so it could actually lead to a cure," Bates told reporters on Friday. "It's very early days, but it's fairly ground-breaking research."

The research is being jointly funded by the Queensland state government, the National Health and Medical Research Council and funding from a Novel Concept Award from the Breast Cancer Foundation. It is expected to cost $200,000 AUD ($209,000 USD) over two years.

Chanelle Wright of Oceanside, Calif., discovered the turtle taped to the green and blue balloons Sunday, and immediately called the Humane Society.

“We look up and there are green and blue balloons up there,” Wright told ABC News affiliate 10 News. “He was just swinging his arms trying to get out of it. Somebody had taped him to the balloons.”

Wright rang up the Humane Society, who sent the fire department an hour later to try to free the turtle. But just as the fire officials were about to cut the turtle loose, a gust of wind blew it safely down to earth.

A Humane Society employee on the scene said it was a box turtle.

Joel Rabago, another Oceanside resident, said his mother began to film the turtle’s plight. “When something like this happens, she always takes the video camera, no matter what it is,” Rabago told 10 News.

Rabago said that although the turtle escaped unscathed from its misadventure, he’s still outraged.

“What were you thinking? I mean, a turtle is still life. There’s no reason to be putting him up in a balloon and sending him off,” Rabago said.

More than 30 juvenile western swamp tortoises were released into Twin Swamps Nature Reserve in Perth’s northern suburbs in a conservation milestone.

Environment Minister Bill Marmion said the release of 34 tortoises was part of the State’s recovery plan to increase the chance of survival for Australia’s most endangered reptile.

“The plan has exceeded all expectations with more than 570 captive-bred tortoises released since the recovery program commenced in 1990,” he said.

When a California woman named Taryn Hook brought Larry — all 7 feet (2 meters) of him — to the vet a few years ago, she never imagined that the trip would one day lead to such a remarkable discovery, which was announced today (Aug. 14) in the journal mBio.

IBD afflicts pythons and boa constrictors, causing a host of strange symptoms. The snakes tie themselves in knots, they projectile vomit and engage in an eerie behavior called stargazing; the snakes raise their heads over and over, stare into thin air, and sway drunkenly from side to side.

Biopsies from animals with the disease show their cells filled up with globules of proteins called inclusions, which may be responsible for the odd behaviors.

There's no cure for the disease. It moves swiftly in pythons, and can progress slowly in boa constrictors, but it is always fatal. And it's infectious, moving from snake to snake, though the mechanism of transmission isn't entirely clear. If one animal in a collection gets IBD, typically all the animals are euthanized.

Blood tests had suggested Larry, a Dumeril's boa constrictor, might have IBD. Wanting to know what could be done to save the beloved snake, Hook contacted Joseph DeRisi at the University of California, San Francisco, a virologist known for his work deciphering another mysterious virus, this one affecting macaws and parrots.

Her plea for help led DeRisi's lab to take on IBD. The scientists put out a call for samples of diseased and nondiseased snakes. Perhaps luckily, the Steinhart Aquarium at the California Academy of Sciences, just a few miles away, had a sudden outbreak of IBD.

The new study, published in Wednesday’s online edition of Nature, focuses on remains of the snake species Coniophis precedens, which lived roughly 70 million years ago during the late cretaceous period. While the snake had been described in the scientific literature and remains had previously been collected, those studies had only looked at vertebrae.

In the new report, researchers from Yale and Harvard analyzed the upper and lower jawbones of the snake as well as its vertebrae, and came to the conclusion that the snake was transitional because its head was more similar to a lizard’s than a snake. In particular, this snake lacks the ability to open its jaw wide and swallow prey whole, one of the hallmarks of modern snakes. The ancient snake likely ate small vertebrate animals.

Because the snake’s fossils are from the plains of Montana, the scientists argue that the remains provide strong evidence that modern snakes evolved on land. They suggest that the lizard-like head and long body indicate that early snakes evolved as burrowers.