Reptile & Amphibian News Blog
Keep up with news and features of interest to the reptile and amphibian community on the kingsnake.com blog. We cover breaking stories from the mainstream and scientific media, user-submitted photos and videos, and feature articles and photos by Jeff Barringer, Richard Bartlett, and other herpetologists and herpetoculturists.
Monday, September 23 2013
This image of a Radiated Tortoise hatching, uploaded by kingsnake.com user marcp, is our herp photo of the day!
Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!
Friday, September 20 2013
One by one we have found and photographed over 130 species of herps on Madre Selva Biological Preserve. The Preserve is located on the banks of Peru’s Rio Orosa, a few dozen miles upriver from its confluence with the mighty Rio Amazonas.
But there is one species, a hallmark of Amazonian reptiles, that continues to elude our wandering gazes. This is the Basin form of the Emerald Tree Boa, Corallus batesi.
We are elated when this magnificent snake is found one river up or down Amazon from the preserve and we then renew our efforts to find it. The intensive searches, by day, by night, in fair weather and foul, have probably led to our finding of more than a dozen other elusive species, and for this we are grateful. But it would be so very nice to be able to add an emerald to the ever-burgeoning list.
During January of 2014 (the normally rainy Amazon summer—it’s in the southern hemisphere) we will be trying again. Wish us luck. Or come on down and join us!
More photos under the jump...
Continue reading "Emerald tree boas: Green and invisible"
 It's not often a veterinarian who writes about pets for a mainstream newspaper devotes an entire column not just to a pet snake, but a species that's not kept as a pet all that often. But Modesto, Calif., veterinarian Dr. Jeff Kahler did just that in a recent piece in the Modesto Bee, where he recounted the story of a wart snake brought to his practice because his eyes had clouded over.
From the article:
Bando is a 3-year-old, 6 1/2-foot snake - and not just any kind of snake. He is a wart snake or sometimes called elephant trunk snake. Bando's caretaker, Randy, has had Bando for two years, having purchased him from a California reptile dealer.
He is housed in an aquarium that is temperature-controlled and aquatic. Bando spends almost all of his time in the water, including feeding time. His diet consists of goldfish and he is feed once a week. Randy reports that Bando has had no problems in the past two years but recently appears to have developed an issue with his eyes.
Over the past few weeks, Bando's eyes have become more and more opaque. They are now to the point where Randy suspects Bando cannot see.
Initially Randy thought Bando's eyes were clouding over as they normally do right before he sheds his skin but even after a shed occurred, the opacity in Bando's eyes remained. Randy has yet to find a veterinarian to examine Bando so he took to the internet and eventually got me involved.
To understand what might be going on with Bando's eyes, it helps to understand a bit about the natural history of his species. For you aficionados, wart snakes belong to the genus Acrochordus, which includes three species of snakes. I suspect Bando is a Java wart snake because of his large size.
These snakes are native to parts of southeast Asia and spend most of their time in water. Their diet consists of aquatic life --- especially fish --- and they have a rough scale pattern, which aids in gripping fish as they coil around them when eating. In my clinical experience, these are very rare snakes in captivity. I personally have only worked with them in zoo collections.
There are many possibilities that could cause Bando's eye issues. But it is my suspicion that Bando's eye problem is directly related to his captive environment and, more specifically, the water he is kept in.
Click here to find out what's wrong with Bando!
Photo: Smacdonald at en.wikipedia, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
This image of a Giant Leaftail Gecko, uploaded by kingsnake.com user Geckos_R_Me, is our herp photo of the day!
Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!
Thursday, September 19 2013
 Four new species of legless lizards have been added to the one previously known member of the group Anniella, reports the journal Breviora.
From the LA Times:
Anniella are pretty small animals, about as thick as a pencil and rarely more than 8 inches long. They spend their lives wiggling beneath loose, sandy soil, snacking on bugs and larvae.
They don't move fast or far, and the researchers say they may spend their whole lives in an area about the size of your dining room table.
Aside from that, scientists still don't know much about them.
"They are one of the most poorly studied reptiles in California," [Cal State Fullerton researcher James] Parham said. "Because they live under the sand, you can't see what they are doing, and you can't even do a mark-and-recapture because you can't reliably capture these things."
Parham and his coauthor Theodore Papenfuss, a herpetologist with the UC Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, have been scouring the state for legless lizards for 15 years. When they began their research, only one type of legless lizard was known to live in California.
One of the four newly identified species of Anniella, the Southern California legless lizard, was found under some dead leaves in dunes at the west end of Los Angeles International Airport.
The Bakersfield legless lizard was found in three vacant lots in downtown Bakersfield.
The southern Sierra legless lizard was spotted in three dry canyons on the edge of the Mojave Desert, and the Temblor legless lizard was found in the oil fields around the city of Taft, on the southwestern edge of the San Joaquin Valley.
To find these lizards, the scientists scattered 2,000 pieces of cardboard and plywood throughout the state to create moist, cool areas, which appeal to the lizards. Then they returned months later to see if any of the lizards had shown up.
Read the full story here.
This image of a Tegu, uploaded by kingsnake.com user MrSickle, is our herp photo of the day!
Upload your own reptile and amphibian photos photos at gallery.kingsnake.com, and you could see them featured here!
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