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.
Wednesday, October 23 2013
 A thriving population of green anoles is living in a Los Angeles neighborhood.
From KCET.org:
The lizards that biologists just found thriving in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles aren't a new species: they're the extremely well-studied green anole. But as the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum's Lila Higgins reports, the discovery marks the first confirmed established population of the common reptile in Los Angeles County, and scientists are curious as to what effect the little lizards may be having on native wildlife.
Green anoles are native to the southeastern U.S. and nearby islands, where --- ironically they're in trouble due to competition from exotic reptiles. Hancock Park isn't the first beachhead green anoles have made in the state: a population has been established in San Diego's Balboa Park for many years, and reptile watchers also report a thriving colony of the sleek lizards in and around Temecula. Individual green anoles have been documented in places like Northridge and Chino Hills.
And according to Higgins, Hancock Park neighbors have told Natural History Museum herpetologist Greg Pauly that the anoles have been there as long as they can remember.
Read the full story here.
Photo: PiccoloNamek/Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons License
Our screened back deck is a wonderful addition to the house. Rather than a deck we refer to it as our aviary, for it is home to a half a dozen European goldfinches that entertain us non-stop. But we could just as well call it our "lizardarium," for despite deterring the omnipresent mosquitoes many local lizards wander in and out along pathways known only to them.
Broad-headed skinks appear now and again, but most of the lizards are one of two kinds of anoles, the native green or the introduced Cuban brown. The green anoles are the most active and the most arboreal, and as I watch their antics my thoughts often drift back to the first green anoles I ever saw.
It was in the 1940s, I was 7 or 8 years old, and the anoles, a slender golden chain affixed around their neck (no photos), were being offered for sale as living lapel decorations at the New York Sportsman’s Show.
They were being sold as American chameleons, and with them came a care sheet that explained that all the purchaser needed to do to assure the lizard a long life was to provide it with sugar water.
I had never seen such wonderful creature and sugar water would be easy enough to provide, so I wheedled my parents into buying me one lizard. Through trial and error I learned that the little lizard needed a much more varied diet than sugar water and that when he was turned loose on my mother’s houseplants he avidly hunted houseflies and other insect repast.
Could this little lizard have been the cause of my lifelong infatuation with herps? Well, it and the long ago herp supply company, Quivira Specialties, certainly were contributors to my lingering interest.
More photos under the jump...
Continue reading "Green anoles and bygone days"
This image of a Giant Mexican Musk Turtle, uploaded by kingsnake.com user Katrina, 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!
Tuesday, October 22 2013
 Scientists are honing in on the immune factor that is allowing amphibian populations to succumb to the fungal disease chytridiomycosis, which has caused a loss of nearly 4 percent of amphibian populations every year between 2002 and 2011.
From Popular Science:
It's been most baffling, given the amphibians' complex immune systems, not far off from the immune complexity of humans and other mammals.
"There's been a big question in terms of why the amphibian immune system hasn't been able to respond to this nasty skin infection," Louise Smith-Rollins, an associate professor of pathology, microbiology and immunology at Vanderbilt, tells Popular Science. "The question is, if it's a failure to recognize the pathogen, what's the defect?"
Rollins-Smith has been studying this immune response for more than 10 years, and she and her team have found another clue as to why amphibians can't clear this fungus. This week in Science, a paper she co-authored brings in new information to understanding the answer to that question. The study, led by Vanderbilt graduate students J. Scott Fites and Jeremy Ramsey, shows that it may be the second line of immune defense where the breakdown occurs.
The first line of defense, antimicrobial peptides produced in the skin, seemed to be effective at producing an immune response. But during the next stage, something happened to stop the usual inhibiting response.
"It appears that the defect is that the fungus itself is able to release factors that target vulnerable lymphocytes and induce them to commit suicide," Rollins-Smith says. "Mediators that should be regulating and calling in the troops, they're stopped right there."
Read the rest of the story here.
Photo: Joel Sartore/Popular Science
This image of a Rhacodactylus Gecko, uploaded by kingsnake.com user mrusso, 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!
Monday, October 21 2013
This image of a Milksnake, uploaded by kingsnake.com user sballard, 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!
Check out this video "Ball Python Clutch, Day 41," submitted by kingsnake.com user kcalderala.
Submit your own reptile & amphibian videos at http://www.kingsnake.com/video/ and you could see them featured here or check out all the videos submitted by other users!
Friday, October 18 2013
Scientists working to protect loggerhead sea turtles know how to save them; they just can't get stakeholders to cooperate.
From Mission Blue:
It's been our experience that those who would spend two decades or more working closely with fishermen to understand and protect sea turtles typically have the best interests of both people and nature in mind, although sometimes they are called "turtle-huggers" or scapegoated over another competing agenda.
Back in the early 1990’s when we learned about the mass mortality of loggerhead sea turtles off the Pacific coast of Baja from geographers Serge Dedina and Emily Young, we responded immediately.
Here’s how Dr. Dedina describes what they found:

"We first started noticing the mortality of loggerheads on Magdalena Island on the trip out to Cabo San Lazaro in the Spring of 1994 when we noticed a few animals stranded on the beach. But as summer progressed we saw more and more. What was fascinating was to see the correlation between stranded loggerheads and the abundant coyote population who fed on the animals as they washed up. There were literally dozens of coyotes sitting in the dunes apparently satiated after a night of feeding.
By July 1994, on one return trip from San Lazaro, we counted more than 224 dead loggerheads, so many, that the fishermen we were with were clearly embarrassed. They all knew that the turtles were being caught in gill-nets. In fact we had been out shark fishing with fishermen in the spring and had seen the problem ourselves."
Read the full story here.
Photo: Mission Blue
This image of a Carpet Python, uploaded by kingsnake.com user chuckn16, 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, October 17 2013
The car was far ahead of us when it swerved sharply. What, we wondered, was the reason for that?
Jake and I were road cruising and not in any real hurry. The car ahead had disappeared from sight around a curve, and we were now near their position when they had swerved.
Suddenly Jake yelled, "Canebrake!" And sure enough, lying almost dead center in the road was a 4-and-a-half foot long canebrake rattler, Crotalus horridus "atricaudatus."
As I slowed to a stop, Jake grabbed a hook and piled out. As he neared the snake, now alerted, another car approached from around the curve. Jake touched the snake on the tail and fortunately, the snake proved to be a runner. It wanted no familiarity with anything and darted across the road, but then stopped on the grassy verge and looked like it was heading back. We stopped it.
The other car, filled with young women, stopped near us. They asked in unison, "What is it?"
"Rattler," Jake replied.
"What are you doing with it?" one of them asked.
"Keeping it off of the road." I replied.
"Let it go," one of the young women said. "We came back to kill it."
"Looks like you’re out of luck," I told them.
"You’re not killing this one," Jeff said. A couple of more unintelligible comments, and they left.
Gives me a warm, fuzzy, feeling to know that Jake and I were able to save this big male from the road idiots.
The locale was rather open, and once the canebrake was in the canebrake, having slowed to cross the roadside ditch, we guided him to the foot of a big pine.
Once against it, he coiled quietly, a monarch of the southern brakes.
More photos under the jump...
Continue reading "A canebrake kind of night"
 Every year kingsnake.com gets asked, "I want to hold a contest and give away a live animal, can I advertise this on your site?"
The answer is surprising to many: kingsnake.com and our other pet-related sites will not accept advertising for live animal contests.
No, it's not because we don't like contests.
Aside from the ethical problems raised by giving away live animals to people who may not, or cannot, care for them responsibly, many states have outlawed the practice, or limited the practice but regulate it in some manner. Some allow it with certain animals, and in certain circumstances, while others outlaw it completely.
Many of these laws have been on the books for decades, some having been written in response to specific problems. Often they were implemented in response to traveling carnivals that would offer goldfish, green iguanas, anolis lizards, turtles, or even baby alligators as inexpensive prizes in games of chance on the midway. Who hasn't seen goldfish bowls at the carnival?
Most, if not all, of these animals died horrible deaths at the hands of owners ill-equipped to deal with them, many times unsupervised children, and over the years many states took action to make the practice illegal or to limit what could and couldn't be offered as a prize.
Does your state have laws against animal giveaways? If so, you may be subject to criminal charges, either as the contest holder or the contest winner. What makes it even more dangerous and problematic is when the contests -- and prizes -- cross state lines. When that happens, a simple misdemeanor, can easily turn into a federal crime.
When a live animal contest crosses state lines, and the contest violates either the state laws of the contest holder or the prize winner, then according to the United States Fish & Wildlife Service, a violation of the federal Lacey Act statutes has occurred, regardless of the species involved. Thus a leopard gecko or ball python that may be 100 percent legal to purchase, keep, possess, and ship across state lines, is illegal as a contest prize instead of a purchase.
So, should you participate in live animal giveaway contests?
If you're a responsible pet owner with experience in the species offered as a prize, and the contest does not violate your state or local laws, or the contest holder's state laws, then there is nothing wrong with participating in a live animal giveaway. But do your homework first! Or that next "prize" might be more than you bargained for.
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