But the "non-native species" has been ranked "of high concern" by the London Invasive Species Initiative (LISI), a government advisory quango which has called for the "foreign" family of snakes to be eradicated. It claims, if not stopped, the snakes could spread, causing "serious negative impact" on the eco-system.

This tough-line stance was this week disputed by Dr Wolfgang Wuster, a snake venom expert and senior lecturer of the School of Biological

Science in Bangor University, who told the New Journal: "Any attempt to eradicate the Aesculapian snake would require justification of resources to be devoted to an almost certainly non-problematic introduced species with little prospects of spread, as opposed to the many far more damaging species already out there."

(S)cientists discovered that glass-frog eggs hatched about 21 percent earlier on average when the fathers were removed. They hatched up to about 34 percent earlier when conditions were drier, suggesting that dehydration was the cue the eggs relied on to hatch early.

"Embryos can cope with delinquent dads," Delia said.

The researchers suggest this kind of embryo behavior may be common among species that provide care to eggs, such as insects, bony fishes and amphibians. "Variation in parental care seems to be the norm rather than the exception," Delia said.

A lot of the money to fund these retrofits comes out of criminal penalties from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which killed or otherwise affected an estimated 100,000 sea turtles. The first two years of the STC’s retrofit efforts were financed by the Recovered Oil Fund for Wildlife (which itself was created with money from Deepwater owner British Petroleum); the organization just received additional funding from the similar Gulf Environmental Benefit Fund, both of which are administered by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

This restitution money, Godfrey says, "has allowed us to actually work with private property owners to go ahead and convert their lights, to work with them, to supplement the money they’re spending. We match money they put in. In some cases where the problem is particularly heinous and the property owners just don’t have the money to fix the problem, we can actually go in and do it for them. That funding mechanism, which has been made available following the spill, has allowed a lot of major progress on this issue."