Two students — Samantha Lambarena and Freedom America Payne — traveled to Sacramento in April to sell lawmakers on the idea.

The red-legged frog is the largest native frog in the western United States.

“We think people will protect it just like they protect America’s bald eagle,” Lambarena said during the April hearing.

Historically, the diversity and complexity of life on an island was determined largely by its size and distance from other landmasses; if animals couldn’t easily travel to and from an island, few new species would arrive and establish themselves.

But with the shipping trade now allowing species to stow away from one island to the next, commerce has overtaken geography as the key factor in cross-island speciation.

“Humans have switched the system to one that in the past was dominated by speciation but now is dominated by colonization,” said Matthew R. Helmus, an ecologist with the Amsterdam Global Change Institute and the lead author of the study, published in Nature. “That’s really a fundamental shift to the system.”

There is considerable debate about the extent to which non-primates are capable of true imitation.

Now researchers from the UK and Hungary have presented the first compelling scientific evidence that reptiles could be capable of social learning through imitation.

They set out to investigate whether the bearded dragon (Pogona vitticeps) is capable of imitating another bearded dragon through a simple experiment using a wooden board which contained a doorway.

All subjects successfully copied the actions of the demonstrator lizard, suggesting for the first time that reptiles exhibit social learning through imitation equivalent to that observed in 'higher' species.

The 9ft (2.7 metre) creature has been taught to walk towards a series of yellow targets, getting a treat if he manages to complete the task successfully.

Despite its terrifying reputation, this Komodo dragon often responds to its keepers call by waddling towards the targets.

As Komodo dragons spend most of their time resting in the sun, the training provides much-needed exercise for Sunny throughout the day.

And once he masters the trick, keepers can ask Sunny to move into a different area of the exhibit.

The training is also helpful if medical attention is needed, as Sunny could voluntarily move without the need for sedation.

Footage from the GoPro camera is currently being used to review the sessions and give an insight into how Sunny sees his training.

According to the federal agency, the black pinesnake is found only in Mobile, Washington and Clarke counties in Alabama, and 11 Mississippi counties, including Jackson and George. It has not been seen in Louisiana in more than 30 years.

If deemed threatened under the Endangered Species Act, the government would impose certain restrictions on activities like the use of herbicides, controlled burns and some timber activities in the affected habitat areas.

"The black pinesnake is an important part of the longleaf pine ecosystem in southern Alabama and Mississippi," Fish & Wildlife Southeast Regional Director Cindy Dohner said in a prepared statement. "Conservation efforts for the black pinesnake align closely with efforts already ongoing in this ecosystem for other wildlife like the gopher tortoise, eastern indigo snake, dusky gopher frog and the red-cockaded woodpecker."

A total of 51 Leptodactylus fallax, known as mountain chicken frogs because they reportedly taste like chicken and make a clucking-like noise, were released on the Jersey-sized island of Montserrat, a British Overseas Territory.

In 2009, conservationists rescued a population of the critically endangered frogs from the island to avoid them being wiped out by a chytrid fungus which has devastated amphibian numbers worldwide. The mountain chicken frog population has also dwindled due to people eating them – the species is the national dish in nearby Dominica.

Following a breeding programme with the rescued frogs by London Zoo and Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, which produced 76 frogs from just two females, 51 frogs in July were put in custom-built shipping containers, flown to Antigua and then by a smaller plane to Montserrat. On arrival at their remote forest home on the volcanically active island, they were kept in tents for several days to avoid being stressed by their new environment, before being released into the wild.

The python is one of the San's most important animals. According to their creation myth, mankind descended from the python and the ancient, arid streambeds around the hills are said to have been created by the python as it circled the hills in its ceaseless search for water.

Sheila Coulson's find shows that people from the area had a specific ritual location associated with the python. The ritual was held in a little cave on the northern side of the Tsodilo Hills. The cave itself is so secluded and access to it is so difficult that it was not even discovered by archaeologists until the 1990s.

When Coulson entered the cave this summer with her three master's students, it struck them that the mysterious rock resembled the head of a huge python. On the six meter long by two meter tall rock, they found three-to-four hundred indentations that could only have been man-made.

Green sea turtles normally live in the Pacific’s warmer latitudes. Their numbers are dwindling because of development along the beaches they use to nest, and because they sometimes become snared in industrial fishing nets and drown.

Climate change has also affected the ancient reptiles. Because temperature determines their gender when they hatch, females vastly outnumber males these days. And the warmer ocean currents tend to take the turtles places they’re not accustomed to going, such as San Francisco Bay.

Herpetology keeper Ruth Smith said: “Sand lizards are the UK’s rarest lizard and populations in some areas are so low that we can’t just rely on protecting the site, we have to help breed them to boost their numbers.

“Surveys have shown that sand lizard numbers have significantly improved in the locations where they have been released before and it’s proven that those bred in the likes of zoos have a higher chance of survival than those that hatch in the wild.

“That’s because we’re able to give them plenty of food and intensive care in their vital early days and build them up for around four to six weeks, giving them a great head start.