The authorities in Mexico have stopped traffickers that were abusing and selling animals.

From Fox News Latino:

The discovery in Monterrey, the capital of Nuevo Leon, was the result of a joint investigation by Profepa and the Attorney General's Office.

Officers found a freezer containing 40 dead animals, among them 17 python regius snakes, two sugar gliders (Petaurus breviceps), two eastern grey squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis), two black-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus), one squirrel monkey (Saimiri sciureus) and one cotton-top tamarind (Saguinus Oedipus).

They also found one parrot (Psittacidae), two common kestrels (Falco tinnunculus), three water monitor lizards (Varanus salvator), two swamp crocodiles (Crocodylus moreletti), four Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus), one corn snake (Pantherophis guttatus) and red-eyed tree frogs (Agalychnis callidryas).

Read more here.


Photo by kingsnake.com use ke.

Home to some of the rarest crocodile species, the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust is fundraising to bolster their work.

From the New Indian Express:

Meanwhile, even as it is struggling to raise the money needed for undertaking its initiatives, the facility also has to rebuild a portion of it which would be affected by the ongoing road widening work.

“The front counter and the entrance office will go. So we are planning to revamp the frontage and three exhibits near the entrance first,” said Zahida.

The MCBT and Center for Herpetology was started in 1976 by Herpetologist and reptile conservationist Romulus Earl Whitaker, and was the first crocodile breeding centre in Asia, set up to save the dwindling crocodile population and preserve snakes.

Read more here.

California's flat-tailed horned lizard is a candidate for endangered species protection, and further research may give it permanent protected status.

From the Yuma Sun:

"From our perspective the most important thing is now the state is going to have to be consulted on for any development that happens within the flat-tailed horned lizard habitat," she said.

There is dispute over whether the species is in fact declining, and how many live in the dunes. A biologist with the Bureau of Land Management, Larry LePre, told the Yuma Sun in December the dunes aren't prime habitat since they don't have many of the harvester ants which are the basis of the lizards' diet, and there's no reliable data to suggest they're going up or down in numbers, mostly because they're difficult to detect.

The BLM, which maintains the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area, is part of a joint Rangewide Management Strategy for the species covering almost 500 acres in California and Arizona. The center's petition contends this is inadequate since most of the land is open to off-road vehicle use.

Read more here.

Hundreds of live and dead reptiles were found in cigarette containers and children's books, as men tried to smuggle them out of Perth Airport.

From the Daily Mail:

Skinks, geckos, frogs, pygmy pythons, and a dead death adder - one of the most venomous snakes in the world - were found in the staggering haul.

A number of invertebrates and 33 dead reptiles, which appear to have been tagged for use as specimens, were also discovered amongst more than 157 reptiles and amphibians being transported out of Western Australia.

Four men were arrested and charged - two from Russia and two from the Czech Republic - at Perth International Airport on February 6 after an investigation by the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service and the WA Department of Parks and Wildlife.

Read more here.

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Alligators have a natural immunity to infection that could help humans combat bacterial illness.

From Bay News:

The government-funded study took place at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park over the past four years.

"Alligators live in a pretty inhospitable environment, “ said Barney Bishop, one of the lead researchers. “Many of them live in stagnant water where there is lots of bacteria. And while they are predators, they also eat carrion, so they must have a robust immune system to fend off infection in these situations."

The researchers were able to isolate those infection-fighting peptides in the alligator blood. The hope is to use alligator blood as battlefield medicine. Soldiers wounded in battle are vulnerable to bacteria, such as MRSA. Alligators have a natural resistance.

Read more here.

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Sometimes the key to healthy poison dart frog populations is a pig playing in the mud.
From BBC Earth:

Typically, female poison dart (dendrobatid) frogs lay eggs on land. Once the tadpoles hatch, male frogs, their fathers, then carry them to small nursery pools.

But these pools may be short-lived, and the frogs are too tiny to dig their own.

Enter the peccary, a species of wild pig common in Central and South America.

Peccaries like to fling turf, specifically by digging out wallows – their own individual mud spas.

As they do so, they can radically transform the rainforest floor, creating pools of water that are just the right size for prospective frog parents.

Read more here.

Planned for the Tottenham Hotspur football club, a new athletic facility has halted development because the land is home to great crested newts.

From the Irish Mirror:

“Surveys confirmed the presence of a medium-sized breeding population of great crested newt within the pond on site, and individual long-eared and common pipistrelle bats roosting in the agricultural buildings as well as the presence of grass snake on site.

“This being the case; the proposed development will result in the loss of a great crested newt breeding pond, confirmed bat roosts, amphibian/reptile suitable habitat and mature trees.”

It states that before planning permission can be granted the newts and bats must be "looked after" and that the club must "demonstrate that the favourable conservation status of the species will be maintained within the whole of the site".

Read more here.

Using computer models of jacky dragons, researchers have learned it's the order of a jacky dragon's movement that makes communication possible.

From Johns Hopkins:

Woo and Rieucau conducted a playback experiment using computer animations of lizard displays. They created three simulated animations of lizards that differed in their shape and skin texture and performed the displays either with natural syntax or reversed syntax. There was the “cyberlizard,” which had normal shape and skin texture; a lizard with normal shape but without realistic skin texture; and an object shaped generally like a lizard but lacking texture.

The researchers found the order of the actions was critical for signal recognition. Even the animated lizards with abnormal shape and texture elicited responses from the jacky dragon subjects, as long as the actions were in the correct order.

The lizards responded to animations with correct syntax by making social signals of their own. These included aggressive signals like fast head bobs or the entire visual display pattern (tail flick, quick arm wave, and push-up body rock) or submissive displays like slow arm waves and slow head bobs.

Read more here.