Fungal threats to honeybees and bats have been in the news lately, but they're not the only species at risk from these human-spread diseases. Snakes and amphibians, too, are facing catastrophic effects from these emerging pathogens.

From the Washington Post:

They are fungi, and they arrived in the United States from overseas with an assist from humans — through travel and trade. They prefer cold conditions and kill with precision, so efficiently that they’re creating a crisis in the wild.

The death toll on amphibians, bats and snakes from fungi represents “potential extinction events,” said [Dr. Jeremy] Coleman, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife research biologist who coordinates the government’s response to the bat-killing infection known as white-nose syndrome. It’s so large, he said, that it can’t be measured “as far as numbers of dead organisms,” and is “decimating populations as we know them.”

Read more here.

Photo: USFWS

This image of a Hognose Snake, uploaded by kingsnake.com user AdamTheOdd, is our herp photo of the day!



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In what has to be the dreamiest, most romantic reptile-related news story, ever, scientists report that Amazonian butterlifes drink the tears of turtles.

From LiveScience.com:

The sight of butterflies flocking onto the heads of yellow-spotted river turtles in the western Amazon rain forest is not uncommon, at least if one is able to sneak up on the skittish reptiles. But the reason why butterflies congregate onto the turtles may be stranger than you think: to drink their tears.

The butterflies are likely attracted to the turtles' tears because the liquid drops contain salt, specifically sodium, an important mineral that is scant in the western Amazon, said Phil Torres, a scientist who does much of his research at the Tambopata Research Center in Peru and is associated with Rice University.

Unlike butterflies, turtles get plenty of sodium through their largely carnivorous diet.

Read the rest here.

Photo: Jeff Cremer / Perunature.com

Is the Prairie rattlesnake (Crotalus Viridis) losing his rattle?

Terry Phillip, a naturalist at Reptile Gardens in Rapid City, thinks so. Check out this audio clip and transcript of an NPR story and tell us if you agree.



Photo by kingsnake.com user DKT.

Congratulations to the Houston Zoo for their third clutch of Madagascar big-headed turtle babies to hatch -- another landmark in the first time this species has reproduced in an institution accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.



Check out more photos of the babies on the Houston Zoo's blog!

No matter how much you love snakes, this homeowner's plight might be too much for you.

From the Carroll County News:

Sometime after July 23, property owner Jess Christensen started noticing a lot of snake activity in the evening around his house, located on County Road 717 just north of Metalton.

"Really what really hit me was how close they were to the house," Christensen said. "I just looked at the statistics and knew that one day I will be bitten if I don't do anything, so I thought to get a professional opinion about it."

So he called Dale Ertel, who runs the educational exhibit Snake World and helps people remove dangerous snakes from their property. Ertel has been collecting snakes for over 50 years, he said. He got his first venomous snake when he was 15 and has been bitten by nonpoisonous snakes countless times. He has been bitten only once by a venomous snake, a diamond back that he still owns.

"The first time he called, he said he'd seen over a dozen in his yard," Ertel said. "So a friend of mine and I went out there the following night and we found over 12 that first night, and we have been back several times since, and it seems like every time we have gone back we are finding at least 12 [copperheads]."

Ertel's friend counted more than 118 snakes collected from Christensen's property.

Read the full story here.

Photo by kingsnake.com user cochran.

No matter how much you love snakes, finding one in the toilet at Starbucks is gonna give you a shock.

From Fox4kc.com:

Snakes in unexpected places can startle anyone. For Bruce Ahlswede the unexpected place was a San Antonio Starbucks bathroom, where he had stopped on Tuesday after a business presentation.

He froze for a moment thinking the snake, lying across the toilet, was a toy left by a prankster.

Then it started to move. He backed out of the room and found a store employee.
"I said "Hey you've got a snake in your bathroom and she’s kind of freaking out,'" Ahlswede told CNN affiliate KSAT. Bruce, his wife and store employees all crowded into the bathroom and watched as the snake, perhaps just as surprised as the rest, slithered around the toilet bowl and disappeared, the station reported.

While originally identified as a python (of course), knowledgeable experts believe it was a rat snake. Read more here.

When it comes to snakes, "protection" apparently equals "death."

Check out the final paragraph of a news story out of Norway today, about just under 200 pythons who were seized in a police raid in Oslo:

The snakes and other reptiles were turned over to animal protection authorities at state agency Mattilsynet, but were expected to be put to death.

Setting aside the blistering ignorance about snakes evident from the rest of the police statements, and the massive over-reaction to the mere existence of these snakes, and even setting aside the culpability of anyone who smuggles and keeps illegal animals, what exactly did the snakes do to deserve death?

Will Norwegian officials attempt to find some non-lethal solution? Will they appeal to the international reptile community for help?

And if not, could they at least stop pretending these animals were being "protected"?

A mysterious disease wiped out nearly all fire salamanders in the Netherlands, even those taken into captivity to protect them. Now scientists have identified the fungus responsible, and warned it could spread to amphibians around the world.

From Scientific American:

But now the cause of the fire salamanders’ rapid decline has been revealed. According to a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the fire salamanders in the Netherlands contracted a previously unknown fungus related to Bd, the fungus that causes chytridiomycosis. The paper dubs the new fungus Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans spec. nov. It causes superficial erosions on the salamanders’ skin, followed by deep ulcerations and microscopic skin necrosis. Captive-bred amphibians which the scientists exposed to the fungus died in as little as seven days.

"At this moment we don’t know the origin of the fungus," says the paper’s lead author, An Martel of the Department of Pathology, Bacteriology and Avian Diseases at Ghent University. "It can be an endemic species that became virulent or it can be an invasive species that was introduced in the Netherlands. Worldwide monitoring can give us an answer to this question. But still, if the fungus would spread a lot of amphibian populations are at risk."

Read more here.

Photo: kingsnake.com user caecilianman02

If you want a Gardiner’s Seychelles frog to hear what you have to say, tell him to forget his ears and open his mouth.

From NatGeo:

Scientists had thought that the Gardiner’s Seychelles frog—at 11 millimeters among the tiniest in the world—was deaf because it doesn’t have a middle ear, a critical component of hearing that’s found most land animals.

[...]

So the scientists x-rayed one of the tiny frogs. The images revealed that the frogs’ pulmonary system is poorly developed, suggesting that the lungs aren’t contributing to hearing, according to the study, published September 2 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

So the scientists refocused their experiments on the frogs’ heads. By making various 3-D simulations of how sound travels through the frogs’ heads, the scientists found that the bones in their mouths act as an amplifier for sound waves.

Read the rest here.
Photo: R. Boistel/CNRS

This image of a Gharial, uploaded by kingsnake.com user Majorpat, is our herp photo of the day!



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The Bronx may not be the first place that comes to mind for saving threatened species, but for the eastern hellbender salamander, it's working out just fine.

That's the word from the Wildlife Conservation Society's Bronx Zoo, which just oversaw the release of 38 juvenile hellbenders into their native habitat in western New York State.

From Scientific American:
The release is the latest step in an effort to help boost the wild population of the eastern hellbender (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis alleganiensis), a threatened subspecies of giant salamander that is not yet endangered but faces a shrinking population and what appears to be a dangerously low birth rate in the wild. "We don’t have a lot of recruitment of young animals," says Don Boyer, the Bronx Zoo's curator of herpetology, who has watched the hellbenders grow since he joined the organization two years ago and who took the recent journey to western New York for the animals' release. "It seems like the younger stages of the hellbender are more vulnerable," Boyer says. "The head-starting, while it's not a solution, may help get the hellbenders through that critical juvenile phase and put them back in the system."
Read the full story here.

Photo: Julie Larsen Maher/Wildlife Conservation Society

In Contra Costa County in San Francisco's East Bay, a pair of scammers have pulled off a string of burglaries, claiming to be animal control officers checking the property for snakes.

From The Contra Costa Times:

The incident, reported in Hayward, is one of three incidents in as many days that scammers tricked their way into homes to check for reptiles. Earlier burglaries took place in Union City and Fremont, police said.

Officers were called about 6:30 p.m. on Aug. 22 to a home in the 2200 block of Bennington Lane after a woman reported her home had been burglarized, said Hayward police Sgt. Mark Ormsby.

The victim told police that a suspect posing as a Hayward Animal Control Officer came to her home wearing a green uniform and said he needed to check her backyard for snake eggs. While the victim was in the backyard with the suspect, a second suspect entered the home and stole property. Police did not say what was taken or how much it was worth.

Read the full story here.

It will take more than a village to successfully re-introduce the Eastern indigo snake in Alabama's Conecuh National Forest. It will take careful science, cooperation between academia, non-profits, and government, a lot of community outreach and education, and luck.

From a report on the project from the Living Alongside Wildlife blog:

We have had to trust that these lab-raised, perhaps ecologically naïve, snakes would possess the innate behaviors needed to integrate into the natural framework of finding shelter, avoiding predators, foraging and capturing prey, surviving the winter, reaching maturity, finding mates, reproducing, and so forth. Thus far the indications are that the snakes are hitting the ground with the needed intrinsic behaviors.

We can also view this reintroduction to be successful on a partnership level. Academic institution, state and federal agencies, and non-profit conservation and educational organizations have come together for the benefit of the eastern indigo snake. Auburn University has been at the center with research and implementation but the project would not have been possible without support and contributions from the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, The Orianne Society, Georgia Department of Natural Resources, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Forest Service, Zoo Atlanta, and Ft. Stewart (U.S. Army).

Eastern Indigo Snakes freely roaming the forest have opened up an avenue of educational opportunities. Snakes, nor any other organism, recognize artificial human boundaries, and our indigo snakes have on many occasions made this very evident. Not too distant from the release area is the Blue Lake Camp, a rustic camp of the United Methodist Church. Within a few weeks at least one snake found their way to the camp. As readers of this blog know, the appearance of a snake on a property is often met with a hoe, shovel, or firearm, but not in this instance. Having a radio transmitter allowed Jimmy and Sierra, our Conecuh ambassadors of snake education, to locate the snake(s) on the property, speak with managers of the camp, and illuminate the importance of the snakes. The fact that they eat Copperheads was not downplayed.

Ultimately the Eastern Indigo Snakes must be accepted by the human visitors of Conecuh National Forest. Being a national forest dictates a multi-use approach, and the visitors to the forest span all of society. Signs have been posted within the forest to alert and educate visitors of the presence of the indigo snake. Some will see the presence of the indigo snake as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience first-hand an iconic ruler of the longleaf pine ecosystem, others, unfortunately, not so much. But when we set forth with this reintroduction effort we made the decision that snake persecution would be a real possibility and that information and education were the best tools to combat it.

Read the rest here, including a great explanation of using telemetry to monitor introduced populations.