If a first responder is on the scene of an accident or injury, and there's a loose reptile present, or the injured person was bitten by one, will they know what to do? They will if they've been taught the basics by an expert.

That's exactly the program being offered in one Canadian community.

From Simcoe.com:

Andre Ngo, director of research and curriculum at Reptilia, a Vaughan-based reptile zoo, gave an informative presentation to almost 25 police, firefighters and bylaw officers in Stayner Friday afternoon.

“It was an excellent training opportunity for us,” Clearview fire chief Colin Shewell said. “We got some real insight in terms of what to do when we encounter a reptile or are dealing with someone harmed by one.”

Huronia West OPP officers, Clearview firefighters, representatives from Clearview bylaw and firefighters from Springwater, Adjala-Tosorontio, Mulmur/Melancthon, Blue Mountains and Oro-Medonte attended the training session, held at the Joint Emergency Services Facility on Highway 26.

“My goal with you is to teach you how to secure a scene and stay safe,” Ngo said.

He started off by reviewing the major groups of reptiles and identified commonly encountered species. He also talked about safe handling practices.

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Photo: Simcoe.com

Timothy N. W. Jackson

Australia is world famous for its venomous critters, including its many highly venomous snakes.

The snake that holds the popular title of “world’s most venomous” is the inland taipan (Oxyuranus microlepidotus), an inhabitant of Australia’s arid interior. Astonishingly, a single bite from an inland taipan is capable of delivering enough venom to kill 250,000 lab mice.

The venom of the inland taipan has attracted considerable research interest and the toxins responsible for its extreme toxicity have been identified. Effective antivenom also exists for the treatment of bites.

What we don’t know, though, is why the inland taipan needs such toxic venom. We know almost nothing about the evolutionary selection pressures that have refined and enhanced the toxins present in the venom of this iconic species of snake.

Snakes vs humans

Historically, the focus of snake venom research worldwide has been anthropocentric – examining the impact the venom has for humans. Large species of venomous snake, those that are known to be potentially dangerous to humans, have received the lion’s share of attention.

Most attention has been given to the development of antivenom and to studying the building blocks of toxic proteins found in snake venoms. This has allowed us to learn more about human physiology and to search for compounds that may be useful in drug design, such as the toxin from the venom of a pit viper from which the blood pressure medication Captopril was developed.

These are important goals for venom research, but the result of this bias toward human interest is that we still know very little about the ways in which snakes use their venom in nature. We also do not know how diet influences its composition – the ecology of venom is an almost completely neglected area of research.

As Eastern kingsnake numbers in the southeastern U.S. drop, copperhead populations climb, according to a new study published in the journal Herpetologica.



From the Augusta Chronicle:

The non-venomous kingsnakes, which grow to more than 5-feet long, are so-named because they have a natural immunity to pit-viper venom, which allows them to prey on other snakes. They eat copperheads, a heavy-bodied venomous snake that can grow to a little more than 3-feet long.

From 377 traps deployed in an array of habitats, the authors recorded captures of 299 kingsnakes and 2,012 copperheads. Fort Stewart was one of the study sites in Georgia, along with the Joseph W. Jones Ecological Research Center at Ichauway in the southwest corner of the state. The data indicates that declines in the kingsnake populations coincide with increases in the copperhead populations. Why that happens is open to interpretation.

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Photo: kingsnake.com user foxturtle

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Baby sea turtles, like kids everywhere, don't always do what we expect them to do. University of Central Florida researcher Kate Mansfield and her team found a way to keep an eye on their movements -- and what they discovered surprised them.

From LiveScience.com:

Marine biologists track seagoing creatures, including adult loggerheads, with satellite tags that transmit information such as location, depth and temperature. But hatchlings are too small to tag — affix a tag with heavy batteries to these turtles, and they'll sink, Mansfield said.

Advances in tag technology have started to change all that. New tags are smaller and solar-powered (no heavy batteries needed), Mansfield said. They're still too large to affix to a newborn loggerhead, but they fit on young turtles. Mansfield and her colleagues lab-reared 17 loggerhead turtles to the age of 3.5 to 9 months, waiting until the turtles had reached between 4 inches and 7 inches (11 to 18 cm) in length before tagging them and releasing them into the Atlantic Ocean.

The long-standing expectation was that baby turtles hatch off the East Coast of the United States, launch into the Gulf Stream that carries them north up the coast and then ride into the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre. This system of currents takes the turtles past the Azores off the coast of Western Europe and down the coast of Africa, before the animals pop back out on the East Coast again.

While the turtles do use the Gulf Stream and the Gyre, they don't always complete this ring around the Atlantic, the researchers report today (March 4) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. In fact, the turtles completed quite diverse journeys; they traveled clockwise, but on their own, individual paths. Some even dropped out of the Gyre into the still waters within that circular current, known as the Sargasso Sea. The Sea gets its name, in part, from the floating Sargassum that gathers there.

Read the full story here...

Photo: Jim Abernethy/LiveScience.com

Humans battle over the dinner check, but in Australia, a python and a crocodile battled over which one of them would be dinner. Ctizen journalist Tiffany Corlis was on the scene and caught it on her camera.



From BBC News:

"It was amazing," she told the BBC. "We saw the snake fighting with the crocodile - it would roll the crocodile around to get a better grip, and coil its body around the crocodile's legs to hold it tight."

"The fight began in the water - the crocodile was trying to hold its head out of the water at one time, and the snake was constricting it."

"After the crocodile had died, the snake uncoiled itself, came around to the front, and started to eat the crocodile, face-first," she added.

Ms Corlis said it appeared to take the snake around 15 minutes to eat the crocodile.

The snake was "definitely very full," when it finished, she said. "I don't know where it went after that - we all left, thinking we didn't want to stick around!"

Read the full story, and see the rest of her photos, here.

It may sound like an horror movie, but it's not, as 66-year-old Jake Thomas learned the hard way.

Mr Thomas, a volunteer who mows the local cemetery at Werris Creek where his daughter Kim is buried, came across the snake during his usual clean-up. It was in a vase on a headstone.

Fearful about other people's safety, Mr Thomas cut the snake in half. Like most people would, he had thought the strike had killed the snake, so he left to finish off the rest of the cemetery maintenance.

About 45 minutes later he came back to get rid of the snake. "I put my hand in the vase to pick it up and it grabbed on to me even though it was dead," Mr Thomas said.

"I pulled my hand out and saw two little marks and knew it had got hold of me."

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Photo: Peter Lorimer/Daily Telegraph

Do you ever catch site of spotted salamanders and wood frogs in the field? The Orianne Society wants to recruit you.

From Living Alongside Wildlife:

The Orianne Society recently initiated "Snapshots in Time", a long-term Citizen Science project aimed at mobilizing people to monitor the timing of Spotted Salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) and Wood Frog (Lithobates sylvaticus) breeding throughout the respective ranges of these species. The purpose of this project is to use the data collected—by on-the-ground citizens, year-after-year—to investigate possible effects of climate change on the timing of reproduction. Determining changes in the timing of breeding is very important, not just for these species, but others that use the same habitat. Ultimately, the results of this project could allow us to inform land managers and development planners of important areas for conservation and look deeper into what other species in these ecosystems may be negatively affected by climate change, including some endangered species.

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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced it's placing the Georgetown and Salado salamanders on the threatened species list, despite ongoing opposition from pro-development forces in Texas.

From the Austin Business Journal:

The salamanders have been a contentious issue for both environmentalists and some community officials, who have struggled over how to protect the animals while preserving development opportunities. The full impact of the decision won't be clear until the Fish and Wildlife service sets rules for how the salamanders will be protected, according to a report in the Austin American-Statesman.

In the case of the Georgetown salamander, the agency may allow local Georgetown's local protections to remain in place. Those regulations prevent development within 80 meters of a salamander site and within 50 meters of a spring as well as limited development up to 300 meters upstream. The city passed those rules in December hoping to fend off federal protection, the Statesman report said. If the federal agency decides the local ordinances are sufficient, local developers won't need a federal permit for building.

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Photo: Texas Parks and Wildlife

A Missouri car accident involved some unusal cargo: Four alligators.

From KMBC.com:

KFVS-TV reports two crashes happened in the southbound lanes of Interstate 55 in the southeast Missouri community around 7 p.m. Saturday.

Four alligators ranging from 3 feet to 5 feet long were being hauled in a small trailer behind one of the cars.

A man and his wife who were in the car pulling the alligators were injured in the wreck. Police say the animals remained inside.

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Danville, Virg., fisherman Morris Lawson took photos of dead turtles on the banks of the Dan River, and shared them online. They've raised a lot of attention to the possible impact of the coal ash spill on wildlife in the area.

From WGHP Fox 8:

“One turtle was at the dam up on the bank about two feet out of the water. And the other turtle was located about where that tree is [by the boat ramp] about two feet up out of the water on the bank. And he was on his back. The other one was on his belly,” explained Lawson.

Jenny Edwards is a program manager with the Dan River Basin Association.

“We have heard some reports that turtles appear to be crawling up on the banks and dying,” she told FOX8.

Edwards added, “Turtles should be hibernating this time of year. It’s cold. They hibernate down in the mud. The fact that they’re crawling up on the bank and dying, even if it’s not in mass numbers… It’s highly unusual.”

She emphasized, “Even though we can’t directly link it to coal ash, this is exactly the sort of thing we expected to start seeing.”

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Residents can report dead wildlife in and near the river at this link; more information here.

Photo: Morris Lawson

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Peru’s treasured Manu National Park is the world’s top biodiversity hotspot for reptiles and amphibians, according to a new survey published last week by biologists from the University of California, Berkeley, Southern Illinois University in Carbondale (SIU-Carbondale) and Illinois Wesleyan University.



The park, which encompasses lowland Amazonian rain forest, high-altitude cloud forest and Andean grassland east of Cuzco, is well known for its huge variety of bird life, which attracts ecotourists from around the globe. More than 1,000 species of birds, about 10 percent of the world’s bird species; more than 1,200 species of butterflies; and now 287 reptiles and amphibians have been recorded in the park.



“For reptiles and amphibians, Manu and its buffer zone now stands out as the most diverse protected area anywhere,” said study coauthor Rudolf von May, a postdoctoral researcher in UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.

Despite the park’s abundant and diverse animal life, von May said, not all is well in the preserve. The devastating chytrid fungus has caused a decline in the number of frogs there, as it has elsewhere around the world, while deforestation for subsistence living, gold mining and oil and gas drilling are encroaching on the buffer zones around the park.

“All of this is threatening the biodiversity in the park and the native peoples who live in settlements in the park,” von May said. At least four Amazonian tribes and a nomadic group of hunter-gatherers known as Mashco-Piro live within the confines of Manu National Park and its buffer zone.

Von May, a native of Peru, and coauthor Alessandro Catenazzi, an assistant professor of zoology at SIU-Carbondale, have spent more than 15 years each scouring the park and its surrounding areas for frogs, toads, salamanders and caecilians – all amphibians – as well as for reptiles such as snakes, lizards, turtles and caimans. The field work in the park and its buffer zone, augmented by other, more limited surveys published previously, allowed the team to compile a list of 155 amphibian and 132 reptile species, including a handful of species new to science. Taxonomist and coauthor Edgar Lehr, assistant professor of biology at Illinois Wesleyan University, collaborates frequently with von May and Catenazzi on frog taxonomy and studies of amphibian declines and conservation.