Robots modeled on baby sea turtles may reveal secrets about evolution

From the LA Times:

To better understand how the sea turtles' flippers work on land, researchers at Daniel Goldman's CRAB Lab (Complex Rheology and Biomechanics) at Georgia Tech studied the movements of just-hatched sea turtles on the beach of Jekyll Island, a coastal island of Georgia.

The researchers noticed that the sea turtles were able to maintain the same speed on both sandy and firmer terrain, by bending their wrists on sandy ground and keeping their wrists rigid when running on hard ground.

In order to study their movements more closely without bringing baby sea turtles into the lab, one of Goldman's students built FlipperBot, a robot model of a baby sea turtle that has the ability to bend its wooden flipper wrist or keep it rigid.

After putting FlipperBot through a number of tests, the scientists found that Mother Nature, and the baby sea turtles, have got it right. The robot was able to traverse a manufactured poppy seed terrain more quickly when it was allowed to bend its wrist. They also found that the robot, as well as the baby sea turtles, slowed down when they encountered previously disturbed poppy seeds or sand.

So, why does this matter? Well, the research can help engineers design robots that can successfully traverse many types of terrain. It might also help turtle conservationists understand what conditions can slow down baby turtles during that all-important first run, and finally, it may even help answer some evolutionary questions.

Read the full story and watch video of the turtle robot here.

Photo: Nicole Mazouchova / Georgia Tech

Say hello to Froggie Mercury! A newly discovered species of frog in India's biodiversity hot-spot, the Western Ghats, has been named after the late Freddie Mercury: Mercurana myristicapalustris.
From TheHindu.com, an account of the discovery of this and one other new species of frog:

The... genus has been christened ‘Mercurana’ to commemorate Freddie Mercury, late iconic lead singer of the British rock band Queen. Mercury (his pen name) was of Indian Parsi origin and had spent major part of his childhood in India in Panchagni, located in the northern part of the mountain range, where the frog now bearing his name has been discovered.

While the ‘Beddomixalus bijui’ was found in the swamp forests of the Anamalai and high ranges of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, ‘Mercurana myristicapalustris,’ is restricted to highly fragmented and threatened low land ‘Myristica’ swamp forests in the foothills of the Agastyamalai hills in Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram districts.

More here!

It's a plain fact that a lot of people don't like snakes, even if those of us here don't understand why not. And for some reason, a lot of snake-haters find their way to the kingsnake.com Facebook page, where they feel a need to inform us that they don't like our animals. So a story like this one is both welcome and a little surprising.

From WFLA.com in Tampa, Florida:

A five foot boa constrictor was found crawling around a Super Shuttle Airport van at Tampa International Airport on Sunday afternoon.

Lt. Natalie Brown with Tampa Fire Rescue volunteered to catch the snake after hearing the call go out over the Airport Police radio. Lt. Brown went to the cell phone lot at TIA and found the snake outside of the shuttle. She captured the snake with a pillow case borrowed from a co-worker's bed.

"I do not like snakes," said Brown, "I am just glad that the snake is safe. It was dangerous, the snake was in the parking lot and could have been run over."

"It is a beautiful snake," said Brown who believes it could be somebody's pet.

Thanks, Lt. Brown, for putting aside your own aversion to snakes and doing the right thing, and not just hacking the snake to death as so often happens in similar circumstances!

And herpers, why not head over to the Tampa Fire Rescue Facebook page and let them know we appreciate her compassion?

Read more here.

Check out this video "True Dwarf Paraguay Cherry Head Redfoots" submitted by kingsnake.com user stingray.
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Fishermen in Pakistan spotted an animal almost never seen anymore: A leatherback turtle.

From The International Herald Tribune:

On Tuesday, a group of fishermen operating a monofilament gillnet caught a large leatherback turtle at Gwadar near Surbandar village. Since the turtle was stuck inside their net, the fishermen brought the turtle to the beach, after which the World Wildlife Fund – Pakistan (WWF-P) helped them rescue it and release it back into the sea.

According to WWF-P technical adviser on marine fisheries Muhammad Moazzam Khan, leatherback turtles are very rarely found in the coastal areas of Pakistan. They have been spotted four or five times before but they were all dead.

“It is our luck that leatherback turtles exist in our sea as these are signs of the existence of life in natural position,” Khan said.

WWF-P has trained the fishermen, who venture out into the sea, to make sure they don’t harm the wildlife that is not of interest to them, such as turtles and whales. “We are happy that our fishermen now have a sense of the value of marine life.” The young fishermen had no recollection of leatherback turtles, but the older ones remember seeing them.

Read the rest of the story here.

Photo: WWF-Pakistan

ExxonMobil is reporting that more than 200 animals, including 125 snakes, were found dead at the site of the Mayflower oil spill, died while being transported, or were euthanized at the clean-up facility.

From THV11.com:

David Eglinton, with ExxonMobil, said 238 animals were captured and 62 were declared dead on arrival, which means they were either found dead or died in transport. Of the 238 captured, 14 died and 64 were released, bringing the death total to 76. One duck, three turtles, and 125 snakes were euthanized, bringing the final total to 205 wildlife deaths.

Exxon said the Unified Command and Arkansas Game and Fish Commission provided for the euthanasia in circumstances where the animals were critically injured or posed a risk to the safety of clean-up personnel.

Read more here.

This image of a rainbow boa uploaded by kingsnake.com user BoidMorphs, is our herp photo of the day!



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What do you do if you find an iguana bleeding and wounded by the side of the road? You move heaven and earth to save him, of course.

"Big Guy," an endangered Rock Iguana, was discovered on Brac Cayman with severe injuries, lying on the roadside. Thanks to the generosity of Cayman Airways, he was flown free to Grand Cayman for veterinary care then back to his rehab home in Cayman Brac with volunteer Bonnie Scott Edwards of the Cayman Species Management Team.

You can view extensive photos here, and see more details of his story here.

Oh, and there's a happy ending: Big Guy recovered well and was released to the wild today.

Photo: Big Guy waiting for his flight to Grand Cayman.

Check out this video "B & W Argentine Tegus Nap Time in Bed " submitted by kingsnake.com user reptilemomof3.
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Frogs, whose voices were once a prominent part of wildlife sounds in the Carribbean, are barely making a peep this spring. And that silence carries deadly implications for both amphibian survival and human health.

From 9News.com:

Without new conservation measures, there could be a massive die-off of Caribbean frogs within 15 years, warned Adrell Nunez, an amphibian expert with the Santo Domingo Zoo in the Dominican Republic. "There are species that we literally know nothing about" that could be lost, he said.

Researchers such as Lopez and his wife, Ana Longo Berrios, have been fanning out across the Caribbean and returning with new and troubling evidence of the decline. In some places, especially in Haiti, where severe deforestation is added to the mix of problems, extinctions are possible.

It is part of a grim picture overall. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has found that 32 percent of the world's amphibian species are threatened or extinct, including more than 200 alone in both Mexico and Colombia.

"Everywhere we are seeing declines and it's severe," said Jan Zegarra, a biologist based in Puerto Rico for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Frogs may be less charismatic than some other troubled species, but their role in the environment is important. They are consumed by birds and snakes and they in turn are major predators of mosquitoes. Their absence could lead to a rise in malaria and dengue, not to mention discomfort.

There's more -- a lot more -- here.

A man with a deathly terror of frogs was awarded $1.6 million when a new housing project caused run-off to flood his property -- bringing along an amphibious payload.

From the Buffalo News:

Water runoff has turned most of Paul Marinaccio’s 40 acres in Clarence into a wetland.

How it happened angers him.

What came along with all that water terrifies him – frogs.

“I’m petrified of the little creatures,” said Marinaccio, 65.

If that sounds bizarre or far-fetched, consider one of Marinaccio’s childhood memories. He traces his deep-seated fear of frogs to when he was a child in an Italian vineyard, where his parents worked. He remembers wandering to a nearby property for figs and being chased away by a man holding bullfrogs.

Decades later, frogs again have Marinaccio on the run. In the spring and summer months, they show up on his driveway and lawn – keeping him inside his home. Marinaccio sued the Town of Clarence and the developer of a nearby subdivision for diverting runoff onto his land and won a $1.6 million award.

“I beat the government,” he said.

There's a lot of background to this story -- you can read the whole thing here.

The great age of the embryos is unusual because almost all known dinosaur embryos are from the Cretaceous Period. The Cretaceous ended some 125 million years after the bones at the Lufeng site were buried and fossilized.

Led by University of Toronto Mississauga paleontologist Robert Reisz, an international team of scientists from Canada, Taiwan, the People's Republic of China, Australia, and Germany excavated and analyzed over 200 bones from individuals at different stages of embryonic development.

"We are opening a new window into the lives of dinosaurs," says Reisz. "This is the first time we've been able to track the growth of embryonic dinosaurs as they developed. Our findings will have a major impact on our understanding of the biology of these animals."

The bones represent about 20 embryonic individuals of the long-necked sauropodomorph Lufengosaurus, the most common dinosaur in the region during the Early Jurassic period. An adult Lufengosaurus was approximately eight metres long.

The disarticulated bones probably came from several nests containing dinosaurs at various embryonic stages, giving Reisz's team the rare opportunity to study ongoing growth patterns. Dinosaur embryos are more commonly found in single nests or partial nests, which offer only a snapshot of one developmental stage.

To investigate the dinosaurs' development, the team concentrated on the largest embryonic bone, the femur. This bone showed a consistently rapid growth rate, doubling in length from 12 to 24 mm as the dinosaurs grew inside their eggs. Reisz says this very fast growth may indicate that sauropodomorphs like Lufengosaurus had a short incubation period.

Reisz's team found the femurs were being reshaped even as they were in the egg. Examination of the bones' anatomy and internal structure showed that as they contracted and pulled on the hard bone tissue, the dinosaurs' muscles played an active role in changing the shape of the developing femur. "This suggests that dinosaurs, like modern birds, moved around inside their eggs," says Reisz. "It represents the first evidence of such movement in a dinosaur."

The Taiwanese members of the team also discovered organic material inside the embryonic bones. Using precisely targeted infrared spectroscopy, they conducted chemical analyses of the dinosaur bone and found evidence of what Reisz says may be collagen fibres. Collagen is a protein characteristically found in bone.

"The bones of ancient animals are transformed to rock during the fossilization process," says Reisz. "To find remnants of proteins in the embryos is really remarkable, particularly since these specimens are over 100 million years older than other fossils containing similar organic material."

Only about one square metre of the bonebed has been excavated to date, but this small area also yielded pieces of eggshell, the oldest known for any terrestrial vertebrate. Reisz says this is the first time that even fragments of such delicate dinosaur eggshells, less than 100 microns thick, have been found in good condition.

"A find such as the Lufeng bonebed is extraordinarily rare in the fossil record, and is valuable for both its great age and the opportunity it offers to study dinosaur embryology," says Reisz. "It greatly enhances our knowledge of how these remarkable animals from the beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs grew."

Photo: A flesh reconstruction of embryonic dinosaur inside egg. Artwork by D. Mazierski.

Seems unborn lizards are not helpless when predators threaten.

From ScienceNOW:

Talk about hatching an escape plan. Unborn lizards can erupt from their eggs days early if vibrations hint at a threat from a hungry predator, new research shows. The premature hatchlings literally "hit the ground running—they hatch and launch into a sprint at the same time," says behavioral ecologist J. Sean Doody, who is now at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

[...]

That curtain began to lift a bit a few years ago, when Doody and student Philip Paull of Monash University in Australia began studying a population of delicate skinks (Lampropholis delicata) in a park near Sydney. There, the common lizards laid white, leathery eggs the size of aspirin capsules in rock crevices. The eggs generally incubate for 4 to 8 weeks before hatching, but Doody got a surprise in 2010, when he and Paull were plucking eggs from the crevices to make measurements. "They started hatching in our hands, at just a touch—it shocked us," Doody recalls. "It turned into a real mess, they were just hatching everywhere."

Soon, Doody launched a more systematic study of the phenomenon. In two lab experiments, the researchers compared the hatching dates for skink eggs exposed to vibrations with those of eggs that weren't shaken. And in three field experiments, they poked and prodded eggs with a small stick, or squeezed them gently with their fingers to measure how sensitive the eggs were to the kinds of disturbances a predator, such as a snake, might cause. They also measured how far the premature hatchlings could dash.

Together, the experiments offer "compelling evidence" that embryonic skinks can detect and respond to predator-like signals, the authors write in the March 2013 issue of Copeia. The vibrated laboratory eggs, for instance, hatched an average of 3.4 days earlier than the unshaken controls. And in the field, the hatching of disturbed eggs was "explosive," they note; the newborns often broke out of the egg and then sprinted more than one-half meter to nearby cover in just a few seconds. "It's amazing," Doody says. "It can be hard to see because it happens so quick."

Read more here.

It started in still-frigid New England, hit half a dozen aquariums on the way, and ended up on the beaches of Jacksonville, Florida, carrying 52 cold-stunned sea turtles back to warmer climes after a period of rehabilitation at each aquarium.

It was dubbed the Great Sea Turtle Trek. From the National Aquarium's WATERblog:

The #SeaTurtleTrek release was a great success!

After leaving Baltimore last night and driving through the night, our team and staff from New England Aquarium made it to the beach in Florida with 52 endangered sea turtles.

Upon their arrival in Jacksonville, health samples were taken from each turtle.

Soon, it was time for the big beach release! The turtles were released by group in the following order: South Carolina Aquarium, Virginia Aquarium, Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, National Marine Life Center, University of New England, National Aquarium and finally, New England Aquarium!

Read the whole saga in reverse chronological order here!

Photo: Chet, a Kemp’s ridley turtle at the National Aquarium, getting ready for his road trip.

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