It's not every veterinarian who can say he's performed surgery on a rattlesnake. Dr. Scott MacLachlan in Poultney, VT, can, however.

From Vermont NPR's Ted Levin:

During the spring of 2011, the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife in collaboration with the Orianne Society and The Nature Conservancy began a two-year study of the summer range of the timber rattlesnake in western Rutland County.

To that end, transmitters were implanted in the body cavity of twenty-two adult snakes. From late spring through early autumn, the snakes were radio tracked across rough terrain west of Otter Creek. Now that that phase of the project has ended, and Dr. MacLachlan, who had inserted the transmitters, is removing them, as well as taking skin and blood samples from each rattlesnake to check for pathogens.

The day I observed the procedure, the operating room was well lit , with a sink in one corner flanked on both sides by a pink linoleum countertop. The floor was a soft white and textured like the back of a snake. There were cupboards, tanks, computers, glass-fronted cabinets filled with a diversity of surgical instruments, and an aluminum operating table situated beneath a hose descending from the ceiling. The hose, called a gas scavenger, delivers both anesthesia to put the snake to sleep and oxygen to bring it back. There’s a heating pad covered by a blue terry-cloth towel on the operating table to keep the snakes warm.

Read more here; watch video here.

Want to do something about declining amphibian populations? It's as easy as 1-2-3.

Karen Lips is an amphibian ecologist and tropical biologist. She recently wrote a Live Science op-ed about her experience tracking frog populations in Panama, and those of other scientists doing the same thing around the world, showing devastating declines in frog numbers.

She wrote:

What was most concerning was that even widespread species we thought were relatively stable were declining. This matches with the many stories I hear from concerned citizens who say that they don't see or hear as many frogs in their backyards as they used to. Because those scientists spent the time to count amphibians, they were they able to detect the slow loss in those populations.

We need more studies like these that can go beyond the distribution of threats and can show us how amphibian populations respond to disease so that we can design appropriate conservation and management actions to protect those species.

For example, if population declines are slow and steady, we might have time to experiment with different management practices; but if populations are declining quickly, we might need to establish captive assurance colonies or take tissues for cryopreservation to protect evolutionary lineages.

Likewise, we need to know which age class, sex or subpopulation might be the limiting step in population recovery. If the problem is in the tadpole stage and none survive to become adults, then we might want to design a reintroduction program that adds more adults to the system. If adults are very rare, we might do better to add hundreds of eggs, tadpoles or juveniles to jumpstart recovery.

Numbers are also critical, she said, because the "IUCN Redlist makes decisions on the level of species endangerment based on the number of individuals and the number of populations, and how quickly those numbers are going up or down. The official listing of species is the first step in prioritizing research and conservation efforts to address those threats, and is used to dedicate funding and other resources."

What can you do as an individual? Contribute data to online databases like http://www.inaturalist.org, or get involved in other citizen scientist projects, she advised.

"Whether the frogs are increasing or decreasing," Lips wrote, "we need to know: Just how many frogs are there?"

Read the full story here.

Photo: Conservation International-Colombia/Marco Rada

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A fossil stored unnoticed in a museum may hold the secret to a question that's plagued scientists for decades: How did the turtle get his shell?

From Boston.com:

It’s a question so obvious a schoolchild can ask it, but for more than a century, consensus has eluded the paleontologists and evolutionary biologists who study the reptiles and their bony carapaces. Now, a group of scientists at Yale University and the Smithsonian Institution argue that a reptile fossil that’s been gathering dust in museum collections is actually a turtle ancestor, and that its reduced number of ribs, distribution of muscles, and T-shaped ribs could help settle the question once and for all.

In a new paper published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, they unveil the argument that a 260 million-year-old creature called Eunotosaurus africanus was a turtle ancestor, hoping to help resolve a debate that has split the scientific community for decades.

Read all about it here.

Photo: Tyler Lyson/Boston.com

We actually found some good news about amphibians. No, really.

From the Vancouver, Canada, Globe and Mail:

Scientists at the Vancouver Aquarium have sprung into action, as part of an effort to prevent an endangered frog population from becoming extinct in eastern British Columbia.

The Rocky Mountain population of northern leopard frogs plummeted by the millions in the 1970s, and only two populations are now known to exist near Creston, in B.C.’s West Kootenay region.

The aquarium announced Thursday its scientists have, for the first time in Canada, bred the species in an aquarium setting and created an assurance — or backup — population.

Dennis Thoney, the aquarium’s director of animal operations, said officials plan to release about 2,000 tadpoles Monday in the Columbia Marshes near the east Kootenay city of Cranbrook, while maintaining a population at the aquarium.

Read more here. And try to smile.

Photo: Adult Northern leopard frogs. (Vancouver Aquarium)

After treatment at Marathon's Turtle Hospital for digestive tract impaction, a loggerhead sea turtle was returned to the ocean off of the Florida Keys on Friday.

From Nature World News:

The roughly 6-pound, foot-long animal nicknamed “Charley” was first located by a fisherman who spotted it floating in a patch of weeds 22 miles off of the Middle Keys.

Upon examination veterinarians discovered that Charley had ingested a small piece of plastic, causing its digestive system to become impacted.

Richie Maroetti, Turtle Hospital founder and director, said in a statement that turtles sometimes confuse plastic with one of their favorite food sources: jellyfish.

"It plugged up her bowel and she started to float," Moretti said. "We gave her some antibiotics and gave her a little Metamucil and she's just much better.”

Ultimately, however, Charley’s struggle is symptomatic of a much larger problem, Moretti warns.

"We just gotta keep plastic out of our ocean," he said.

Read the rest of the story here.

Photo : Florida Keys & Key West News Flash

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Supermodel Cara Delevingne was quite the herp-loving little girl, reports heatworld.com.

Cara then:



Cara now:



Whether you grow up to strut the runway, crack genetic codes, or rule the world, just keep on herpin', little girls!

In a nice change of pace from news of species and habitat loss worldwide, meet the ten newly identified species scientists have selected as the best and most interesting of last year -- including a new snake and a new frog.

From Science Daily:

An amazing glow-in-the-dark cockroach, a harp-shaped carnivorous sponge and the smallest vertebrate on Earth are just three of the newly discovered top 10 species selected by the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University. A global committee of taxonomists -- scientists responsible for species exploration and classification -- announced its list of top 10 species from 2012 today, May 23.

Meet the world's newest snake:

No to the Mine! Snake
Sibon noalamina
Country: Panama

Snail-eating snake: A beautiful new species of snail-eating snake has been discovered in the highland rainforests of western Panama. The snake is nocturnal and hunts soft-bodied prey including earthworms and amphibian eggs, in addition to snails and slugs. This harmless snake defends itself by mimicking the alternating dark and light rings of venomous coral snakes. The species is found in the Serranía de Tabasará mountain range where ore mining is degrading and diminishing its habitat. The species name is derived from the Spanish phrase "No a la mina" or "No to the mine."

Next, the world's smallest and newest frog:

World's Smallest Vertebrate
Paedophryne amanuensis
Country: New Guinea

Tiny frog: Living vertebrates -- animals that have a backbone or spinal column -- range in size from this tiny new species of frog, as small as 7 millimeters, to the blue whale, measuring 25.8 meters. The new frog was discovered near Amau village in Papua, New Guinea. It captures the title of 'smallest living vertebrate' from a tiny Southeast Asian cyprinid fish that claimed the record in 2006. The adult frog size, determined by averaging the lengths of both males and females, is only 7.7 millimeters. With few exceptions, this and other ultra-small frogs are associated with moist leaf litter in tropical wet forests -- suggesting a unique ecological guild that could not exist under drier circumstances.

Read the rest of the top new species here.

A just-published map of the world's most endangered species of mammals and amphibians shows that very little of the habitat critical to these species' survival is being protected.

From the BBC:

Amphibians are suffering a "terrifying" rate of extinction say the researchers, making them the most threatened vertebrates in the world. The Mexican salamander or axolotl is being threatened by expanding cities, pollution and invasive fish species which eat their young.

While many of the survival issues facing species highlighted on the map are extremely challenging, sometimes small changes can make a big difference.

(Zoological Society of London Director of Conservation Jonathan) Baillie highlights the example of a small worm like amphibian from Kenya called the Sagalla caecilian.

"It was just losing its habitat because the native trees were taken, so we've started a programme of replanting the native trees and 6,000 have been replanted and the areas where they have their strongholds are now being protected."

"That kind of simple action can ensure that those species can be there hopefully for hundred of years to come."

Read the rest here.

Photo: Mexican salamander/ZSL

Scientists studying a fossil fond in Iraq in the 1950s were surprised to find it was that of a marine reptile dating back 66 million years, long after the time this group of animals was thought to have become extinct.

From Science Live:

Ichythyosaurs were dolphin-shaped swimming reptiles that gave birth to live young. They lived in the oceans at the same time dinosaurs were tromping around on land. Previously, researchers thought only one group of ichthyosaurs, called ophthalmosaurids, made it out of the Jurassic into the Cretaceous. The newly named fossil, dubbed Malawania anachronus, is a Cretaceous survivor that does not belong to the ophthalmosaurids, however. That means a "ghost lineage" of ichthyosaurs survived alongside the ophthalmosaurids, changing very little over millions of years.

The fossil in question was first found in the 1950s by British petroleum geologists, who noticed the slab being used as a stepping stone on a mule track in Iraq. The geologists rescued the fossil and took it to the United Kingdom, where it stayed unstudied until the 1970s. Because researchers didn't know where in the rock record the fossil had come from, they struggled to determine its age. (Layers of earth build up over time, meaning, in a general sense, the oldest layers will be on the bottom and the more recent layers more toward the surface.)

Read the full story here.

Illustrations: Robert Nicholls (www.paleocreations.com); coloring by C. M. Kosemen (www.cmkosemen.com).

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Scientists believe the black markings of the West African Gaboon viper may hold the secret to creating materials with a powerful ability to absorb light.

From The Age:

The West African Gaboon viper, one of the largest in Africa and a master of camouflage, has dark spots in the geometrical pattern of its skin that are deep, velvety black and reflect very little light.

Interwoven with white- and brown-coloured scales that are very reflective, this creates a high contrast that renders the snake difficult to spot on the richly-patterned rainforest floor.

A team of German scientists set out to find the secret behind the black spots' ultra darkness, and found the scale surface was made up of tightly-packed, leaf-like microstructures covered in turn with nanometre-sized ridges.
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One nanometre is equivalent to a billionth of a metre.

Writing in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, the team theorised that the microstructures and nanostructures, which protrude at slightly different angles, scatter and trap incoming light.

"The structure based velvet black effect could also be potentially transferred to other materials," the scientists wrote.

The complete article is here.

Chytrid fungus infections are wiping out amphibians all over the world. Now, a new study may have pinpointed the origin of the disease.

From National Geographic:

“It did a really huge number on an entire genus of frogs in Central America,” said Marm Kilpatrick, a disease ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). The fungus probably caused several species of this harlequin frog (Atelopus) to go extinct, he added.

Chytrid is also largely responsible for endangering California’s mountain yellow-legged frog (Rana muscosa).

"It's the single biggest threat to vertebrate diversity in the world," Kilpatrick said.

The fungus, which seems to attack only amphibians, causes a thickening of the infected amphibian’s skin, preventing the animal from breathing properly and interfering with its electrolyte balance. The infection can eventually lead to cardiac arrest, although some frog species are better able to cope with it than others.

A new study delving into how this fungus spreads has now linked chytrid outbreaks in California—one of the more recent areas experiencing huge amphibian die-offs—to the spread of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis).

And the study’s implications could extend far beyond California, providing scientists with a potential road map showing how a devastating infection continues to spread around the world.

Read more here.

Photograph by Joel Sartore, National Geographic