The frog says, "Ribbit ribbit." Anyway, that's what I learned from my old See n' Say. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fisher-Price was not holding that toy to the highest standards of scientific nuance. See, it turns out that frogs "talk" to one another in other ways, as well. In particular, they vibrate. Not vocal chords. But their whole bodies.

In this video interview with Michael Caldwell, frog researcher at the Smithsonian Institute for Tropical Research in Panama, environmental journalist Gaia Vince introduces the quieter side of frog communication, where amphibians can say a lot without saying a word.

Khadka revealed 146 gharials raised at the breeding center in Chitwan National Park were released in Narayani and Rapti rivers alone. But a recent count found just 25 of them in these rivers. “The numbers have declined in other rivers as well,” Khadka said releasing 10 six-year-olds, including six female, in Rapti in Chitwan Wednesday.

“It takes a lot of effort and money to raise gharials. But they are long dead when we look for them in rivers,´ he stated. Experts, however, maintain that the numbers are down also because the chances of gharials raised in controlled conditions surviving in big rivers are low.

“They are raised with utmost care in parks and their chance of surviving in the natural environment is always low,” claimed Chief Conservation Officer of Chitwan National Park Narendra Man Babu Pradhan.

The national tri-state Chambal sanctuary management coordination committee has been formed to look into the conservation issues. The first meeting of the committee has took some serious decisions like developing a tri-state management plan for gharial in consultation with experts, local communities, state forest department and others.

According to a press release by the conservator of forests, Wildlife and Nature Conservation Circle, fishermen captured the 2.3 feet long reptile at Koya under Kumarkhali upazila.

Mistaking the one and a half-year-old gharial for a young crocodile, they sold it to another fisherman for Tk 2,000 which was rescued by police and forest department staff.

Hossain Mohammad Nishat, divisional forest officer of Social Forestation Department informed Dr Tapan Kumar Dey, conservator of forests at the Wildlife and Nature Conservation Circle who brought the injured gharial to Crocodile Breeding Centre at Bhawal National Garden. After providing first aid the reptile was released in a pond.

By noon the next day, the wind had died down, but the Croc Bank was strewn with piles of debris. On the beach, enormous trunks of trees from far off shores lay washed up like beached walruses. The Kovalam bridge was under a rushing torrent of water, and the road to Kelambakkam had disappeared. Apart from the thin strip of road, the predecessor of the East Coast Road, a sheet of water covered everything. The Croc Bank was marooned for three days. Had high tide coincided with the cyclone hitting the coast, Madras would have been devastated.

The crocs seemed bewildered by the sound and light show that had changed the profile of their enclosures. But, the worst was over and now it was just a matter of cleaning up. The following night, after a long day of back-breaking work, a deeply-asleep Rom was woken up by the incessant barking of Balu, the watch dog.

A large male gharial had escaped and was pushing its way through the casuarina grove to the sea. Rom picked up a fallen branch and fenced with the 13 foot crocodile to keep it at bay.

It is often impossible to know exactly which snake species was responsible for a bite; identification is particularly difficult in developing countries as the majority of snake-bites are inflicted at night in rural communities that do not have electricity or artificial lighting.
Then the victim, who often lives in an impoverished remote place, has to find suitable medical treatment before the toxic venom leads to permanent disfigurement or death.
Late last year, an international team of researchers from Costa Rica, Australia, Brazil and the UK published an academic paper calling for a more integrated approach to dealing with snake-bites.

The BBC documentary One Million Snakebites details how one expert in India, Romulus Whitaker, is trying to engage and educate local communities about the snakes living around them.

By helping local communities to understand and respect the snakes they share their land with, passionate herpetologist Whitaker hopes that snakes such as the threatened king cobra will no longer be persecuted.

Whitaker has worked with the Irula tribe, who have a long tradition of snake catching, to create a cooperative that now supplies snake venom to laboratories across the country to create lifesaving antivenom, the only effective treatment for snake-bites.

Jennie Erin Smith's "Stolen World: A Tale Of Reptile, Smugglers, and Skulduggery" is a fascinating read that I found both hard to put down, and hard to pick back up again when I did. I can't put it down because it reads like a Ludlum novel, but I am afraid to pick it back up again because many of the stories she relates make me cringe.

Back in the days before the internet, before captive breeding, before the word "herpetoculture" existed, and before most of the laws and regulations about reptiles and amphibians were even proposals, there were the snake men. Reptile cowboys who strapped on the boots, jumped in the swamp and wrestled the python into a bag, or a cobra, or a krait, or a mamba.

Those men would fly around the world, collect the animals, box them up, put them on a plane, and the animals they acquired would show up at the world's biggest zoos, or in the hands of the few private collectors of the time. It was a loose group of people who maintained their own "internet" based on phone calls, letters, and the occasional mailed price list. There were no reptile expos, no magazines, no clubs, and few organizations open to non-academics.

Decimated by illegal hunting for both food and the pet trade along with habitat loss, many turtle species will go extinct in the next decade unless drastic conservation measures are taken, according to the report, which was released at a regional workshop hosted by Wildlife Reserves Singapore and WCS. Seventeen of the 25 species are found in Asia, three are from South America, three from Africa, one from Australia, and one from Central America and Mexico

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"Turtles are being unsustainably hunted throughout Asia," said co-author Brian D. Horne of the Wildlife Conservation Society. "Every tortoise and turtle species in Asia is being impacted in some manner by the international trade in turtles and turtle products. In just one market in Dhaka, Bangladesh we saw close to 100,000 turtles being butchered for consumption during a religious holiday, and we know of at least three other such markets within the city."
Liz Bennett, Vice President of WCS Species Program, said: "Turtles are wonderfully adapted to defend themselves against predators by hiding in their shells, but this defense mechanism doesn't work against organized, large-scale human hunting efforts. The fact is that turtles are being vacuumed up from every nook and cranny in Asia and beyond."

The team from University College London (UCL) and Stony Brook University, New York, said the frog would have had a body length of about 40cm (16 inches), and was among the largest of its kind to be found.

"This frog, a relative of today's horned toads, would have been the size of a slightly squashed beach-ball, with short legs and a big mouth," explained co-author Susan Evans, from UCL's Department of Cell and Developmental Biology.

"If it shared the aggressive temperament and 'sit-and-wait' ambush tactics of [present-day] horned toads, it would have been a formidable predator on small animals.

"Its diet would most likely have consisted of insects and small vertebrates like lizards, but it's not impossible that Beelzebufo might even have munched on hatchling or juvenile dinosaurs."

What would the National Reptile Breeders' Expo look like? I struggled hard to imagine what kind of people would buy and sell reptiles. May be ‘weird people' — pot-smoking, long-haired, and elaborately-tattooed dudes who drove Harley Davidsons. Rom, who had been to one several years ago, shook his head: “You've never seen anything like it.” And, he was right!

On an August Saturday balmy morning in 2005, as we walked past the long queue, waiting to get inside the convention centre in Daytona, Florida, I was amazed that ‘straight people' outnumbered the freaks. There were elderly people, young couples, teenagers, little kids. You'd think they were going to the supermarket!

By the end of the weekend, thanks to an enthusiastic group of associates, we had raised close to $ 25,000 for gharial conservation from the sale of t-shirts, books, items donated by individuals, zoos and organisations. The reptile fanciers' commitment for the gharial in far-off India was touching. I wondered if we could raise this kind of money for reptile conservation (do I hear an “ugh”?) here, in middle-class India. Sadly, not a chance.

At a science conference in Washington Saturday, marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia aired early results of her December submarine dives around the BP spill site. She went to places she had visited in the summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then. It wasn't.

"There's some sort of a bottleneck we have yet to identify for why this stuff doesn't seem to be degrading," Joye told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington. Her research and those of her colleagues contrasts with other studies that show a more optimistic outlook about the health of the gulf, saying microbes did great work munching the oil.

"Magic microbes consumed maybe 10 percent of the total discharge, the rest of it we don't know," Joye said, later adding: "there's a lot of it out there."

Eddie Sigai, nicknamed 'Crocky Balboa' by his friends, punched and gouged the saltwater croc after the powerful animal grabbed hold of his hand.

The 37-year-old, from Weipa, Queensland, was swimming with his daughters Jennifer, 17, and Monica, 12, at a creek last week when the crocodile caught hold of his left hand and dragged him underwater.

"We went and had a good look around the perimeter the following day and I really don't know how it got in," he said.

"Maybe it washed under somewhere in a fence line, but it's too hard to say whether it got in or whether it was put in.

"But I find it hard to believe it did manage to get in by itself."

NT Police said they were told late this morning that the boy was playing with his brothers in a creek at Milingimbi in Arnhem Land when he was apparently seized by a crocodile.

Members of the Milingimbi community began searching the creek and surrounding area for the boy, but there had been no sign of him.

Members of the NT police territory response section were flying to the community from Darwin this afternoon to lead the search for the boy, police said in a statement.

Milingimbi is part of the Crocodile Island group off the coast of Arnhem Land, about 440km east of Darwin.

Chief Minister Paul Henderson is warning people not to play in swollen waterways because flooding has made it easy for saltwater crocodiles to move around.

"We're urging everybody to keep out of those waterways, keep out of those lagoons, keep out of those steams because crocodiles are on the move," he said.

Bob Flemming from the Billabong Sanctuary says his 12 breeding crocs would not surface for several days after the enormous category five cyclone crossed the coast at Mission Beach more than a week ago.

"They were traumatised for a couple of days," Mr Flemming told AAP.


"They stayed underwater for some time and didn't even surface for food."
But he said the crocs, some more than four metres long, have since recovered and are back to feeding again.

His wildlife park lost power but back-up generators kept incubators containing more than 300 crocodile eggs going

The unusually heavy falls in the Burke shire, in Queensland's northwest, also brought a nasty surprise for locals in the form of 5m crocodiles.

"Because the floods bring the dead wildlife, the crocs follow them," said Jake Davis, manager of the Burketown Caravan Park.

"There's a big area of water, six or seven kilometres wide, and the crocs are just going where they like."

“Right now, the numbers aren’t all that different,” said park biologist Skip Snow. “We’re finding them in the same places we’ve been finding them.”

While scientists can only estimate the toll the Big Chill took on the army of exotic reptiles, fish and plants in the wilds of South Florida, field observations over the last year suggest nature knocked them down but not out. Some already are speeding down the road to recovery.

David Hallac, the park’s biological resources chief, said he expected a sharp decline in captured snakes. But last year’s total of 322 fell only about 10 percent from 2009.

Once about as common as coconuts, green iguana have grown scarce all the way down to the Keys. At previously infested Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park on Key Biscayne, the largest lizards — six-footers that might give a pit bull pause — have vanished.
But Elizabeth Golden, the park’s biologist, said she’s seeing small greens pop up. There also are plenty of black spiny tail iguanas in all sizes, another species that seems to have weathered the chill, she said, possibly protected by its underground burrows.

Let's face it. Snakes are not most people's favorite animals. They slink and slither without making much noise, have a forked tongue with unblinking eyes, and fangs that bite or coils that wrap. Some snakes are so dangerous that people have died from the encounter.

According to a 2010 report by the World Health Organization, at least 20,000 people are killed by poisonous snakebites every year. Not surprisingly, snakes are commonly feared, disliked, and even hated.

And yet, snakes are some of my favorite animals, and I have been bitten more than my fair share. When I tell the stories of how I've been bitten, I always acknowledge that it was my fault, and that the snakes were acting solely out of instinct and self-preservation.

However, as venom continues to evolve, this creates areas Fry calls "hot spots," where venoms have evolved radically and could result in a decrease in the ability for antivenom to do its job. However, as dangerous as the situation can be, there is also opportunity.

These "hot spots" are where novel toxins will appear within venom, which can then be studied and analyzed for future use in drug design and development.

"Venoms have had a huge role in drug design and development such as Captropril, a high blood pressure medication developed from the study of the venom of Bothrops jararaca, [which] kill more people than any other in the region," said Fry.

Therefore, not only has antivenom saved countless people from pain, limb loss, and even death, but the study of venom has also helped develop various products that increase human health.

Not too bad for an animal long thought to symbolize evil.

The scientists' high-resolution 3D images suggest the legs in this particular species, Eupodophis descouensi, grew more slowly, or for a shorter period of time.

It is a conclusion made possible only after seeing all the bones obscured inside the limestone, and determining that although the creature possessed ankle bones, it actually had neither foot nor toe bones.

"This study reveals the degree of regression of the legs," said Dr Alexandra Houssaye from the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle (MNHN) in Paris, France.

[....]

Two theories compete. One points to a land origin in which lizards started to burrow, and as they adapted to their subterranean existence, their legs were reduced and lost - first the fore-limbs and then the hind-limbs.

The second theory considers the origin to be in water, from marine reptiles.

This makes the few known bipedal snakes in the fossil record hugely significant, because they could hold the clues that settle this particular debate.

Denver Zoo staff assisted a breeding project at the Huachipa Zoo in Lima, Peru, in December and met with experts from around the world on strategies to preserve the giant frogs in the lake that straddles the border between Peru and Bolivia at 12,500 feet.

The Lake Titicaca frog is the Denver Zoo's top conservation project. Since 2007, the zoo has spent about $100,000 and advised local conservationists in the effort.

Although the five hatchlings did not survive, their births were considered a major step forward.

The question is, is there enough of a problem here that prompted this?

Apparently there is, in fact last year a man who runs a center to help exotic animals. Said this legislation needed to go through specifically about alligators he says he sees.

Senator Richard Alloway is expected to introduce a new bill that Jesse Rothacker says is long overdue. In Pennsylvania it's legal to buy pet alligators that start out tiny and end up huge.

The bill would amend Title 30 and make it illegal to buy or sell American alligators or venomous snakes.

Dr. Darryl Heard said Krakatoa was a young lizard when he died, which could have put him at risk for viral infections, as young animals have yet to develop immunity against the diseases. Heard is the primary veterinarian for the St. Augustine Alligator Farm and the zoological medicine service chief at the Department of Small Animal Clinical Science at the University of Florida.

Krakatoa had minor changes in his spinal cord, which could have been on-going damage from a viral disease, Heard said.

Other signs of neurological damage included some spinal cord lesions and also a weakness in the lizard's legs, leading Krakatoa to position his legs awkwardly, Heard said.

Brueggen said the results from Krakatoa's necropsy are frustrating, mostly because it doesn't allow the doctors or specialist to focus on how to prevent a certain disease or virus from affecting Tambora.

Heard and Brueggen both said Tambora will be vaccinated for equine encephalitis and West Nile virus to prevent either disease from causing the lizard harm.

Krakatoa tested negative for both viruses, but both the doctor and Brueggen said it was a preventive measure.

The report said the rate of dead, disabled and diseased sea turtles discovered in the months following the massive April 20 spill was four to six times above average. The analysis, by the National Wildlife Federation, the Sea Turtle Conservancy and the Florida Wildlife Federation, was conservative and only took into account turtles found on shore, not those rescued or recovered at sea.

Researchers with the federal government said it would take years to determine the full impact of the spill on sea turtles. Necropsies have been done on more than half of 600 turtle carcasses, and while some may have died from oil, most of the turtles drowned in fishing gear, said Monica Allen, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association spokeswoman.

Unseasonably cold temperatures last winter were also detrimental to sea turtles, most of which are considered endangered, said Gary Appelson, policy coordinator for the Sea Turtle Conservancy. "Sea turtles have had a tough year,'' Appelson said.

The study follows on the work co-author David H. Rakison of Carnegie Mellon University did with spiders and infants as well as research Susan Mineka of Northwestern University did with monkeys, which when raised in a lab show no fear snakes. When Mineka attempted to instill a fear of rabbits, flowers, and snakes in the monkeys they much more readily learned to fear the snakes.

Arne Ohman at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden showed that for humans, once a fear of snakes or spiders is established, when a photo of a snake or spider is shown the fear response will last longer than a fear response learned to something less immediately threatening such as a mushroom. The research suggests an evolutionary tendency for humans to have the ability to quickly learn to fear these creepy crawlies and then respond metabolically longer in that state of fear during an encounter.

“Ideally, we’d like to have something that will either minimize or eliminate cancer cell growth in the body,” said Mackessy.

They are focusing on three different types of cancer: melanoma, colon and breast cancer.

“One of the reasons for looking at those three is that they’re very, very common in humans here in the United States. It’s a critical health concern,” said Mackessy.

Smith said both tracts are waterfront property that have unique wetlands habitats.

"Both tracts need to be conserved, but one in particular, the one that we call the Heron Bay tract, happens to be the only stronghold of the last remnant habitat for the diamondback terrapin, which is a big deal," Smith said.

"There's a lot of interest in that habitat and some universities have been studying that area for years, and that's basically the last remaining habitat in the state of Alabama for the diamondback terrapin, so we're really excited that we’re getting this award to purchase that property."

Smith said the state Forever Wild program will provide $379,500 in matching funds to buy the property.

The diamondback terrapin is the only turtle in North America that spends its life in brackish water. About 40 to 60 of the turtles are believed to live in south Mobile County, according to a 2008 Press-Register story. The reptile is listed as a species of 'highest conservation concern' by the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.

Reptile & Amphibian Ecology International (RAEI), a nonprofit conservation ecology organization, has announced an innovative program that puts used cameras and other equipment to work for promoting the science and art of biodiversity. In this program, RAEI accepts donations of all kinds of gear crucial to conservation ecology, from camera bodies and lenses to GPS units and even "snake hooks". The donated equipment is used by biologists and photographers in the field to document the diversity of life. Some of the gear is used by RAEI staff, but many of the recipients of the donated items are residents of impoverished regions in Ecuador, Mexico, and Cameroon.

"Biologists and guides working in poor nations often don't have the resources they need to work effectively", said Dr. Paul S. Hamilton, Executive Director of RAEI. This program will put cameras and other crucial tools in the hands of those that can use them best, and need them the most. The program works like this: residents of targeted study areas are chosen for their knowledge of ecosystems and abilities to conduct field work. They are then given basic gear like cameras, GPS units, snake hooks, and data sheets, along with training and a research manual. They are also taught the technical skills needed to take photos and field data, and given instructions on how to get their photos and data to biologists who can use them.

U.S. Rep. Tom Rooney (FL-16) today introduced legislation to protect the Everglades and surrounding communities from dangerous, imported snakes like African rock pythons and boa constrictors. Rooney’s bill would restrict the importation of specific breeds of snakes, which continue to cause extensive damage to the Everglades, into the United States.

[....]

Rooney’s bill would add the following species of snakes to the “Lacey Act,” effectively banning them from importation into the United States: Burmese python, northern African python, southern African python, reticulated python, green anaconda, yellow anaconda, Beni or Bolivian python, DeSchauensee’s anaconda, and boa constrictor.

The mishap has caused bigger problems for the crocodile, which has not eaten or had a bowel movement in four weeks and appears depressed and in pain.

"The animal is not feeling well," said Alexandra. "His behavior has changed, he moves very little and swims much less than he used to."

Doctors tried to whet the crocodile's appetite this week by feeding him live quail rather than the pork or beef he usually gets once a week. The quail were injected with vitamins and a laxative, but while Gena smothered one bird, he didn't eat it.

He also won't play with three fellow African crocodiles, despite being the leader in the group. Crocodiles can live up to 100 years.

Maybe I wasn't careful with it but, I think that zoo managers should think about human mistakes.

Last year its owners gave up and walked away, allowing the house to fall into foreclosure - deciding that was a better option than living with the serpents slithering around in the ceilings and walls.

It was taken over by the lender, Chase Bank. Now Realty Quest associate broker Todd Davis is faced with the daunting task of trying to sell it.

That task would be hard enough with the current market, but once the slithery occupants are factored in, you have to feel a pang of sympathy for the optimistic Mr Davis.

Even his decision to slash the price from the estimated value of $175,000 to $109,000 may not be enough.

[....]

Even more horrible for those living there. Previous owners describe the terror of trying to sleep at night, never knowing when your bed could be invaded, in a YouTube video from as far back as 2006.

"Recently, two squirrel species were discovered to anoint their bodies with rattlesnake scent as a means of concealing their odour from these chemosensory predators," begins the study in the current Journal of Evolutionary Biology. It was written by a team led by Barbara Clucas of the University of Washington in Seattle.

The two ground squirrel species chew up shed snake skins and lick their fur to acquire the scent of their predators.

In the study, Clucas and colleagues track back the origins of protective snake scents on squirrels, first by checking the popularity of such chemical disguises among 11 squirrel species, including two kinds of chipmunk. In field trials, the team checked the squirrels fondness for rattlesnake, weasel (another predator) and deer (a non-predator included as a test) stinks. The team also tested the fondness of 15 wild North Pacific rattlesnakes for mice burrows that did and didn't smell of their kind.

Biologists say the entire population of anacondas in one of the jewels of the Amazon basin will be wiped out within three years because of the deadly effect on the snakes of the insect repellant used by most backpackers to help protect against malaria.

The number of tourists going on tours of the pampas that snake there way through jungle and grasslands 250 miles north of La Paz has exploded from a few hundred to nearly 12,000 a year in the past decade.

Travellers are enticed by the promise of getting up close and personal with the world's largest snake - sometimes picking them up and hlding them - as well as swimming with river dolphins, catching pirhanas, and spotting monkeys, sloths and an array of other flora and fauna.

[....]

He added: "A study has been carried out by other biologists which shows the ecosystem will collapse in three years if things continue as they are."

The fear is that insects, fish and smaller amphibians would be wiped out within the river basin, resulting in the collapse of the entire food chain.

"For a long time we thought it was a little dinosaur jaw and that led us down the wrong path," she said.

"We kept coming back saying, ‘What is this thing?' We thought it might be a fish, a reptile -- anything that had teeth at that time."

Arbour made a breakthrough when she compared the bone against a known Chinese species of pterosaur, a flying reptile that lived during the Cretaceous period that often grew to the size of a small airplane.

"The teeth of our fossil were small and set close together," Arbour said. "They reminded me of piranha teeth, designed for pecking away at meat."

Scientists performed only a cursory examination of the fossils—enough to determine that they belonged to an ancient crocodile—before the slabs were transferred to two museums in Italy.

The fossils sat unstudied until 2009, when scientists decided to examine them again in more detail.

Analysis of the embedded bones revealed a skull and a few vertebrae that belonged to a previously unknown species of 165-million-year-old prehistoric reptile now named Neptunidraco ammoniticus.

"It was incredible", said Dr. Moore. "We went in looking for one missing species and found a treasure trove of others. That, to me, represents a welcome dose of resilience and hope for the people and wildlife of Haiti."

With large-scale deforestation leaving the country less than two-percent of its original forest cover and degrading most of the fresh water ecosystems Haitians depend on, the cloud forests of the southwest mountains stand as two of the last remaining pockets of environmental health and natural wealth in Haiti. In fact, the Massif de la Hotte has been highlighted by the Alliance for Zero Extinction (AZE) as the third-highest site-level conservation priority in the world, with 15 endemic amphibian species found there and nowhere else.

"A common assumption about Haiti is that there is nothing left to save", said Moore, who also documents his findings as a photographer with the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP). "That is not entirely true. There are biologically rich pockets intact, despite tremendous environmental pressures. Haiti now has the opportunity to design their reconstruction plans around these pockets, and grow them, so they can more effectively act as natural buffers to climate change and natural disasters."