Bryna Daykin, crew leader, is on an airboat during an American crocodile capture survey. (Photo by UF/IFAS Croc Docs)
Today is International Women in Science Day and what better way to celebrate than to highlight some of the "Croc Docs" who track and research the alligators and even burmese pythons in the Everglades. The "Croc Docs" is a program through University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) carry out overnight conservation research projects that checks data on alligator populations as well as tracking invasive species.
For Pupo, a South Florida native, a career in science once felt unrealistic. Like many women in her family, she briefly considered medicine before rediscovering biology during her undergraduate years, inspired by female wildlife professors and peers who shared her passion.
“I can’t imagine a more fulfilling way to spend my time than helping to conserve the environment and the fauna that taught me so much growing up,” she said in the news release.
Jamie McNellis, a Conservation Specialist at the San Francisco Zoo, holds four-month-old garter snakes kept in enclosures at the San Francisco Zoo in San Francisco, Calif., on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
The San Francisco Garter Snake is amazingly beautiful and also very endangered, but now with the help of the conservation program at the San Francisco Zoo, they may get a chance at re-establishing their population! The largest current population of the snake lives on the property of the San Francisco airport and is quite protected but there is another area in Pacifica that conservationist from the Zoo have been preparing to help headstart a population of 115 babies for a spring release with more planned for the future!
Those destined for Pacifica will be released into a habitat that has been upgraded for their arrival. The project included creating a new pond for snakes and red-legged frogs to thrive, and removing invasive Monterey Cypress and Monterey Pine trees.
“If we didn’t do any type of tree removal, those scrub and grassland areas would be converted into forested habitats,” said Fong. “For sun-loving reptiles like snakes, converting open grasslands and scrub to forested habitats is not great.”
In December, a vegetation crew from NPS scattered seeds to help populate the upgraded habitat with native plant species.
One remaining concern is the continuing threat posed by people and their pets. The striking colors that make the San Francisco garter snake a California icon have also made it a target for illegal poaching for the pet trade, said McNellis. SFO can secure its habitat with a security fence, but other habitats cannot provide protection.
Aldabra giant tortoise foraging for food in a forest on North Island, which is part of Aldabra – the world's second-largest coral atoll. Credit: Rich Baxter/IOTA Seychelles
In 1997, North Island located in the Seychelles was purchased by private investors for ecotourism and rewilding. Today, that venture took 200 heavy steps forward as 50 Galapagos tortoises were released to the island to roam free again as they did once before. Many of the tortoises were actually pets surrendered for the joint project with Indian Ocean Tortoise Alliance (IOTA) and North Island Environment Department.
Before the tortoises left Mahé, they were microchipped for the national tortoise census and fed only native leaves to prevent the spread of invasive plant species via their droppings. They underwent two quarantines, one in Mahé and one on North Island, before taking their first steps into their new wild home.
Now, every day, they walk a little farther and explore a little more. “After months of planning, seeing them walk free was incredibly rewarding,” says IOTA assistant project officer Santosh Albert.
Jean Beasley with the Karen Beasley Rescue and Rehabilitation Center in Topsail Beach holds onto Southport a juvenile Kemp's Ridley sea turtle Wednesday Sept. 20, 2006. Southport along with Carolina held by Sandy Sly as Jeanie Marasco of North East, Maryland looks on were both released back into the ocean after being rehabilitated at the hospital. KEN BLEVINS/STARNEWS
Jean Beasley, the founder of the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center, passed surrounded by loved ones at the age of 90, but she leaves a huge hole in Sea Turtle conservation. She was the director and driving force behind the rehabilition center, named after her daughter who passed from Leukemia at the age of 29/ She and her daughter originally created the Topsail Turtle Project, which protected nests and hatchlings, eventually she expanded that into work with the hospital as well as public outreach through the center. Topsail is the midway point between New York and Florida, so the facility helps many cold stunned turtles each year on their migration. To read more about this amazingly dedicated woman, click here.
Inset photo by Jeff Barringer of my first Western Diamondback ever seen in the wild. Animal was seen at an event hosted in Sanderson Texas called Snake Days which was a conservation and educational event that brought reptile people from all over the world. I used this photo to respect the nat geo copywrites. They have amazing shots in the article!
Rattlesnakes are one of the most demonized animals on the planet. Deeply beloved by their fans and often hated by others. National Geographic author Elizabeth Royte spent a great deal of time traveling the country and looking into how to change the perceptions of rattlesnakes. She learned a bit about them in nature along the way and a bit about our battle as those who love rattlesnakes on changing perceptions.
At a time when populations of animal species globally have declined by an average of nearly 70 percent, wanton disregard for life—in the absence of imminent threat to humans—bothers Texas A&M University herpetologist Lee Fitzgerald. “The roundups do send a twisted message,” he says. “They’re not helping the way we think about biodiversity. We care about polar bears, but these snakes are worthless?”
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“I’m blue in the face from teaching people that snakes aren’t out to get you,” Matt Goode said as we hummed through Stone Canyon. “But I don’t know how much progress we’ve made.” Throughout much of the South and Southwest, it’s legal to kill many rattlesnake species. And some people kill a whole lot.
Have you heard of Project RattleCam? It is a livestream of a Prairie Rattlesnake Rookery in Colorado at an undisclosed location and it runs 24/7 from May to October. You can watch and share interesting obeservations with the team directly through their contacts or just spend your time watching rattlesnakes be rattlesnakes! What a better way to celebrate Rattlesnake Friday! Check it out!
The authors note: “While collecting eggs for incubation in May 2022, we were able to identify a unique series of notched tail scutes on a female C. siamensis as she aggressively defended a nest.
“From these markings we determined the female was hatched on 11 August 2012 (age = 9.75 years) and released in March 2014. A camera-trap placed at the nest on 11 May 2022 and recovered on 5 July 2022 recorded 1724 images.
“These images indicated the female remained in attendance at the nest throughout the monitoring period. Camera-trap imagery captured eight nest repair events and two nest defense events; during the later the female defended the nest from village dogs.”
USGS biologist holds an endangered yellow-legged frog recovered from a fire-ravaged stretch of Little Rock Creek, just off Angeles Crest Highway 2 near Wrightwood in the San Gabriel Mountains. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
For over 500 species of frogs, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis or more easily BD has been devastating. It has decimated populations worldwide and lead to extinctions of of 90 possible species threatening more world-wide. Scientists have been struggling to come up with a cure of any sort and have started to look at the possibility of infecting the fungus with a virus.
Meet BdDV-1, a viral fragment discovered by scientists whose paper was recently published by the journal Current Biology. The researchers found it in much the same way that one disentangles a knot, by pulling on individual threads to see where they lead. While examining the BD fungus to learn about weaknesses, they discovered a single-stranded DNA virus trapped within the genome of the fungus. Although this only applied to certain strains, when infected they produced fewer spores than the uninfected fungi. Now the next step is to see if researchers can clone and engineer this virus so that it kills BD and saves the frogs.
That will not be the easiest task to accomplish, however, for a big reason: Currently the virus makes the fungus more deadly to the frogs, rather than less so.
Zoo Atlanta in Georgia recently sent 11 endangered Guatemalan beaded lizards (Heloderma charlesbogerti) to La Aurora Zoo. (Zoo Atlanta v)
With an estimated 500-600 animals in the wild, the Guatemalan Beaded Lizard (Heloderma charlesbogerti) is one of the more endangered lizards on the planet. Now when you consider the fact that they are part of the family of the only medically significant venomous species of lizards, it makes them even more special. Zoo Atlanta has been long involved in their conservation efforts and recently had a clutch hatch!
"The lizards that went down will not be released into the wild themselves, however," Zoo Atlanta's Curator of Herpetology Robert L. Hill explained on Wednesday.
"The plan is that these animals would reproduce in their beaded lizard-specific facilities, and that following a quarantine period, the offspring would then be transferred from La Aurora Zoo to protected areas within the known wild range of the species in the dry forests of the Motagua Valley."
After saving over 700 eggs from poachers, the Costa Rica National Guard released 446 Sea Turtle babies recently!
Costa Rica, one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, is home to five of the seven sea turtle species. They are natural-born fighters, as only one in every 1,000 sea turtle eggs will become an adult. Hatchlings are prey to almost everything up until that point.
Once they reach adulthood, which can take up to 30 years, their list of enemies decreases significantly. The biggest predators they face are humans.
Chelonia mydas, a newly hatched baby green sea turtle. Photo: Shutterstock
In Taiwan, saving the Green Sea Turtle on its preferred nesting island was the goal, but drastically impacting the native lizards species was the unintended result. Since 2001, on Badai Beach the only remaining suitable nesting spot on Orchard Island, researchers have protected every Green Sea Turtle Nest with a fine mesh netting. This netting prevented any ground dwelling predators from dining on the babies cooking inside. Orchard Island is also the home of the kukri snakes and the stink ratsnakes, both of which gladly dine on eggs. With the instant loss of their normal food source, they turned elsewhere.
The scientists estimated kukri snakes consumed around 120 sea turtle eggs each year before 2001, which would be equivalent to between 5,000 and 18,000 lizard eggs from the five soft-shelled lizard species on the island.
The team found that while populations of kukri snakes and stink ratsnakes were estimated to have declined by 12 per cent and 8 per cent per year between 1997 and 2020, lizard species saw drops of 11 to 25 per cent every year.
Photo of Gideon, a Grand Cayman hybrid bred by Ty Parks in FL, but living his best life safe in WIsconsin - Cindy Steinle
Recently, the State of Florida deemed all Green Iguanas (Iguana Iguana) as a restricted species and created quite a stir, confiscating animals from even private zoos and killing the animals rather than allowing them to be rehomed or allowed to remain on display at the zoo. Now in a move to destroy the reptile industry further, Florida Fish and Wildlife is making the move to change the language from Iguana (Iguana Iguana) to simply Iguana. This would thus include all species including Cyclura and Ctenosaura most definitely but potentially all species under the family Iguanidae which would also include Amblyrhynchus, Brachylophus, Cachryx, Conolophus, Dipsosaurus, and Sauromalus as well.
In the hottest and wryest region of Vietnam, deep in the dry lowland forest of Nui Chua National Park, researchers discovered a new species of blind skink. Searching around the leaf litter around the yellow-bellied termite mounds that these skinks preferred to dine on, the found 7 specimens. When they looked closer, they realized they had a new species, the Ninh Thuận blind skink ()
Ninh Thuan blind skinks have a “worm-like” body that can reach about 4.6 inches in length, the study said. Their eyes are “rudimentary” and “completely covered by scales.” They are also “limbless” with only males having “rudimentary” hind limbs that form “flap-like structures” near their tails.
photo courtesy - Missouri Department of Conservation The male hellbender found in the Gasconade River
An Eastern Hellbender, reared in the St. Louis Zoo and then re-released as an adult in the wild was found to have been the first zoo reared animal to have reproduced in the wild having fathered 86 "well-developed" eggs in the Gasconade River.
Justin Elden, curator of herpetology and aquatics at the Zoo, said hellbenders are cryptic, secretive creatures. Numbers might be rising faster than known.
“If there’s one there’s likely many more,” said Elden. “It’s exciting stuff, and my hope and thought is that this is the first of many that we will find.”
A Nanorana laojunshanensis, or Laojunshan slow frog, seen from the top and underside. Photo from Tang, Liu and Yu (2023)
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/article282426903.html#storylink=cpy
While studying the mountain range of Yunnan in China, biologists ran across 6 different frog species, and one of them turned out to be a brand new one!
Laojunshan slow frogs are considered “small,” reaching about 1.4 inches in size, researchers said. They have “robust” limbs, “oval” tongues and “rough” skin. Photos show the multicolored Laojunshan slow frog. The frog’s back is chestnut brown with dark brown-black splotches. Underneath, its belly is creamy white with “yolk-yellow” groin and armpits, the study said.
