I had a dream where I was taught how to “tag” snakes, and it was like a band around their tail/end of their body. Could that theoretically happen or is that impossible?

Tagging wild snakes (for population counts, whatever) is one of the greatest difficulties of herpetologists. Bands and other visible tags are all but impossible to get to stay on without hurting the snake or restricting mobility - it's just hard to get things to stay put on an animal that is essentially a long tube. Scale clipping can hurt the snakes and is undone with sheds, and dying scales has the same problem.

The most reliable method is PIT tagging, that's a teeny microchip (the ones I'm familiar with for snake tagging are less than a centimeter long). The tag is injected with a syringe between the belly scales, it's super small and this doesn't hurt the snake at all. As you can imagine, this is something that can only really be done professionally because it's expensive and you need to be trained in how to do it right.

“Harrison Ford has a new Peruvian snake species named after him”

"These scientists keep naming critters after me, but it's always the ones that terrify children," Ford told Conservation International. "I don't understand. I spend my free time cross-stitching. I sing lullabies to my basil plants, so they won't fear the night."

"The snake's got eyes you can drown in, and he spends most of the day sunning himself by a pool of dirty water — we probably would've been friends in the early '60s," he said. "It's a reminder that there's still so much to learn about our wild world - and that humans are one small part of an impossibly vast biosphere,"

(Link to full article below)

(Harrison Ford responds to snake species being named after him - BBC - 08/16/23)

— WDD

URGENT! DO YOU WANT TO HELP THE SOUTHERN RESIDENTS? PLEASE HELP US WRITE, CALL AND TEXT!

A lawsuit, National Wildlife Federation vs National Marine Fisheries Service, may finally determine the fate of the 4 Lower Snake River Dams, the salmon who spawn there and the remaining 75 Southern Resident Orca who desperately need salmon to survive. Biden needs to know that we want those dams breached. He's broken enough of his climate promises - let him know that, and the extinction of these amazing animals, isn't an option!

Public comment is also being sought on the matter. Please visit our page, BidenBreachNow, for talking points, social media shareables, and extensive information about why the dams need to go. This is a critical time. Please call, text, write or email, every day if you can, until August 31st. Even if you already have acted and/or shared, please do it again. Please keep sharing because every voice counts! The Snake River was once one of the top salmon rivers in the world. That is sadly no longer the case. Four deadbeat dams on the Lower Snake River have cost an estimated 8 to 9 billion dollars in failed salmon recovery attempts - taxpayer money! - and they lose millions more every year generating unstorable surplus energy. What they do sell is often sold at a loss. The dams continue to get older and costlier to maintain, while solar and wind energy have replaced their power output; energy efficiency alone has done the same seven times over.

These dams aren't even clean energy! Their reservoirs emit huge amounts of methane, which contributes to the climate crisis. Please help spread this if you can, and join in. We have a real chance here to get this done - so let's do it.

As the late and great Ken Balcomb said: "We're at a point in history where we need to wake up to what we have to consider: do we want whales, or not?"

He never stopped fighting for the Southern Residents, and neither should we.

Animal of the Day!

Emerald Tree Boa (Corallus caninus)

(Photo from Georgia Aquarium)

Conservation Status- Least Concern

Habitat- South America

Size (Weight/Length)- 2 m

Diet- Small rodents; Small marsupials; Bats; Lizards

Cool Facts- Emerald tree boas are made for a life in the trees. Their coloration helps them function as an ambush predator that is the nightmare of any climbing rodent or marsupial. The Emerald tree boa strikes and bites into prey with abnormally long front fangs, the longest of any non-venomous snake. Once the prey is properly suffocated, the boa enjoys its meal head first. All of this is done 50 meters off the ground along a tree branch. Luckily for small critters, emerald tree boas have slow metabolism and only eat once every few months.

Rating- 13/10 (A snake hammock.)

Researchers have discovered a new distinctive and secretive snake species in the Hejaz region of Saudi Arabia. Rhynchocalamus hejazicus is a small snake bearing a black collar and reddish coloration, distinguishing it from its closest relatives. A uniformly black "melanistic morphotype" of the species has also been discovered. The new species is widely distributed and fills much of the existing distribution gap between the Levant and the coastal regions of Yemen and Oman for the genus Rhynchocalamus. An international team led by scientists from the Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos (CIBIO), Portugal, and Charles University, Czech Republic, published their discovery in Zoosystematics and Evolution.

Continue Reading.

For those unaware, Burmese pythons have been a seriously destructive invasive species in the Florida Everglades for the past three decades thanks to a hurricane destroying a breeding facility. Other than the occasional big, old alligator, nothing eats them--but they eat everything. In some places, mammal species have been reduced to a tiny percentage of their former numbers--or have been extirpated entirely.

Because these snakes are so good at hiding, and they often populate the more remote areas of the Everglades, it's incredibly difficult to track them or determine how many of them are hiding there, though their impact is certainly obvious. Even people who spend time hunting the pythons only bring back a tiny fraction of the population; over 17,000 have been killed since 2000, and yet numbers are robust enough that native species have been eaten nearly to complete extermination. Both amateur and professional hunters are allowed to hunt Burmese pythons year-round anywhere on private land and in many public lands as well.

It was totally by accident that researchers came across a way to find these elusive animals. Opossums that had been fitted with radio collars for a separate study became victims of pythons, and the transmitters showed exactly where the snakes went after feeding. While some very large snakes were able to pass the collars when defecating, others retained them in their digestive systems. And as it turns out, the opossums were the perfect size for large female pythons mature enough to lay plenty of eggs. Every female removed from the ecosystem meant that many fewer being born in the future, putting at least a small dent in the population of invasive pythons.

Now there are plans to fit opossums and other mammals with simple tracking collars that are more likely to stay in a python's system even after digestion. Quicker response will mean more of them can be captured and euthanized. While it's not going to be the solution that gets rid of all of the Burmese pythons in Florida, every tool we have in controlling their numbers is a step forward.

Guam Kingfisher (Todiramphus cinnamominus) AKA sihek

Guam

Status: Extinct in the wild, less than 200 in captivity

Threats: invasive species, habitat loss

Gonna be insufferable from now on in using Taranis as an example of why the ahamkara deserve a second chance and why they aren't all inherently evil or dangerous entities but are instead just as nuanced and morally neutral as any other predatory species btw. Because if there was anything that Starcrossed showed us its that we've been learning about the lives and nature of ahamkara from the very biased perspective of one individual (Riven, who is proud and hungry and cunning and rejoices in it, as well as has a very good reason to hold a substantial grudge aginst humankind) and from the outsider fear-knowledge of their prey and that is not by any means a good way of measuring the worth of a species or casting judgement on their fate. They would deserve the right to live even if Taranis was not kind or had not given his life to save his eggs, because being capable of love is not a determinant of worth either, but it DOES prove that they are not inherently evil and that living in a universe with them is not an impossible nor unnecessarily dangerous endeavor

2023 Reading Log pt 7

31. Rare Trees by Sara Oldfield and Malin Rivers. OK, so apparently that whole “less books about plants” pledge didn’t take. In my defense, this book is really pretty. It’s also very good; it’s about efforts for tree conservation around the world, and is published both as a public report and a fundraiser for the Global Trees Campaign. If you want to know what boots on the ground conservation work is like, its successes and its challenges, this is an excellent resource. And, like I said, the photographs are very pretty. The first chapter is about the overall history of forest conservation, and then future chapters discuss trees categorized by uses and by phylogeny. Honestly, I kind of wish they had picked one or the other of those organization schemes instead of splitting the difference, but that’s a quibble.

32. How To Survive History by Cody Cassidy. I’ve recommended some of Cassidy’s other books before (Who Ate the First Oyster? and …And Then You’re Dead), so I’m happy to report that this is his best yet. The theme is, what does science and the historical record tell us about how you could survive various catastrophes, or just hostile environments? I knew I was going to like it from the first chapter, How to Outrun a T. rex, which treats dinosaurs as just animals rather than kill crazy monsters. It also does an excellent job of summarizing Very Bad Times like the Donner Party expedition and the Magellan circumnavigation, and I learned a lot (like about how Magellan’s slave Enrique was the first person to actually circle the globe, having been captured by slavers in the Philippines and then being brought back around… and getting his revenge when he wasn’t freed as Magellan’s will proclaimed).

33. Snakes in American Culture: A Hisstory by Jesse C. Donahue and Conor Shaw-Draves. I didn’t expect this to be a searing indictment of the American medical profession of the early 20th century when I started the book, so that was a pleasant surprise. The first half or so is the story of how (white, upper class, male) “experts” denied that venomous snakes in the USA were really all that dangerous, while people (mostly poor, ethnic minorities and children) were dying in large numbers. Antivenin was only developed in this country as a side effect of the United Fruit Company’s desire to keep laborers from dying in the fields from snakebite, and the development of said antivenin was mostly done by volunteer labor and then marked up for tremendous profit by pharmaceutical companies! The back half, unfortunately, isn’t nearly as good, although it doesn’t go full conversion with its fairly sympathetic portrayal of snake handlers (which is something I’ve run into before). My biggest complaint is that this was written by humanities professors, and they needed a trained biologist to go over their draft. For example, they can’t format scientific names correctly, and don’t know enough about the history of science to understand that “virus” and “venom” were used interchangeably by some authors in the 19th century.

34. Marvelous Microfossils by Patrick De Wever, translated by Alison Duncan. Worst book I’ve finished this year? I think so. This book was originally written in French, but I can’t blame its problems on translation issues. It’s about plankton and other microfossils, what they can tell us about geology and how they’ve influenced art and culture. To start with the good, the book is gorgeous; each page is well organized, and it has lots of electron micrographs, photos and engravings by Ernst Haeckel. And that’s the first problem. The author seems to be a modern devotee of Haeckel’s science and philosophy, when both were full of garbage (Haeckel is the “ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny” guy, and one of the codifiers of scientific racism). His use of terminology is stuck firmly in the 19th century, and he doesn’t seem to care about modern cladistic phylogeny at all. And he has lengthy quotes from architects and philosophers instead of, you know, modern scientists, including lines specifically about how “we understand all there is to know” about plankton from like 1910. So I get huge “reject modernity, embrace tradition” vibes from this author, and that makes my skin crawl.

35. Nicole Angemi’s Anatomy Book by Nicole Angemi. Another “searing indictment of the American medical system”, only this one is more modern. The book is a loosely A-Z collection of pathologies, with case histories and photos. So this one is super gross, just a head’s up. Why I say it’s a searing indictment is that about 1/3 of the case studies talk about how the patient was ignored by their doctors initially, and had to spend time seeking second opinions taking them seriously, and how a number of things that could have been fixed more easily turned into huge, life altering (or ending) problems. The book is written by a pathologist’s assistant, and the introduction/biography would make a good “see, you can follow your dreams and get a career that you love later in life” inspirational story. I’m keeping a copy of this for my classroom, because I have plenty of students who are interested in medicine but not necessarily medical school, and because teenagers love gross pictures. Seriously, some of the descriptions of cysts and tumors made even my stomach turn.

Corps of Discovery

(September 22, 2021)

So I've been reading through your blog for a while now and I have a question for you!

I know you advocate for "Look with your eyes and not with your hands" when it comes to Herping in the wild. I completely agree with you on this standpoint. However, the Herpetology class I'm currently taking at college has plans for us to go out while working alongside the state Wildlife department to catch a wide variety of Snakes! Both Hots and Nonvens.

The conflicting part is that we aren't just finding them and harassing them to study them up close. Instead we are microchipping them so that they can be studied and tracked without more human interference. After the Snake is tagged the department sends out Drones to find the tagged snake's and monitor their health and behavior. I understand the Data is super important and we will be doing everything in our power to make it less stressful. But like? Is the one time of stress worth the benefit of never having to be physically studied again worth it? 🤔

Hello hello - sounds super cool! Important data-collecting work like this is a crucial exception to the "don't pick up wild reptiles" rule. That's because it's for an important reason, and everyone there knows what they're doing and will be able to minimize the stress to the animals!

Another crucial reason these cases are exceptions to that rule is because they're not being filmed to make content online. One of the reasons I (and many other professional herpetologists) are so critical of even well-intentioned and well-informed videos that involve picking up wild snakes is because posting them online will encourage others to do the same, and non-professionals attempting that can easily lead to cases where people are bitten or even accidentally pick up hot snakes.

Today's my 30th birthday and I can't do much to celebrate personally, but I can bring back my annual fundraiser <3 If you can, please consider donating to my fundraiser for Save the Snakes! They support snake conservation around the world and do educational outreach programs in less developed countries to help educate people of different cultures that come into contact with snakes far more than we do. I don't think I need to tell yall how important that is to me lol

FUNDRAISER:

If you can't donate through Facebook, you can directly on their website:

In the face of extreme habitat loss, wildlife biologist Dr. Chris Jenkins puts an ambitious plan in motion to save two uniquely American reptiles, the eastern indigo snake and the gopher tortoise, and the forest they call home.

The two threatened species are as important to their ecosystems as they are interconnected themselves. The eastern indigo snake is a prolific hunter that manages predator populations in the southeastern United States. In the northern part of its range, the snakes – along with more than 350 other species – rely on the deep burrows that the gopher tortoise creates to survive freezing temperatures every winter.

Both the indigo snakes and gopher tortoises are in steep decline, as their native habitat has been deforested for centuries and then further fragmented by roads with fast-moving vehicles. Dr. Chris Jenkins is part of a massive conservation effort that takes the reptiles’ homes into account. The team surveys the most critical tortoise land, purchases it, and then restores the native forests. From there, Dr. James Bogan, who leads the only eastern indigo breeding program in the world, can reintroduce new snakes to areas where they have previously gone extinct – with plenty of tortoise burrows to protect them.

Animal of the Day!

Arabian Sand Boa (Eryx jayakari)

(Photo in public domain)

Conservation Status- Least Concern

Habitat- Middle East

Size (Weight/Length)- 40 cm

Diet- Reptiles; Small mammals

Cool Facts- Yes, this is a snake and yes, its eyes are on the top of its head. Being completely nocturnal, the Arabian sand boa spends most of its life buried under sand. At dusk, they wiggle their way to the surface so that the majority of its body is hidden. This is where their eyes come into play. With eyes positioned on their forehead, the Arabian sand boa is a vicious ambush predator. When a gecko comes into range, the boa strikes and constricts the lizard to death. Luckily, people don’t have to worry about this little guy. They’re only big enough to get your pinky toe into its mouth.

Rating- 12/10 (Please don’t laugh, they’re sensitive about their appearance.)

Requested by @blainwalker

A group of scientists led by researchers of from the Khamai Foundation discovered five dazzling new species of eyelash vipers in the jungles and cloud forests of Colombia and Ecuador. This discovery was made official in a study published in Evolutionary Systematics. Prior to this research, the captivating new vipers, now recognized as among the most alluring ever found, were mistakenly classified as part of a single, highly variable species spanning from Mexico to northwestern Peru. The decade-long study began with an unexpected incident wherein one of the authors was bitten by one of these previously undiscovered species.

Continue Reading.