One excellent reason that you should never release a pet reptile into the wild is the risk of spreading diseases into wild populations. Even if the species is naturally found in the area, captive and wild populations carry different pathogens and have different immune responses. A well-known example is what happened when captive desert tortoises were released into the wild, which has had devastating effects on the wild populations.

Now there may be another example. Wild eastern massasauga rattlesnakes in Illinois have been discovered suffering from a fatal fungal infection. The Chrysosporium fungus involved has been matched to a variety found in captive black rat snakes; Chrysosporium is found in captive reptile populations, but it’s not normally seen in the wild. The implication is that released pet snakes may be the disease vector, though I wouldn’t rule out other ways for the fungus to have made its way from captive to wild snakes (say, piggybacking on unhygienic herpetologists). Article, press release, Scientific American. Via Joan Slonczewski.

The social life of snakes, such as it is, is not generally well understood. There are some tantalizing hints that there may be more going on than we thought. Pregnant live-bearing snakes, such as rattlesnakes, have been known to aggregate at basking sites, and there are reports of what might be called parental protective behaviour among rattlers. To which might be added new research showing that timber rattlesnakes tend to prefer the company of close relatives: pregnant females aggregating at basking sites were often found in the company of their sisters, daughters and mothers; juvenile snakes seem to prefer their siblings’ company to that of other snakes as well. Presumably they’re identifying one another by scent. This is exciting stuff, if true. Image credit: Richard Bonnett (CC licence).

People who watch a snake drink for the first time invariably think it’s one of the coolest things they’ve ever seen, even though a vertebrate drinking water should in theory be nothing special. But it turns out that it is something quite special after all: a new study has found that three different North American snake species — eastern hognose snakes, cottonmouths, and rat snakes — use skin folds in their lower jaw like a sponge to lap water up when they drink. They can’t, after all, lap up much water with those tongues. (Boa constrictors, on the other hand, suck up water as though through a straw.)

Four new species of leaf chameleon, genus Brookesia, are described in a new article published this week. Brookesia are tiny lizards; these species are even tinier: “The newly described Brookesia micra reaches a maximum snout-vent length in males of 16 mm, and its total length in both sexes is less than 30 mm, ranking it among the smallest amniote vertebrates in the world.” Via National Geographic News.

On kingsnake.com, Cindy Steinle asks why the reptile community has such an issue with calling its animals “pets” instead of “collections,” since what we do with our reptiles certainly fits the definition of petkeeping.

I think we use the word “collection” to elevate what we do above petkeeping, as though maintaining a reptile collection is a more scientific pursuit than merely keeping a pet. But what we do isn’t really science, in that we’re not keeping them for a research program, conservation, or any other scientific purpose; at best, what we do could be called amateur zookeeping.

If the general public has a hard time understanding what we do, it’s in large part because keeping a reptile “collection” is so difficult to categorize. If they’re pets, why do we interact with them so little, and why don’t they all have names? If it’s a zoo, why isn’t it open to the public? If it’s a breeding operation, how is it different from a puppy mill? If they’re exotic, how is this different from keeping a tiger? If there are so many of them, how are you not a hoarder?

Answering these questions is doable, but it takes some explaining, and explaining isn’t always reptile keepers’ forte. And applying “collection” to live animals can make people who associate collecting with stamps and Beanie Babies rather uncomfortable. People understand “pet,” though; I think that’s a safer starting point.

According to a study published 19 years ago in the Journal of Chemical Ecology and unearthed today by Neurotic Physiology, brown tree snakes (Boiga irregularis) are attracted to human menstrual blood — in the study, the snakes’ flick rates increased when presented with, um, a used tampon, and one snake even attacked and, um … ate one. It’s unknown whether the attractant was menstrual blood, human blood or blood in general, but it’s worth noting that brown tree snakes (the scourge of Guam) will eat just about anything. Via @Laelaps. Photo credit: teejaybee (CC licence).

A new paper published in Biology Letters reports that boa constrictors respond to their victims’ heartbeats during constriction, and adjust their coils and apply bursts of pressure until the heartbeats stopped. Now I’ve kept two boas who ate frozen/thawed mice (which don’t have much of a pulse); they constricted their dead prey for a good long while, more so than the colubrids did. But what these researchers found, using dead rats with simulated heartbeats, is that their boas, both wild-caught and captive-bred, constricted for a longer period of time, and made more coil adjustments, than they did with ordinary, pulseless, dead rats. Via Scientific American.

Kansas-based herpetologist Joe Collins died of a heart attack over the weekend while on a field herping trip; he was 72. Collins was the author of a number of books on North American reptiles and amphibians; he was also the director of the Center for North American Herpetology, whose frequent changes to snake taxonomy, it must be said, have been a source of irritation. More: Reptile Channel; photo gallery (Wichita Eagle). Via @REPTILESMag.

A bit of excitement on the snake front this evening. The two male red-sided garter snakes, who have been with each other (or their siblings) since they were born nine and a half years ago, decided to get into a tussle. Rather than attacking one another, which was my initial fear, it turns out that they were fighting over food. Problem is, we fed them on Friday. One of them had regurgitated his meal and they were both trying to swallow it back down. Yum. Of course, we had to separate them for a while — food fights can be serious business with snakes — but we couldn’t stop Thing Two (the lumpy one) from eating it. Double yum.

And I bet you thought only cats tried to eat each other’s barf.

Previously: Biting Your Cagemate Is Wrong, Snake.

Update, Dec. 13: It happened again this morning. Looks like Thing Two can’t keep his food down, which is to say that he’s not doing at all well.

Rattlesnakes won’t be able to keep up with climate change, according to a new study, which doesn’t bode well for other species.

Increasing temperature does not necessarily mean expanded suitable habitats for rattlesnakes. For example, Crotalus horridus, the timber rattlesnake, is now found throughout the Eastern United States. The study finds that, with a temperature increase of 1.1 degree Celsius over the next 90 years, its range would expand slightly into New York, New England and Texas. But with an increase of 6.4 degrees, its range would shrink to a small area on the Tennessee-North Carolina border. C. adamanteus, the eastern diamondback rattlesnake, would be displaced entirely from its current range in the southeastern U.S. with a temperature increase of 6.4 degrees.

The problem is that rattlesnakes adapt too slowly: their ranges have only shifted by a couple of metres a year over the past 320,000 years, which means they can’t migrate to new territory fast enough; and it would take even longer to adapt to new temperatures. Climate change is happening too fast for them.

To continue my exhaustive coverage of all things snot otter: the Saint Louis Zoo has successfully bred Ozark hellbenders in captivity — a first for either subspecies of hellbender (aka snot otter). Hellbenders are giant aquatic salamanders; they appear to be sensitive to river pollution: the Ozark hellbender is down to fewer than 600 individuals in the wild and is now on the U.S. endangered list. Which is to say that this is a good time to start a captive breeding program. Image credit: Mark Wanner/Saint Louis Zoo.

Previously: Snotty the Snot Otter.

A lump on a snake that isn’t a mouse just passing through is usually cause for concern. One of the two male red-sided garter snakes has one (see above). It’s been long enough since his last meal that it’s almost certainly not that. It’s a little too round to be an intestinal blockage. It’s far enough down the body that I don’t think it’s an organ. My first thought is that it’s a growth of some sort; whether it’s a benign cyst or an ominous tumour is something that remains to be seen.

His mother died of a golf-ball-sized liver tumour in 2002, and the Butler’s garter snake presented a rather large lump before dying earlier this year. Lumps are bad, and there’s generally nothing to be done about them.

If nothing else, his behaviour — rapacious and in constant motion — is certainly unchanged. This is, incidentally, one of the 42 baby garter snakes born in 2002, only now this baby snake is nine and a half years old. For a garter snake, that’s getting up there.

Here’s a short video of Puerto Rican boas snatching bats in mid-air as they emerge from their guano-covered cave. This will either be profoundly cool or profoundly icky, depending on your temperament. Via National Geographic News Watch.

I look forward to the day when a lost snake is treated the same way as a lost dog or cat. We’re not there yet, if this story of two snakes — a corn snake and a python — turning up in neighbouring apartment buildings in Toronto is any indication: a lost snake is still man-bites-dog news, more so when it’s two nearby snakes a day apart. (I bet they’re from the same collection.) But I take heart from the police statement: “Like finding a stray dog, now we’re finding stray snakes.” It’s unusual (man bites dog) but hardly a city-wide freakout. Not in Toronto, anyway.

From time to time I hear about a female snake who gives birth in captivity even though she hasn’t encountered a male in years. Now female snakes can retain a male’s sperm for quite some time, keeping it handy until they ovulate, so it’s hard to parse out the cases of sperm retention from true cases of parthenogenesis — where the female snake reproduces asexually. Snake parthenogenesis is being researched by Kansas State University professor Eva Horne, the Topeka Capital-Journal reports. In the case of a copperhead that gave birth to two offspring in 2001 without the benefit of midichlorians a male, DNA tests confirmed that the babies were genetically identical to their mother — clones, in other words — which confirms this as parthenogenesis, not sperm retention. So it happens. How often it happens is still to be determined.

The fate of the Seaway Serpentarium’s two Orinoco crocodiles has been decided, the National Post reports. The rest of the late Karel Fortyn’s collection was split between Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo in Ottawa and Reptilia in Vaughan, but the crocodiles, representatives of an extremely rare species, were being packed up over the weekend for shipment to the Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville, Texas.

Fortyn died last May; the fate of his 200 or so reptiles, including the crocodiles and a number of venomous snakes, was the subject of a legal battle earlier this year. Previously: Seaway Serpentarium Reptiles in Custody Battle; Judge Rules on Seaway Serpentarium Reptiles.

Every now and then, one of our snakes goes and does something interesting. Last night’s definition of interesting involved a four-foot male Gray Rat Snake named Spook deciding to bite the head of his cagemate, Nic, a six-foot male Everglades rat snake.

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Some good news from our walk yesterday afternoon: we spotted two live garter snakes along the PPJ bike trail. They represent the first live snakes we’ve seen in Shawville since moving here. A damn sight better than finding a dead snake on the trail, let me tell you.

My guess is that they were sunning themselves on the asphalt: now that the PPJ is paved through Shawville, I suspect that more garter snakes will be encountered along the trail. I just hope this won’t simply make it easier for my neighbours to thwack them.

We could only grab the second snake, photo above: a male who promptly musked all over Jennifer. (It’s her mandate to be musked on, mine to record the musking.) He’d eaten recently, which is also a good sign. The PPJ passes above several ponds and wetlands in the town proper that in the spring have a deafening number of spring peepers and treefrogs, so garter snakes are not hurting for food around here.

Previously: Dead Snake on the Path.

“Some of the Egyptians consider crocodiles sacred; others do not, but treat them as enemies,” wrote Herodotus in his Histories more than 2,400 years ago. “Those who live near Thebes and Lake Moeris consider them very sacred. Every household raises one crocodile, trained to be tame; they put ornaments of glass and gold on its ears and bracelets on its forefeet, provide special food and offerings for it, and give the creatures the best of treatment while they live; after death, the crocodiles are embalmed and buried in sacred coffins.” (II: 69)

Crocodile mummies 2,000 years old have helped reveal a second, cryptic species of crocodile where there was once thought to be just one: the Nile Crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus). Recent research by a team led by biologist Evon Hekkala has discovered, by sampling DNA from living, preserved and mummified specimens, that the crocodile referred to in Herodotus was not the fearsome Nile Crocodile, but a smaller, less-aggressive species that has since disappeared from the Nile valley (but is found elsewhere in Africa). The naturalist Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire identified it in 1807 as the Sacred Crocodile (Crocodylus suchus), but his proposal was not widely accepted. The ancient Egyptians, on the other hand, appear to have known the difference. Details at Nature News and Not Exactly Rocket Science. Photo credit: Arno Meintjes (CC licence).

George, our lumpy, floppy, semi-paralyzed, nearly incontinent male Plains Garter Snake (Thamnophis radix), a snake that I’ve been expecting to drop dead any day now for the last five years, finally did so last night. George had a huge lump just past the cloaca that started oozing the other day, which made us think his time was finally up. This time it was.

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Five years ago today, Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray. I wrote a blog post in response to some of the reactions to his death, the ones that essentially said that Irwin was a reckless thrill-seeker whose death was poetic justice. I also had a few things to say about the rather patrician nature of wildlife conservation, and the class issues revealed by the criticisms of Irwin. I have to confess that I’m rather proud of that post; if you haven’t read it before, why don’t you read it now? I won’t mind.

On our walk this evening, we happened across the first snake we’ve ever encountered in Shawville in the eight years we’ve been living here. Unfortunately, he was also stiff as a board. This small Northern Red-bellied Snake (they only come in small, especially when they’re male, as this one appeared to be) was lying in the middle of the PPJ bike trail. Here’s another view. Not sure what killed him: as far as we could see, no part of him was squooshed, sliced open or missing, which suggests that he wasn’t stomped upon, run over, or eviscerated by predators. My first guess was actually dehydration, but I have no idea if that’s even plausible.

ScienceDaily reports on the recovery of the Eastern Collared Lizard (Crotaphytus collaris collaris) in the Missouri Ozarks. By the mid-1980s, the lizards had disappeared from 75 percent of the Ozark glades in which they had previously been found. Biologist Alan Templeton discovered that the culprit was forest fire suppression: a lack of forest fires meant that red cedars colonized and wiped out their glade habitats. Small burns helped translocated lizards survive in separate glades between 1984 and 1994, but it took widespread burning for the lizards to thrive:

The major revelation of the work was that burning entire mountains and valleys, called landscape-level burning, undid ecological damage that was slowed but not stopped by smaller prescribed burns.

In fact, it allowed the lizards to undertake their own expanded restoration effort without the assistance of worried biologists.

Moreover, burning benefited many species besides the lizards, including a rare fen orchid and fen dragonfly, that were flying under the radar and would probably never have commanded labor intensive restoration efforts on their own.

In short, fire turned restoration from a time-consuming labor-intensive process to one that ran pretty much on its own.

Thanks to Fred Schueler for the link. Alternate news link. Templeton’s research was published in the September 2011 issue of Ecology. Photo of an Eastern Collared Lizard in Missouri’s Peck Ranch Conservation Area, where Templeton did his restoration work, by Anthony Zukoff; reprinted under a Creative Commons licence.

The Lake Erie Water Snake (Nerodia sipedon insularum), a subspecies of Northern Water Snake found only on islands in western Lake Erie, is listed as an endangered species in Canada, and is protected under Ontario law. In Ohio, however, its numbers have recovered enough that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is removing it from the endangered species list, Kingsnake.com reports. The snake’s U.S. population is nearly 12,000 — twice the number set out under recovery criteria and more than 10 times the estimated Canadian population. Despite the delisting, It’s still listed as endangered under Ohio state law and as such is still protected. Photo credit: Benny Mazur (CC licence).

Five spectacled caimans were seized last month from a home in Lévis, Quebec; they’re now being housed in the Granby Zoo. It’s just as illegal to keep crocodilians in Quebec as it is to keep venomous reptiles — and, it seems, just as newsworthy.

A Sharp-tailed Snake (Contia tenuis) has been found near Whistler, B.C. This is the first time a sharptail has been found on the mainland; it had been previously reported only from the eastern tip of Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands. It’s an endangered species in Canada, so this is big news. I had to laugh at this, though: “Concerned about poachers and collectors — as well as over-enthusiastic herpetologists from all over — Anthony would only say he found the snake in the Pemberton area.” I assure you that this cute and tiny slug-eater has little to no commercial value; I’ve never heard of anyone keeping it. Photo credit: Greg Schechter (CC licence).

Brigette Zacharczenko is a graduate student in entomology. As a side business, she makes plush animals of insects, other invertebrates, and other interesting animals; she sells them at her Etsy store, Weird Bug Lady. I’m not sure where else you could get plush nudibranchs, water bears, copepods or eelpouts. She’s also fond of reptiles: there are several plush snakes available, including a garter snake (dibs!).

In his Beginner’s Guide to Keeping Venomous Snakes, Lenny Flank, Jr. speaks truth to crazy.

Providing information on how to keep venomous snakes in captivity — by definition, an extremely dangerous and life-threatening activity — is a contentious thing. Even among those crazy few who think that keeping venomous snakes should be legal, even among those who keep such snakes themselves, there is a line of thought that says, don’t tell anyone how it’s done. Because you might encourage the wrong people to do it. They’ll read your book or website, buy a bunch of deadly snakes, and get themselves — or worse, some innocent bystander — killed.

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The fate of the Seaway Serpentarium’s 200 or so reptiles, in limbo since the death of Karel Fortyn, was decided in court yesterday, the Toronto Star reports. The judge ruled in favour of Fortyn’s brother. “Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo in Ottawa will take the non-venomous reptiles and Reptilia zoo in Vaughan will take the venomous reptiles. The estate said they are in consultation with the authorities about the Orinocos” (i.e., the Orinoco crocodiles, whose legal status is a bit complicated).

Previously: Seaway Serpentarium Reptiles in Custody Battle.

Legendary venomous snake expert Bill Haast has died at the age of 100: Miami Herald, New York Times. Head of the Miami Serpentarium from 1946 to 1984, Haast extracted venom from venomous snakes for medical and research purposes for most of his life. He was bitten at least 172 times, and injected himself with small amounts of venom daily to build up immunity: transfusions of his blood were even used to save snake bite victims. More on Haast from Kingsnake.com and TwinSrpnt.