- “Fix and Release” is a 15-minute CBC documentary on the Ontario Turtle Conservation Centre’s work rehabilitating injured turtles. [YouTube]
- More signs that reptile population locations are being obscured or hidden to keep the animals from being poached or killed: scientists released 6,000 eastern spiny softshell (Apalone s. spinifera) hatchlings near London, Ontario, but the location is being kept secret.
- Here’s a short video on building a snake hibernaculum on your property, hosted by two friends of mine: Jeff Hathaway (of Scales Nature Park) and Ben Porchuk, whom I met while messing about on Pelee Island.
- Dozens of snakes—western fox snakes (Pantherophis ramspotti) and racers (Coluber constrictor)—were rescued from a well scheduled to be demolished.
- Last month a Peterborough, Ontario man was bitten by a monocled cobra (Naja kaouthia) and had to be given given antivenom from the Toronto Zoo’s stock at Scarborough and Rouge Hospital. [CBC News, Toronto Star]
- The Calabar burrowing python (Calabaria reinhardtii) is an unusual egg-laying boa from central Africa. It’s a nest-raider that feeds primarily on baby rodents. Mama rodents tend to have a thing or two to say about that, so it turns out that Calabaria has an extraordinarily thick skin that resists penetration (i.e., from bites)—thicker and tougher than any other snake they compared it to, causing researchers to call it a “rhinoceros among serpents.” [Journal of Morphology]
- Climate change may be making bearded dragons (Pogona vitticeps) dumber. The National Geographic headline is a bit clickbaity; the underlying study suggests that incubation impacts social cognition. “Lizards incubated at colder temperatures were quicker at learning a social task and faster at completing that task.” The study determined that the effects of incubation temperature lasted into adulthood. The effect of rising global temperatures follows from that. [Royal Society Open Science]
- Last week the New York Times reported on snake fungal disease, which has featured prominently in previous posts. A new study suggests that in the eastern United States snakes afflicted by the fungus “are both phylogenetically and ecologically randomly dispersed”—i.e., widely different species in widely different habitats—and that monitoring “should consider that all snake species and habitats likely harbor this pathogen.” This is, as they say, bad. [Science Advances]
- Paul “Little Ray” Goulet is another old friend, and the proprietor of Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo in Ottawa. For the past few years he’s been offering free passes over the holidays to disadvantaged families who’d otherwise be unable to afford to go to the zoo. (Zoos, whether private or public, are a lot more expensive than they used to be.) Here’s the Ottawa Citizen story.
- Finally, here’s video footage of a western diamondback rattlesnake (Crotalus atrox) riding on the back of a tortoise. Yee-haw. [UPI, YouTube]
A Herpetological Roundup
Jonathan Crowe
Jonathan Crowe blogs about maps at The Map Room and writes and reviews science fiction and fantasy; his work has been published by AE, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Strange Horizons and Tor.com. He lives in Shawville, Quebec.
Recent Comments