Hibernating ending..

Yesterday, I started to take some of my animals out of hibernation. I have had them all in a separate refridgerator in my garage, with temperatures ranging from +6,0 degrees Celcius to +7,5 degrees Celcius.

Started to tkae the male vipers out and some of the lizards, putting them on the garagefloor for a couple of days in a temperature of roughly +12 degrees Celcius - +15 degrees Celcius. This is to prevent the animals dying from a heatchock.

So, I will be busy this coming weekend, decorating terrariums for them. This is one of the pleasures in herptilekeeping, at least for me..

 Temperatureconverter

Sea turtle advocates appeal to the Vatican

Did you ever want to write a letter to the Pope, but you didn’t know what to say? Well, here’s your chance to write that letter. Sea turtle advocates did all the work for you, and they vastly improved your only likely chance of an audience. According to the sea turtle advocates, your voice could be one of thousands calling upon His Excellency to stop the slaughter of these oceangoing innocents during the Lenten season. The Baja California Sur environmental group ProPeninsula is engaged in a letter writing campaign to His Excellency Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican asking him to remind Catholics everywhere that sea turtles are not fish.

Snake Found Inside Car Rental

WITI-TV, MILWAUKEE  –  Of all the things you might expect to find in your glove compartment. A map, your car’s registration. A four-foot long snake is probably not one of them.

But that’s what happened Wednesday at the Budget rental location near Milwaukee’s General Mitchell Airport. The car had just been returned, and budget employees were combing through it. When they opened the glove compartment, they saw the snake’s face right there.

The snake is actually a red-tail boa.  Animal Control was called to remove it. But they actually had to tear apart the dashboard to get it out.

The man driving the car says he’s glad he didn’t see it, or he probably would’ve passed out.

From: MyFox Milwaukee

Teen bitten by venomous snake at Cameron Park

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

By Erin QuinnTribune-Herald staff writer

BRUCEVILLE — The mile walk through the trails of Cameron Park back to the car seemed to take hours.

Omar Fagerberg’s hand was swelling up fast, and the pain was becoming unbearable.

The 17-year-old Lorena High School junior didn’t even know why his hand was swelling up as it was — to two, then three times its normal size. Soon, his arm followed — all the way up his forearm, past his elbow and then up to his bicep.

Something was seriously wrong.

Allergic reaction? Thorn prick? Bug bite?

He knew he needed to get to the hospital. Fast.

“I didn’t know what was going on,” he said. “The pain was so intense. I was way past the point of tears.”

Venomous Snake Count Rises Dramatically

Venomous Snake Count Rises Dramatically By Corey Binns Special to LiveScience posted: 27 March 2007 11:07 am ET

A newly identified deadly snake in India is one of several now challenging the long-held concept that there are only four dangerous snakes in the country, sometimes known as the land of snakes. The hump-nosed pit viper is one among at least 13 snakes now counted as having medical significance in India in a recent report released by members of the World Health Organization’s Snakebite Task Force. Venomous U.S. Snakes Sources offer various figures for the number of U.S. venomous snake species. Here is one authoritative list: Rattlesnakes Banded rock Black-tailed Canebrake Diamondback (eastern, western) Massasauga (eastern, western) Mojave Mottled rock Pacific (northern, southern) Pigmy (southeastern, western) Prairie Red diamond Ridge-nosed Sidewinder Speckled Tiger Timber Twin-spotted Copperheads Broad-banded Northern Osage Southern Trans-Pecos Cottonmouths Eastern Florida Western   Coral snakes Arizona Eastern Texas Western SOURCES: Gregory Juckett and John G. Hancox, West Virginia University School of Medicine, who got their information from Conant R, Collina JT, “A Field Guide to Reptiles & Amphibians: Eastern and Central North America. 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 199 and Stebbins RC, “A Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians: Field Marks of All Species in Western North America, including Baja California. 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 199 All About Snakes   Twelve hours after being bitten by the hump-nosed pit viper, a patient’s blood becomes incapable of coagulating. The patient bleeds and develops renal failure. There is no antivenom for the viper. The hump-nosed pit viper is often mistaken for a saw-scaled viper, one of many new details in the March issue of the journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine. There are more than 250 snake species in India and more than 50 of those are venomous. Estimates for the number of venomous snake species in the United States range from 20 to 29, with all falling into four groups—rattlesnakes, copperheads, cottonmouths and coral snakes. (Technically, snakes are venomous, not poisonous, as they inject their toxin. Poison must be inhaled or injected.) Snakebites cause an estimated 50,000 fatalities annually in India, said Ian Simpson, a member of the WHO Snakebite Treatment Group, but just a dozen or fewer per year in the United States. The Big Four The hump-nosed pit viper isn’t one of the “Big Four,” a list of the region’s most deadly snakes that consists of the Indian cobra, common krait, Russell’s viper and saw-scaled viper, which now is known to closely resemble the hump-nosed pit viper. The difficulty in distinguishing the two snakes has likely led to many deaths due to confusion over how to treat the bites. “In the last century the ‘Big Four’ provided an easy means to alerting people to some of the most significant snakes,” said Simpson, also with the Tamil Nadu Government Snakebite Task Force in India. “Now it is outdated and proving confusing to doctors.” “It also curtails research into how many medically significant species there are,” he said. “Some people just refuse to accept that there are more than four and cling to outdated ideas that are decades out of date.” By constantly referring to the Big Four, Simpson said, doctors are misled about what antivenom treatment is best for their patients. Meanwhile, antivenom manufacturers have yet to produce new concoctions to protect against snakebites other than the Big Four. Better training Improving doctor training is a key factor for better treatment of snakebites, Simpson said. Much of Indian medical education is taught with Western textbooks that have snakebite chapters only relevant to American species. This leads to unnecessary antivenom use and much confusion. In addition, doctors in rural clinics uneducated in treating snakebites refer patients to better-equipped hospitals that often require the patients to travel for hours, often in a state of agony and/or shock, without antivenom. “We have developed protocols and support material to enable primary care doctors to treat snakebite with confidence,” Simpson told LiveScience. “These are being implemented in a number of states in India.” Top 10 Deadliest Animals Fear Of Snakes Drove Pre-Human Evolution Gallery: Snakes Of The World

The hump-nosed pit viper, Hypnale hypnale, a newly identified poisonous snake in India. Credit: Ian D. Simpson, WHO Snakebite Treatment Group and Tamil Nadu Government Snakebite Taskforce > Click to View

 Found at: LiveScience

Monster cane toad caught in Darwin

A cane toad the size of a small dog has been nabbed in the middle of a “breeding frenzy” at a Darwin suburb.Dubbed the ‘monster toad’ by its catchers, the 861-gram male is the largest to be caught anywhere in the Northern Territory, according to environmental group Frogwatch.

The warty pest was picked up by local volunteers during a community toad bust at Lee Point on Monday night.

Measuring 20.5cm in length, the colossal male was one of 39 toads caught in the middle of “a breeding frenzy”, said FrogWatch coordinator Graeme Sawyer.

“The biggest toads are usually females but this one was a rampant male,” he said.

“He is huge. I would hate to meet his big sister.”

The second largest toad to be caught in Darwin was a female measuring about 15cm.

“This monster is another five centimetres long and one third heavier,” Mr Sawyer said, adding that the toad was about the size of a small dog.

He said NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) ToadBusts were finding low numbers of toads in the city, except for Lee Point and the Coastal Reserve.

First released in Queensland, cane toads have since multiplied and marched across Australia, poisoning millions of native animals, including crocodiles in World Heritage-listed Kakadu.

Earlier this year, the NT government announced the arrival of the cane toad had forced two species of geckos higher up the Top End’s threatened species list.

FrogWatch is organising a series of weekly ToadBusts in key areas of Darwin’s rural, Palmerston and Darwin suburbs to try to minimise the wet season toad invasion.

AAP

 From The West Australian

——————————————————————————-

From the ABC :

Toad busters say the animal is more than 20 centimetres long and weighs more than 860 grams. FrogWatch

FrogWatch says last night’s toad bust in Darwin’s northern suburbs uncovered what it says is the biggest cane toad ever to be caught in the Northern Territory.

The pest was found at Lee Point along with 38 smaller toads.

FrogWatch organiser Graeme Sawyer says the monster toad is the size of a small dog, measuring more than 20 centimetres in length and weighing more than 860 grams.

“The only bigger cane toad I’ve seen [is] in a specimen bottle in a museum in Brisbane,” he said.

“I reckon I’ve probably seen 50,000-60,000 cane toads in the last 12 months and there is nothing even remotely close to this thing.”

Mr Sawyer says the toad is a huge shock.

“The biggest toads are usually females, but this one was a rampant male,” he said.

“He is huge, I would hate to meet his big sister.

“The highly publicised big female caught in the city recently was a little over 15 centimetres, this monster is another five centimetres long and one third heavier.”

FrogWatch has organised a series of toad busts in key areas of the Northern Territory to minimise the wet season toad invasion.

This week, called Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) week, there have been low numbers of toads everywhere in city locales, except at Lee Point and Casuarina Coastal Reserve.

South Africa: SPCA Man Held Hostage After Rescuing Mole Snake

Cape Argus (Cape Town)

March 25, 2007
Posted to the web March 26, 2007

Vusumuzi Ka Nzapheza

AN SPCA inspector who rescued a snake in Gugulethu was held hostage by a mob who wanted him to release the reptile so they could kill it.

Benson Kotsie was called to NY111 on Saturday following a complaint that a snake was in a Wendy house. He found it was a harmless mole snake.

He said he struggled for about an hour to catch the two-metre black snake, which slithered out of a wardrobe and into the ceiling. He finally caught it using special hand-activated pincers used to catch snakes.

Meanwhile, a crowd was swelling outside and trouble began after he placed the snake in a drum.

“I was confronted by a mob of about 50 or more people with rocks, bricks and sticks demanding that I should release the snake on the street so they could kill it,” Kotsie said.

When he told them he had come to rescue the snake and was to release it in the wild, the mob threatened to harm him and the snake.

“For about an hour I argued with the crowd. They said a snake was an evil thing and a sign of witchcraft. One man said I should pay R100 for permission to take the snake with me.”

Kotsie’s pleas that a mole snake was not dangerous fell on deaf ears.

The crowd, shouting for the snake to be killed, were finally brought under control when the police arrived.

“Only then was I allowed to leave. I took the snake to the Rondevlei Nature Reserve,” Kotsie said.

A conservation inspector for more than 10 years, he had often encountered incidents in which people did not understand wildlife, he said.

“They clearly did not know anything about snakes and refused to listen to reason. I told them the snake was not a threat, but they said it was put there by someone with an evil spirit.”

Kotsie said communities often placed different meanings on the presence of wildlife in their midst.

 

Found at:  allAfrica

Frozen Frogs, Fava Beans Unlock Role of Disease in Evolution

By Robin D. Schatz

March 26 (Bloomberg) — Cancer, diabetes and other life- threatening diseases may have evolved to help human beings survive other horrible fates — like succumbing to bubonic plague or freezing to death. That’s the bold hypothesis of geneticist Sharon Moalem in his new book, “Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease.”

Moalem, who wrote his book with Jonathan Prince, says that understanding the evolution of these genetically based maladies may lead us to new cures and treatments. I spoke with the 33- year-old scientist, who is also a medical student at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai School, at Bloomberg’s New York offices.

Schatz: Why did you write this book?

Moalem: As a geneticist, I couldn’t understand one thing: why would diseases today still be common, and I mean the genetic variety. So one in particular that I looked at was hemochromatosis — 30 percent of people from western European descent carry genes that predispose them to that condition.

Schatz: What is hemochromatosis?

Moalem: It’s a condition where you absorb too much iron from the diet. The problem is, all of that iron that you’re absorbing from your diet ends up in organs, and rusting them out, essentially. So you can end up with diabetes and liver cancer.

So it didn’t make any sense to me: Why would such a high percentage of the population have something that appears to be negative? And the more I dug, I came to the conclusion, by putting different information together, that it probably protected past populations in Europe against the bubonic plague.

Reverse Engineering

Schatz: Are you saying we need to view disease in a new context?

Moalem: Exactly. I think we’ve made the mistake of declaring war against disease. And when you use that conquer metaphor, and you don’t understand your enemy properly, you’re running the risk of failing miserably. We’ve declared war on cancer. We’ve declared war on obesity, on diabetes, without really stepping back and seeing if these conditions arose originally to protect to us.

Schatz: An example?

Moalem: Diabetes. People of a northern European descent are more at risk of type 1 juvenile diabetes. That’s the diabetes that is awful. It’s fatal, you need insulin and without treatment you die. But why northern Europeans? Well it’s pretty cold up in northern Europe. And I came across this frog called Rana sylvatica — it’s a wood frog — and it has the incredible ability of becoming diabetic every winter. It actually has reversible diabetes. And it does this to manage the cold.

`Frogsicles’

It becomes so diabetic that it could actually freeze solid, its heart stops, its brain stops. It becomes like this frozen frogsicle. Come spring, it defrosts.

So now researchers are actually looking at a frog that can freeze solid in winter to find a new treatment for diabetes, and you would have never gotten to this point if you didn’t step back and ask these basic questions.

Schatz: What do we learn from fava beans?

Moalem: If you have a deficiency called G6PD — it’s a genetic condition — you lack the ability to break down fava beans, and a few beans can be deadly. It’s mainly people who hail from the eastern Mediterranean — southern Italy, Sicily, Greece, Turkey — who have this problem. Why? It didn’t make any sense to me, because these are the regions that love fava beans.

This G6PD deficiency makes your blood cells inhospitable to malaria. It turns out that even if you don’t have this mutation, if you eat a couple of fava beans it makes your red blood cells dirty and it makes them inhospitable for this malaria parasite to live within your red blood cells. So people were actually, in a way, probably almost treating their malaria by feasting on fava beans during the spring.

“Survival of the Sickest” is published by William Morrow (267 pages, $25.95).

(Robin D. Schatz is an editor for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this story: Robin D. Schatz in New York at rschatz@bloomberg.net .

From: Bloomberg.com

Man Rushed To Hospital After Being Bit By Snake

(CBS4) UNINCORPORATED BROWARD A snake caused quite a scare as emergency crews scrambled to treat a man who was bitten by a poisonous water moccasin.

Police say the man, who is in his 20’s, was bitten Saturday night along US-27 at mile marker 40.

Emergency crews arrived on scene and noticed the victim was suffering from symptoms of swelling, discoloration, forcing them to take him to the Cleveland Clinic for treatment.

Officials were standing by at the clinic and began administering anti-venom when the victim arrived and said his injury was not life threatening.

Police are still trying to determine how the man was bitten.

MW

cbs4

The Hyla arborea project..

I am going to try to breed Hyla arborea , European Green Tree frog this year. The project is going to be an outdoor one.

I have recently reconstructed the bathroom in my house, leaving a shower unused, of rather exchanged to a bathtub. Now, this shower is to be made into a hopefully suitable outdoor vivarium for these little frogs. I have never had an outdoor viv before, so this is going to be really exciting to me.

First, I have to make sure that the little buggars don´t get out of there, therefore I am planning to put a meshroof on the top. First I have to build a rim, and then put the mesh in it. The mesh have to be made of stainless steel, not only not to rust, but as a protection against birds. Crows and Magpies, mainly.

There have to be sufficient airflow in the vivarium, so the lower half of the backpiece is also going to be made out of stainless steel-mesh.

In order to make the frogs in the right “matingmood”, there have to be water running from a mouthpiece of a shower for a couple of days. A pump that transtorts the water around, from the little “pond” in the bottom of the shower to the mouthpiece and around again.

I sure hope that my nextdoor neighbours can stand the noise from the calling males, they have good voices and can reach up to 90 decibel..

Hopefully I will find some good plants to put in as well..