Scientists discover new lizard in Truong Son

The new species of lizard

VietNamNet Bridge – A group of three Vietnamese and two German scientists discovered a new species of lizard in the Truong Son mountain range.

 

The new animal (Cyrtodactylus pseudoquadrivirgatus or sp. n. Rösler, Nguyễn, Vũ, Ngô & Ziegler, 2007) belongs to the Gekkonidae family.

 

This lizard lives in the forests of the Truong Son mountain range, stretching between the Kon Plong District in the Central Highlands province of Kon Tum through Ba Na National Park in the central city of Da Nang to Bach Ma National Park and A Luoi forest in the central province of Thua Thien – Hue and Huong Hoa District in Quang Tri Province.

 

The discovery was reported in Hamadryad Magazine in December 2007.

 

The group of scientists who discovered the lizard include Nguyen Quang Truong from the Hanoi Institute for Ecology and Fauna Resources, Ngo Van Tri from the HCM City Institute for Tropical Biology, Vu Ngoc Thanh from the Hanoi National University, Herbert Rosler from Tierkunde Museum and Dr. Thomas Ziegler from Cologne Zoo.

 

This discovery and recent others proves that the Truong Son mountain range is a center of biodiversity in Vietnam which needs to be preserved, protected and discovered.

 

According to Ngo Van Tri, a scientist from the HCM City Institute for Tropical Biology, 2008 may be the year for lizards and geckos as over ten new species will soon be announced.

From Vietnam Net

Merry Christmas!!!

..and a Happy New Year!

To all of you that have been wieving and reading my blog this year..

Here is a picture that I have been working for hours in Photoshop with..  Not.. 

Endangered NSW frog disappearing

The New South Wales Government has warned an endangered frog species at Port Kembla, near Wollongong, is disappearing.

A species recovery project conducted by the Department of Environment and Climate Change has found the green and golden bell frog has disappeared from many places around Port Kembla.

Department spokesman Paul Wearne says while establishing safe habitats is necessary, the frogs must also be able to move between areas.

“It’s all good to have that created habitat but what we also need is how we get it all connected together,” he said.

“What we have to build is the corridors to get to all these key bits of habitat around the area.”

From ABC News

California Red-Legged Frog Jumps into Court

SAN FRANCISCO, California, December 19, 2007 (ENS) - Conservation groups filed a lawsuit today in federal district court in San Francisco seeking to overturn a decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reduce protected habitat for the California red-legged frog.The frog, dramatized in Mark Twain’s story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” is a California native once found from the central coast to the Sierra Nevada foothills.

The public interest law firm Earthjustice filed the California red-legged frog suit on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity against Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne and Dale Hall, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service.

At issue is an April 13, 2006 Endangered Species Act rule adopted by the service that reduced the critical habitat for the California red-legged frog from 4.1 million acres to about 450,000 acres.

The suit claims that the service agreed to revise the frog’s critical habitat rule as a result of a “closed-door settlement” between industry and the service that was approved over the objections of a coalition of conservation groups.

The California red-legged frog (Photo courtesy USGS)

The California red-legged frog suit is one of 13 being filed today challenging the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s refusal to properly designate and protect “critical habitat” areas for 13 endangered species in California, Oregon, New Mexico and North Carolina.

Today’s lawsuits challenge the slashing of 4,223,036 acres of critical habitat for the California red-legged frog, arroyo toad, three plants in California and four invertebrates in New Mexico, and the failure to consider critical habitat protection for four additional plants in California, Oregon and North Carolina.

The suits are part of broader effort by the Center to challenge political corruption harming 55 endangered species and over 8.5 million acres of wildlife habitat.

Lawsuits over six other species were filed in November.

The California red-legged frog’s critical habitat rule is one of several dozen species decisions that may have been manipulated by former Interior Department Deputy Assistant Secretary Julie MacDonald, who resigned in disgrace in May 2007.

Both the Inspector General and Government Accountability Office have ongoing investigations in political interference by MacDonald and others in Endangered Species Act decisions.

The lawsuit claims the service’s decision that over 3.5 million acres is not frog “critical habitat” is a “direct result of pressure by the Interior Department, in particular by former Deputy Assistant Secretary Julie MacDonald, to reduce protections for the frog for the benefit of private landowners, the livestock industry, and other special-interest groups, at the expense of the scientific integrity of the final rule.”

“The red-legged frog won’t survive unless we protect its habitat,” said Mike Senatore, senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity, “Julie MacDonald’s interference is inexcusable.”

“We’re headed back to court not only to protect Mark Twain’s celebrated jumping frog, but also to protect the scientific integrity of the Endangered Species Program,” said attorney Erin Tobin of Earthjustice.

In its complaint, the Center for Biological Diversity says, “The final critical habitat rule excludes over 200,000 acres based on an economic analysis that does not meaningfully consider nor analyze all of the likely benefits of designating such areas as critical habitat for the frog.”

Benefits of designating critical habitat ignored by the Service in the final rule include protection of ecosystem functions such as water filtration, erosion control, and climate and air quality control.

“Although members of the public repeatedly informed the Service of this error in public comments on the proposed rule, the Service did not consider many such benefits because the Service found that it was too ‘difficult’ to estimate their value,” the conservation group complains.

“The California red-legged frog, once common across the state, appears to have been the victim of politics,” said Tobin. “We urge the Department of the Interior to promptly revise the frog’s critical habitat and fix the mess created by Julie MacDonald and possibly others.”

The California red-legged frog, Rana aurora draytonii, is the largest native frog in the western United States, ranging in size from 1.5 to five inches long, but it is smaller than the introduced bullfrog, one of its biggest predators.

From Environment News Service

Swedish article about some Redeared sliders on a hotell: Sköldpaddor checkar ut

Någon som är intresserad av elva vattensköldpaddor?

Spekulanter kan höra av sig till stadshotellet i Västerås som ska göra sig av med sina husdjur.

– Sköldpaddorna checkar ut för gott efter årsskiftet, säger hotelldirektör Tobias Hultberg till TV4 Nyheterna Mälardalen.

Sköldpaddorna har bott i en damm på hotellet i 25 år men i takt med att kräldjuren har vuxit har dammen blivit för liten. Djurskyddsmyndigheten kräver att dammen byggs ut, vilket hotellet inte anser sig ha råd med. Om sköldpaddorna inte hittar nya hem kommer de sannolikt att avlivas.

From Aftonbladet

Reptile tunnel features in new airport road

A new access road has been opened at Robin Hood Airport Doncaster Sheffield, which its builders claim features the country’s first ever reptile tunnel.

The £5 million stretch of road was opened yesterday (December 12), with the airport’s shuttle bus being the first vehicle to travel along it, and it also features more than a kilometre of cycle way.

Peter Nears, of Peel Holdings the parent company of the airport owners, said: “Environment issues are at the forefront in the design of the new road. With over 1,200 metres of cycle paths installed, combined with our commitment to encouraging airport users to travel by public transport.

“Suitably today, the very first vehicle to have used the new road being the Airport Arrow shuttle bus service. We will be planting some 6,000 new trees and shrubs, and as we continue to seek to act responsibly towards our surroundings, the construction of the country’s first ever reptile tunnel being a significant achievement by all involved.”

The tunnel was built to protect existing reptile habitats, and provide new environments for them, with reptile friendly fencing also installed around the road and the tunnel features internal heating and lighting to prevent wildlife using it for hibernation.

The road will relieve traffic from Hayfield Lane and Auckley and is part of an overall scheme to bring together the airport, its business park and associated businesses including the new Ramada Encore Hotel, due to open in the summer.

From CheapFlights

Tanzanian dwarf toads get WB loans

A diminutive toad has become an unlikely recipient of World Bank loans, with the latter having indeed offered 3.5 million U.S. dollars to help conserve the toad’s natural habitat. The World Bank and the Tanzanian Finance Ministry signed over the weekend the loan agreement in hope of boosting the survival of the Kihansi Spray Toad.

The World Bank money will be spent on an environmental program known as the Lower Kihansi Environment Management Project which also aims at improving the water quality in the Kihansi River.

The World Bank loans came at a time when international conservationists are preparing to return home some of the Kihansi Spray Toad which have been brought up in captive breeding in the United States where two zoos are accommodating some 500 Kihansi toads from Tanzania.

The government of Tanzania and international development partners started in 2000 the captive breeding program to make sure that the Kihansi Spray Toad, a dwarf toad measuring no more than three quarters of an inch long in adulthood, do not become extinct.

Discovered in 1996, the toads are only found in spray zones around the Kihansi and Mhalala waterfalls in the Udzungwa Mountains in southern Tanzania.

But the toad has soon been listed as a critical endangered species due to a restricted habitat range, a fast habitat loss and a declining population.

Tanzanian Natural Resources Minister Jumanne Maghembe announced earlier this year that some Kihansi toads are expected to return from the United States to their natural habitat at the waterfall spray wetlands.

“We are planning to return the species in phases at the end of this year,” said the minister.

The diversion of water away from the waterfalls in the Kihansi Gorge and into the power generation plant at the namesake hydropower dam has resulted in a loss of about 95 percent of the toad’s habitat and hence the significant population decline.

Since April 2000, 90 percent of the water that formerly maintained the toad’s habitat has been diverted into a tunnel to power the Kihansi hydropower plant. This has caused 95 percent of the spray-dependent habitat to dry up.

The number of Kihansi Spray Toad plummeted from an estimated 21, 000 individuals to some 50 individuals around 2003 for a population crash.

Researchers Jeremy Thompson and James Gibbs tried to spot a live Kihansi Spray Toad in late 2004 but failed to sight one in the spray wetlands within a time span of three months.

Other factors that have added to the decrease of the Kihansi Spray Toad included the release of toxic substances which accumulated due to water reservoir sedimentation and the existence of the chytrid fungus in the Kihansi river water.

The Kihansi Spray Toad, scientifically known as the Nectophrynoides asperginis, is one of seven species in the genus Nectophrynoides in the family Bufonidae.

The genus, having one of the most restricted ranges of any vertebrate in the world, is found only in a 0.2 square km spray zone wetland around the Kihansi and Mhalala waterfalls.

The toad is dependent on the delicate habitat maintained by the spray from the waterfalls.

In recognition of the rarity of the genus Nectophrynoides, it is listed on Appendix 1 of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) thereby prohibiting any commercial trade.

Nike Doggart from the Tanzania Forest Conservation Group has pinpointed the contradiction of the development of the hydropower dam and the survival of the toad.

The fact that the Kihansi hydropower plant generates up to a third of the country’s electricity supply has rendered the dam unfeasible either politically or economically to close down.

On the other hand, mortality rates among the captured toad individuals have been high, i.e., 55 percent for adults and 45 percent for the young due to lung worm parasites and related infections.

Conservationists, boosted by the money from the World Bank, will now try one of the few remaining feasible ways to “re-locate” the toads back to their natural habitat which is expected to be improved by the World Bank money.

Though officials from the Tanzanian Finance Ministry are optimistic, those from the Tanzania wildlife conservation NGOs would not agree with them too readily.

Nike Doggart said that the chance for success is bleak if the Kihansi water level could not return to their previous level to re- generate the waterfalls and therefore the spray zones under them.

Even if the Kihansi environment should not change for the better for some time, animal lovers can still see the miniature toads as they are now being kept in the Bronz Zoo in New York and in the Toledo Zoo in Ohio in the United States. The Toledo Zoo is the only place in the world where the miniature toad is on display.

From Trading Markets

Cat survives snake necklace

THIS would have to be one of the luckiest cats alive.

Nine-year-old Jelly spent some time yesterday walking around with a copperhead snake wrapped around her neck.

Owner Wendy Wallis said Jelly wandered back in to their property, which borders Sorell Creek north of Hobart, about 11.30am yesterday carrying the snake with her, the Mercury in Hobart reports.

She called wildlife rescuers who removed the snake.

“Both the cat and the snake seemed quite happy,” Ms Wallis said.

“She didn’t show any signs of a bite last night, but this morning she was almost paralysed.

“She’s at the Montrose vet at the moment being pumped full of anti-venom, but the vet says she’ll recover fully.”

Ms Wallis said she hadn’t noticed any snakes on the property, but the previous owners and neighbours had seen them regularly.

She added it was a timely reminder about snakes being about at this time of year.

Jelly may well be thinking “One life down, eight to go!”

From HeraldSun

Added bite to snake discovery

WELSH snake experts have discovered a new species of giant spitting cobra that can kill 20 people with a single dose of venom.

Specialists at Bangor University ran DNA tests on a 9ft beast found in Kenya – one of the deadliest creatures alive – and confirmed it was of a kind never before seen.

The snake, named Naja Ashei after James Ashe, the man who first suspected it was of a separate species, was found lurking in one of the country’s up-and-coming tourist areas and is the largest of its kind in the world.

Mr Ashe, who died in 2004, founded the Bio-Ken Snake Farm research centre in Watamu and had suspected the existence of the lethal serpent in the region for years.

But it wasn’t until Dr Woldgang Wuster of the University of Wales analysed samples of the creature’s blood and urine that those suspicions were confirmed.

Toxicologists now hope to develop and produce an effective antidote to the poison the cobra can, when reared up, fire into its victim’s eyes – a shot which can be accurate at up to five metres.

Highly secretive, spitting cobras can live near houses for years without being seen.

Royjan Taylor, director of the Bio-Ken Snake Farm, said: “We advise holiday makers to be most careful if one is seen in the wild.”

A link to the taxonomic paper. PDF-file.

From icWales

Mike’s Pond to be protected habitat for gopher frog

The endangered Mississippi gopher frog has a new 292-acre protected habitat.The parcel - called Mike’s Pond - was presented this week to The Nature Conservancy. The pond is named after its discoverer, biologist Michael Sisson.

Sisson was a Mississippi Museum of Natural Science biologist who was studying Mississippi gopher frogs in Glen’s Pond in DeSoto National Forest. He also surveyed other Southern Mississippi ponds, looking for remnants of frog populations or the possibility of setting up new colonies.

He discovered a small group of frogs in the pond in Jackson County in 2004.

There are about 100 Mississippi gopher frog adults left in Glen’s Pond and Mike’s Ponds, zoologists say.

“It’s the rarest of the rarest. No one knows how long it will take to sustain the population,” said Tom Mann, a zoologist with the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science Natural Heritage Program.

Mann said the frog lays eggs in ephemeral ponds, which only fill at certain times of the year. Tadpoles develop in the water, then live as adults in the abandoned holes of forest creatures such as the gopher tortoise.

Mike’s Pond holds water a little longer than Glen’s Pond, Mann said, and will be a good site to rekindle the frog population. Glen’s Pond dries up before tadpoles can grow, and biologists have started rearing future frogs in tanks.

The frogs’ land habitat has to be burned regularly to clear out brush, which will be a challenge with subdivisions nearby, Mann said. More people are moving north, lessening the space that can be safely burned.

The Nature Conservancy owns many parcels of land in Mississippi, and in addition to Mike’s Pond, has another with the potential to house gopher frogs, said Robbie Fisher, the conservancy’s state director.

“The more habitat provided, the better chance we’ll have of preventing this frog from going extinct,” she said.

 From SunHerald