Remembering Bert Langerwerf.

The world loses the lizard man.

 

By Russ Gurley

Bert Langerwerf, one of the most exciting and innovative reptile breeders in the history of our hobby, passed away August 11, 2008. Bert was well-known for his great sense of humor, and his desire to share his knowledge about keeping and breeding lizards.

Having bred more than 135 species of reptiles, Bert was a true pioneer in reptile breeding. His famed Agama International, a 7-acre farm in Alabama, annually produces thousands of lizards that have made their way into reptilekeepers’ homes throughout the United States, Europe and Japan.

Bert was also responsible for some of our hobby’s most important innovations. Finding that the temperature at which incubating eggs were kept determined the sex of many lizards he produced, he was responsible for early work on temperature-dependent sex determination. Bert also made many early observations about lighting requirements for lizards. Stating terrarium glass filtered out ultraviolet light, he wrote that in the 1970s he realized lizards kept indoors were not receiving the full spectrum of light. Vitamin supplements were also featured in Bert’s early writings. He reported an improvement in lizard health and breeding with their use.

He also excelled at adapting items for his use. “Bert’s ability to scrounge materials with which to construct hundreds of breeding cages, and to collect surplus food for his bug (herp food) colonies, was extraordinary,” said longtime friend Bill Love. “Bert Langerwerf personified recycling and advanced herpetoculture in the process long before it was trendy and necessary for the planet.”

Bert is survived by his wife, Hester; son Aleksis and daughter-in-law, Shae; son Timo and his girlfriend, Isabella; brother Andre; and mother, Coralie Poppelier Langerwerf. Bert leaves mourning family in the Netherlands, and countless friends and colleagues all over the world. His passion has been an inspiration to us all.

More Memories of Bert

By Russ Case

In June of 1994 I attended my first International Herpetological Symposium in New Orleans, La., and that was where I first met Bert Langerwerf. Bert was friendly and eager to share his knowledge about breeding lizards and other herp topics, and soon after our meeting he was writing for REPTILES. Bert was the first to breed the super mealworm (Zophobas morio), and he was anxious to tell people about it. Thus, his first article, “Super Mealworms,” appeared in the October 1994 issue.

Bert pitched many article ideas over the years, and we were always happy to hear from him. Editing Bert’s articles could be a challenge. In early years they would show up written in longhand, sometimes in outline form. So we’d decipher his handwriting and type his words into our PCs. Typically we don’t accept handwritten articles, but Bert was a legend, and his REPTILES contributions were something special. They were always packed with useful information, and readers loved them. His last article for us, “Totally Tegus,” appeared in the June 2008 issue.

Over the years I saw Bert regularly at the National Reptile Breeders’ Expo. I sometimes wondered how we appeared when we met. I had to talk really loud because Bert was hard of hearing, and I also frequently asked him to repeat himself because of his Dutch accent. Always ready with a huge smile, he never changed, remaining one of the friendliest herp people I’ve ever met.

At the 2006 NRBE he suggested that he and I take a train trip across Europe to visit with different reptile breeders. He thought it would make a great article. It probably would have.

I will miss Bert Langerwerf, a true gentleman and forever a titan in the herpetological world.

 

Bert Langerwerf holds a black and white Argentine tegu. About 10 percent of his Tupinambis merianae turned red, orange or yellow during the winter. Photo courtesy Bert Langerwerf.	Bert Langerwerf holds an Argentine black and white tegu (Tupinambis merianae). The species was one he discussed in his last article for the magazine. Photo courtesy Bert Langerwerf.

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Bert Langerwerf is pictured with his wife, Hester, in 2005. Photo courtesy Russ Gurley.	Bert Langerwerf and Russ Case smile at the 2004 National Reptile Breeders’ Expo after Bert was presented his World-Class Reptile Breeder award. Photo courtesy Sandy Quinn.

From Reptile Channel.com

 

Rare frog breeding happily

This week is Conservation Week, with the theme Meet the Locals Tutakitia te Iwi Kainga. The Marlborough Express headed out to meet some of them.  

 

Crawling along a boardwalk on your stomach in the middle of the night on an isolated Marlborough Sounds island, preferably in the rain, is the only way you’ll ever find an endangered Hamilton’s frog.

With tiny bodies and huge eyes, the frogs live among damp rocks under forest canopy on two Marlborough Sounds locations, Stephens Islands and Nukuwaiata Island in the Chetwodes.

The Marlborough amphibians are one of the world’s rarest frogs, with an estimated population of just 250 to 300.

Biz Bell, a senior biologist for Wildlife ManagementInternational, is one of just a handful of people in the world lucky enough to regularly see the reclusive frogs.

Twice a year she visits the islands to monitor their progress by sliding around on boardwalks, so she does not tread on a frog, by night.

Ms Bell says she has developed a keen eye to spot the frogs which are just 12mm in size as juveniles and up to 49mm as adults.

She says the frogs may be tiny, but they are fascinating.

Hamilton’s frogs don’t croak; Ms Bell said at most they produce a tiny squeak, and they emerge from their eggs as a frog not a tadpole. They live in damp hollows rather than in or near water. Adult females lay just seven or eight eggs and then leave dad to hatch and raise the young which he carries on his back. The family will spend several months in a rocky hollow, and dad often looks a lot thinner when he finally emerges, Ms Bell says.

Hamilton’s frogs were discovered in the 1930s on Stephens Island. There is evidence they once lived on New Zealand’s mainland but Ms Bell says even early Maori did not know they existed because of their reclusive lifestyle and diminutive size.

In 2004, 40 frogs were transferred to Nukuwaiata from Stephens Island, followed by another 31 in 2006 to establish a second population. This year, Ms Bell and volunteer Kelvin Floyd found 37 of them plus the first juvenile frog found on Nukuwaiata, showing the population was happy and breeding.

It’s a huge step in the right directions for one of Marlborough’s tiniest but most unique locals.

From The Marlborough express.

Frog hunt: In search of the world’s rarest frogs

A team of researchers is in Costa Rica attempting to track down some of the world’s rarest frogs to aid their conservation.

The country used to be teeming with amphibians, but numbers have plummeted in recent years – largely because of a deadly fungus.

Science reporter Rebecca Morelle joins the University of Manchester and Chester Zoo team as they head into the rainforest.

Science reporter Rebecca Morelle was with the team when they found the tiny frog.

Video

We have now moved from the frog-laden forests of the Costa Rica Amphibian Research Center up to the highlands of Monteverde, where the hunt for some very rare species has begun.

This area used to be teeming with amphibians – but since the population crashes of the late 1980s this is no longer the case.

An eerie silence pervades the cloud-shrouded forest, with only the occasional frog call breaking through.

Our plan this evening was to track down a critically endangered frog called the red-eyed stream frog, which the team are trying to learn more about to aid its conservation.

The red-eyed stream frog is extremely rare

Given that the frog is tiny, nocturnal and extremely rare, the task seemed to verge on the impossible – but the team had a few tricks up their sleeves.

We had been joined by naturalists Mark Wainwright and Alexander Villegas from Costa Rica, who came armed with a special CD packed full of red-eyed stream frog mating calls that had previously been recorded in the forest.

And as soon as we passed a site where the little frog had been seen some months’ earlier, at the touch of a button a soft, whistle-like call began to fill the air.

Seconds later, another near-identical sounded back – but this time the noise did not come from the speakers, but from a tree just above a stream.

After carefully scanning the leaves with torches, the tiny male, measuring just a few centimetres long was spotted – a beautiful little creature with red eyes and vivid green skin.

Getting some footage of it was quite a privilege – the team believes that this is the first time it has ever been filmed.

Video

From BBC

Unusual Snake Surfaces in Southeast Missouri

The scarlet snake looks very much like the more common red milk snake but has been found in only a handful of places in the Show-Me State.

A rare snake has surfaced in southeastern Missouri, giving Show-Me State herpetologists confirmation that the species still exists here.

Natural History Biologist Bob Gillespie reported the discovery of a northern scarlet snake (Cemophora coccinea copei) July 31. Prior to the most recent discovery, only five scarlet snakes had been documented in Missouri. State Herpetologist Jeff Briggler said the find resulted partly from luck and partly from scientific curiosity.

“Bob Gillespie and Brandon Blechle put out a few drift fences to see what herps they could find,” said Briggler. “It was a lucky catch.”

A drift fence is a low barrier that directs crawling animals toward a trap.

Briggler said Missouri and Arkansas mark the western extent of the scarlet snake’s distribution. They are fairly abundant along the East Coast. Nowhere are scarlet snakes seen as routinely as other species.

“They seem to be easier to find back east,” said Briggler, “but around here they have always been rare for a couple of reasons.”

One of those reasons, said Briggler, is that scarlet snakes are fossorial, which means they are adapted for digging and spend most of their lives underground, rarely emerging on the surface.

“We have had five official records of this species before this one, four in the Lake of the Ozarks-Fort Leonard Wood area and one south of Branson,” he said. “One of them was found under a rock on a glade. The others were found dead on roads. The last sighting was in 1978.”

“We think this species probably is more abundant than it would seem. One of them showing up in southeast Missouri is very interesting, because based on our records they are found more in the Ozarks. But when you think about it, out east they are found in sand flatwoods, so maybe they are more abundant in sandy areas here and people have never looked for them. Maybe you just have to trap them to come across them a little more often.”

Although the find is interesting, Briggler said he does not think the new discovery will change the way the species is classified. It might lead to more intensive study, however.

“It’s good to know it is still here and part of the biodiversity of the state,” Briggler said. “It probably won’t change the conservation status of the species, but this new discovery could focus more attention on it, so biologist start looking for it more.”

Briggler said the scarlet snake would be easy for amateur herpetologists to confuse with the red milk snake (Lampropeltis triangulatum). Although the two species’ overall appearance is similar, two fairly obvious characteristics distinguish the two.

The scarlet snake’s snout is pointed and red all the way to the tip, and its belly is unmarked. The red milk snake’s nose is more blunt, and it is not red at the tip. Furthermore, the more common species’ belly has dark blotches.

“With the discovery of a scarlet snake in southeast Missouri a lot of people might think they have found one when they really have a milk snake,” said Briggler. “We certainly don’t want people catching and keeping scarlet snakes, so in order to verify a sighting we need good photos of the tip of the snake’s nose and of its entire belly. Without those, it would be almost impossible to be sure it was a scarlet snake.”

Female scarlet snakes usually lay only three to eight eggs. What is known of the species food habits indicate it is especially fond of other reptiles’ eggs. It also eats frogs, salamanders, insects, slugs and earthworms.

From Kansas City infoZine News

The Fabulous Frogsicle

On these clear, blue, autumn mornings, when golden leaves flutter to the ground, the musk of highbush cranberries crinkles your nose and puddles glass over with a thin sheen of ice, a person may wonder what wood frogs were thinking when they hopped this far north.

These palm-size, desert-camo creatures have not a pinch of bodily insulation. Their smooth, clammy skin is more suited to a creature that needs to shed heat than one that needs to conserve it, yet they live in North Pole, in Livengood, all the way north to Anaktuvuk Pass. At the end of the cul-de-sac of cold-blooded creatures, they are the only amphibians that live north of the Arctic Circle (by comparison, more than 400 species of amphibian live in Ecuador). The lonely arctic frog is perhaps the most oxymoronic creature in Alaska.

A few northern scientists interested in bodily adaptations to cold have scratched their heads while pondering far-north frogs over the years. In 1972, a graduate student named Michael Kirton wondered where wood frogs went when the temperature dropped. He employed the best technology of the time—radioactive chips that he implanted under the skin of a few frogs—and that September, he took to the woods with a Geiger counter, carefully scanning the ground around the pond where he had captured the frogs weeks earlier. He heard the telltale radioactive clicks from his chips in places he didn’t expect—the forest floor, far from where he captured the frogs.

Rana sylvatica doesn’t need large ponds or lakes to breed. They sometimes choose bodies of water that capture spring snowmelt. Because these little pools often dry up before summer’s end, laying eggs here is a gamble for a creature that begins life as a tadpole. That risky behavior pays off because those meltponds don’t sustain fish that would eat a wood frog, and the forest near the shallow water warms more quickly than the area around a large pond, giving the frogs a jump on the breeding season.

The forest also comes to the frogs’ aid when it’s time to hunker down—late August or early September over much of their range in Alaska. The duff on the forest floor—moss and sticks, and dried leaves and needles—is loose enough for a determined frog to wedge its way in, kicking and shoving, until it is completely covered.

A few decades after Kirton’s Geiger-counter experiment, miniature electronics evolved to the point where University of Alaska professor Brian Barnes thought transmitters were small enough for use with the tiniest creatures out there. Barnes—a physiologist who once got the arctic ground squirrel on the cover of the journal Science by finding that its body dropped below freezing during hibernation—enlisted his students in a study of the Alaska wood frog. Late in summer, they captured a few frogs in the Goldstream Valley north of Fairbanks. They superglued tiny transmitters to the backs of wood frogs, then let the frogs hop away. The class wanted the same information Kirton sought with the Geiger counter, but took the study one step further, placing tiny temperature probes next to the frogs as they settled for the winter. They wanted to see just how cold an Alaska frog could get.

They tracked one frog to the sand near a horse corral; another tunneled half a foot into loose moss. Until the insulating snow arrives, the frog isn’t much protected by the blanket of dry forest litter, so it must steel itself to winter some other way. Beginning in September, as its Alaska home changes from liquid to solid, so does the wood frog.

Wood frog bodies survive this freezing in a novel way: by becoming sweeter. Triggered by cold, a frog’s tiny liver begins cranking out glucose, which floods all the frog’s cells. This sweet liquid allows cells to freeze without the points of ice crystals puncturing cell walls, which is what destroys our skin when frostbite claims the tip of a finger or toe.

As the cold autumn air pulls the heat from the ground, it does the same to the wood frog. First, the frog’s eyes freeze hard as little ice cubes. Then its feet and toes become hard.

Awash in sweetness, the frog becomes ready for the deeper penetration of cold. As the fall days pass, deep cold migrates to a frog’s internal organs, shutting them down and freezing them one by one. On a late fall or early winter day, a frog’s final functioning organ, its heart, stops beating. If you were to dig up this frog and hold it in your hand, it would appear squashed, legs and arms tucked close to the body, eyes closed; a cold, polished stone.

Humans would die with frozen hearts, but that’s where adaptations of the animal kingdom trump human cleverness and fiberglass insulation. In springtime, the frog warms—somehow its heart thaws before its extremities—and it hops away to breeding water to get to business.

For all their amazing machinery, frogs have their limits, too. In the lab, scientists have found that Lower-48 wood frogs perish when the temperature drops to about 20 degrees F. Barnes and his students found that the Alaska version of the frog survived air temperatures of 10 degrees F. The fact that air in northern Alaska sometimes drops 70 degrees colder than the frog’s lower-lethal temperature shows the wonderful insulating quality of snow, which, with six inches or more, keeps the ground’s surface near 30 degrees no matter how cold the air above it, allowing Alaska frogs to survive

An Alaska expert on amphibians has guessed that the wood frog long ago hopped across the land bridge from the equatorial regions of Asia. As generations passed, some wood frogs made it all the way to Georgia. But some remained, settling near the Arctic Circle, creating a bizarre and lonely niche wintering beneath the footprints of moose and caribou.

This northern life requires an Alaska wood frog to remain frozen for at least half the year. That’s two of their four years on the planet as frogsicles, waiting out the winters with their brains frozen as hard as pondwater, without a croak of complaint.

From Alaska magazine