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First European hatching for rhino rat snake

Zoologists at London Zoo have succeeded in welcoming to the world a rare species of snake which had not

Rare rhino rat snake born in London

previously been bred in Europe.

The rare rhino rate snake, or Rhynchophis boulengeri, originates from the mountains of Vietnam and feeds on geckos, frogs and rodents.

Attempts to increase the captive population of the snake, which features a horn-like feature protruding from its head, met with success and have delighted the Zoo’s staff as a result.

Eight snakes were produced in the clutch. Three have now gone to different collections as part of an exchange program to increase the captive population in European zoos.

The babies are currently black but will turn green when they reach around one year of age. They will grow to around 1m in length.

From inthenwes.co.uk

Now, I don´t know why they had to bang the big drum over this “rare” hatch. The species have been bred in captivity for several years.

Some examples:

CaptiveBred Reptile Forums: http://www.captivebredreptileforums.co.uk/showthread.php?t=9259&highlight=Rhynchophis+boulengeri

Terrarium Morbidum Forums: http://www.terrariummorbidum.se/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=52

New species of frog found in Karnataka

Kozhikode (PTI): A new species of wrinkled frog found active during night has been recently traced in the hilly ranges of Chikmagalur in Western Ghats, Zoological Survey of India sources here said.

‘Nyctibatrachus dattatreyaensis’ is a 40-mm-sized frog which differs from the other species in having high degree of small corrugations on the body with prominent discontinuous lateral folds, the sources said.

The new found species have golden yellow eyes with black rhomboidal pupil and the upper surface of its body is reddish black to stone black with two yellow lateral bands, they said.

“The dorsal colour of the species camouflages with the ferruginous substratum of its habitat which is essential for its survival from predators,” the sources added.

The finding has been published in the October edition of ‘Zootaxa’ journal of New Zealand.

The discovery assumes significance as it has come in the ‘Year of the Frog’ as declared by the Amphibian Ark – a joint effort of the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA).

As per the current studies, the species is limited to the hilly ranges surrounding the Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary in India and is not found anywhere else in the world.

The genus ‘Nyctibatrachus’ is endemic to Western Ghats and the species, named after Lord Dattatreya worshipped in Chikmagalur, is one among the 16 nominal species known in the world.

From The Hindu

Morse Toad: When amphibians tap their toes

Toe wiggling creates motions, vibrations that get potential prey moving.

Fowler's toads vibrate their hind toes when food shows up. Frogs and toads in at least seven families waggle their toes, though researchers are still figuring out what's going on. J. SloggettWhen some toad toes tap, maybe it’s the beat, not the motion, that matters.The resulting vibrations could agitate insects and other little morsels, setting them wriggling and scuttling in a flurry of activity that triggers a toad’s known tendency to strike at moving prey, says entomologist John Sloggett of Groningen, the Netherlands.Details of how a toad’s brain processes information about when and where to strike will require deep amphibian neuroscience. But Sloggett and Groningen ecologist Ilja Zeilstra propose that vibration deserves attention in the study of what’s up with all the toe wiggling among frogs and toads.An adult Cane toad wiggles it´s hind toes when little toads show up, am intriguing motion that draws bite-sized juveniles close enough to be a cannibal´s lunch. Video shown in real time, then slowed down.

That study of toe motion surged in 2008, with two papers: a study in January’s Animal Behaviour on cane toads’ habit of “pedal luring,” and a paper by Sloggett and Zeilstra in the online version of the November Animal Behaviour.

Cane toads flutter their toes when small prey appear, and the intriguing pedal lure draws little cane toads closer to bigger cannibalistic ones, reported Mattias Hagman, now at Stockholm University in Sweden, and Rick Shine of the University of Sydney in Australia, in January.

Hagman and Shine studied a colony of captive cane toads for research on how to minimize damage to Australia’s native landscape as these big, poisonous toads invade. Hagman noticed that the arrival of crickets or a nearby aquarium full of bite-sized juveniles set the long middle toes of the adults’ hind feet waving.

A Mozambique rain frog waggles its feet when offered a mealworm, and the sound recording (from both toes) indicates that the motion taps out strong vibrations, which could play a role in nabbing prey.Sloggett & Zeilstra. 2008 Animal Behaviour

To test the effects of toe waving, Hagman and Shine built a mechanical toe that could wiggle at various rates and affixed it to a taxidermy mount of a deceased toad. Waving the toe didn’t much interest the crickets. But the motion did entice clusters of the juvenile toads to move closer to the stuffed mount, Hagman and Shine reported.

Older cane toads near water could easily encounter youngsters clustering there during the dry season, Shine says. Dissecting more than two dozen adults from the wild, Hagman and Shine found that 64 percent of the adults’ meals had been even smaller toads of their own species.

“By understanding these interactions, we might be able to work out ways to turn cannibalism to our advantage,” Shine says.

Waving toes to create an alluring motion makes sense with visually responsive prey, says Sloggett. But for frogs and toads eating mainly invertebrates, which don’t respond much to gestures, maybe it’s the vibrations and subsequent frenzy of motion that matter, he and ecologist Zeilstra suggest in their new paper.

The two researchers keep frogs and toads as a matter of personal interest, and Sloggett even brought North American amphibians with him to Europe after he recently finished a project at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. Observation of some of those companions brings the total number documented to at least 13 species across seven frog and toad families, the team reports.

Getting information about an animal’s diet in the wild isn’t perfect, but several species are known to eat a lot of invertebrates. One such toe-wiggler, the Mozambique rain frog, Breviceps mossambicus, probably doesn’t prey on vertebrates because it has such a small mouth. This frog flexes its long middle toe when it catches sight of food, and by feeding a rain frog on a sheet of plastic, the researchers recorded strong vibrations from the toe tapping.

Toe flexing for useful vibrations “sounds plausible to me,” Shine says. “But the data are yet to be gathered.” And vibrations and motion can work together, Hagman says.

From Science News

Amphibians’ Ability To Predict Changes In Biodiversity Confirmed By New Study

Biologists have long suspected that amphibians, whose moist permeable skins make them susceptible to slight changes in the environment, might be good bellwethers for impending alterations in biodiversity during rapid climate change.

Now two University of California biologists have verified the predictive power of this sensitive group of animals in a global study of species turnover among amphibians and birds. The study appears this week in the advance online version of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Our study supports the role of amphibians as ‘canaries in the coal mine’,” said Lauren Buckley, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and the first author of the study. “Amphibians are likely to be the first to respond to environmental changes and their responses can forecast how other species will respond.”

“Amphibians are much more tuned in to the changes in their specific environments,” said Walter Jetz, an associate professor of biology at UC San Diego and the other author of the study. “They are much more sensitive to differences in environmental conditions as you move geographically from one location to another.”

The two scientists used maps of the environment and amphibian and bird distributions to answer the question of how the environment—as well as the distribution of birds and amphibians—changes as one moves from one place to another around the globe.

The researchers found that if the environment changes rapidly as one travels from one location to another, the amphibian and bird communities also change rapidly.  However, the species of amphibians would change more quickly than species of birds.  This confirms that amphibians are particularly sensitive to changes in the environment, the researchers conclude, and that this sensitivity is particularly acute given their narrow distributions.

Whether one is traveling through a tropical or temperature region also influences how quickly the types of animals change.  Given a mountain of a certain size, the researchers found, the amphibian and bird communities change more quickly if one is climbing a mountain in the tropics than in a temperate region.

“There are more species in the tropics and the species are generally more specially adapted to particular environmental conditions,” said Jetz. “This suggests that tropical species may be more severely impacted by a given temperature increase as a result of climate change.”

For the study, he and Buckley produced a series of global maps of environmental turnover and the associated changes in amphibian and bird communities that reveal that the identities of birds and amphibians change particularly quickly in mountainous regions such as the Andes and Himalayas.

“Understanding how environmental changes over space influence biodiversity patterns provides important background for forecasting how biodiversity will respond to environmental changes over time such as ongoing temperature increases,” said Buckley.

The study was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, UC Santa Barbara and the State of California.
Adapted from materials provided by University of California – San Diego.

From Herpdigest.org

Popular agrochemical linked to frog disease

Atrazine, one of the world’s most widely-used herbicides, makes frogs more susceptible to disease by compromising their immune system, US scientists suggest. The study provides further evidence linking the herbicide to a global decline in amphibian populations over the last three decades.

‘Amphibians are perhaps the most threatened vertebrates on the globe,’ says Jason Rohr, who led the work at the University of South Florida. Since the 1980s, he explains, amphibian populations have been declining at a startling rate. 

Local chemical pollution has been blamed along with global climate change. But links between pollution and amphibian diseases are not clear, says Rohr.

Rohr and colleagues studied parasitic infection of the leopard frog (Rana pipiens) – a declining species – in wetlands across Minnesota. Of 240 possible factors, the researchers found that atrazine and phosphate, a common component of fertiliser, were the best predictors of the abundance of parasitic flatworm infection in the frogs – which can lead to malformed limbs, kidney damage, and death.

The leopard frog, a species in decline

Back in the laboratory, the team found that frogs of various species exposed to atrazine were more likely to have a suppressed immune system, judging by measurements of immune cells. Atrazine also appeared to increase concentrations of the snails that harbour flatworm parasites. 

Banning chances

Atrazine has already been suspected of causing a variety of ill-effects in frogs, such as growth defects and reduced sex hormone production. The chemical was banned on fears of groundwater contamination by the European Union in 2004. But it is still commonly used in the US; in 2006, the country’s Environmental Protection Agency concluded there was not enough evidence to suggest the chemical was harmful to humans.

‘I doubt that further documentation of atrazine’s harmful effects on frogs will prompt a ban in the US anytime soon,’ says Pieter Johnson, an expert on amphibians at the University of Colorado at Boulder, US.  

‘In some respects amphibian development mirrors human development very closely and could therefore be used as a bioindicator. But in other regards, amphibians and humans are very different both ecologically and physiologically,’ Johnson adds. ‘Work such as this, in combination with more findings that atrazine could pose a threat to humans may push towards a ban in the US.’ 

A falling population of amphibians is itself a cause for concern, let alone any effect on humans, notes Rohr. Though bullfrogs and cane toads have been castigated for being invasive predators, most native amphibians are important for controlling insect pests that attack crops, and, as prey for birds and mammals, provide a link between freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems. 

Lewis Brindley

From RSC Cemistry World