Category Archives: herps

Ozark Hellbender Federally Endangered

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Yesterday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated the Ozark hellbender as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA). It also announced its decision to list the Ozark and eastern hellbender in Appendix III of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which will mean that international sales of the creatures will be monitored.

The Ozark hellbender is found only in a small region in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. There are about 590 of the salamanders left in the wild.

Read the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service press release, here.

The more widespread eastern hellbender, which shares a genus and several conservation issues with the Ozark hellbender is not included in either listing. The eastern hellbender is listed as endangered in Maryland, Ohio, Illinois and Indiana; threatened in Alabama; and is a species of special concern in New York. It is found in parts of 16 states.

Read the excellent backgrounder on eastern hellbenders from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, here.

Map: Courtesy of the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation.

Ozark Hellbender Federally Endangered

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Yesterday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated the Ozark hellbender as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA). It also announced its decision to list the Ozark and eastern hellbender in Appendix III of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which will mean that international sales of the creatures will be monitored.

The Ozark hellbender is found only in a small region in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. There are about 590 of the salamanders left in the wild.

Read the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service press release, here.

The more widespread eastern hellbender, which shares a genus and several conservation issues with the Ozark hellbender is not included in either listing. The eastern hellbender is listed as endangered in Maryland, Ohio, Illinois and Indiana; threatened in Alabama; and is a species of special concern in New York. It is found in parts of 16 states.

Read the excellent backgrounder on eastern hellbenders from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, here.

Map: Courtesy of the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation.

Toad in the Hole

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There is a lot of media coverage out there about the dire situation of the endangered Houston toad since a wildfire swept through its last stronghold, Bastrop State Park, 30 miles southeast of Austin, Texas. However, an article in the San Antonio News-Express points out that in the heat of the summer the toads burrow a foot or more underground to escape the heat. There is a chance that the toads were far enough underground when the fire swept through that they were insulated from the heat of the fire.

The article explains that it’s not the fire as much as the fragmented landscape that may seal the toad’s doom. The Houston toad is listed as endangered both federally and in Texas.

Read the San Antonio News-Express article here.

Read info on the Houston toad from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department here.

(Yes, that’s two toad stories in a row. Sometimes it works out that way.)

Photo courtesy of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

Disease is Less Potent Where There Are More Species

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Previous research has shown that higher levels of biodiversity leads to lower levels of infectious disease because of the “dilution effect,” where some species are poor hosts of the disease or may not be infected at all, slowing disease transmission.

The dilution effect has been studied in Lyme disease and West Nile.

A paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows the dilution effect at work in chytrid fungus infections in Western toads. Other news outlets have reprinted the press release from Oregon State University. (We have a OSU two-fer this week. Go Beavers.)

Read the original release via EurakAlert. 

The press release does not make clear that this was a laboratory experiment, or that the experiment was conducted with tadpoles. The Western toad tadpoles were raised in aquaria with American bullfrogs and Cascades frogs. You can read the Ph.D. dissertation that is the basis for the paper here. (It’s a big PDF, but that shouldn’t be a surprise.)

The laboratory setting with just three species (well, four, if you count the fungus) makes the conclusion that much more striking. It would be interesting to see how these findings hold up in the field.

Read the PNAS paper here (fee or subscription required).
Read a conference summary of the research from the Ecological Society of America annual meeting here.

Photo: Western toad. Courtesy Oregon State University.

Love, Lizards and Prescribed Burns

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Alan Templeton, a scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, has been studying collared lizards for decades and has been in love with them since he was a teenager. He found that the lizards only survive as far east as Missouri in an unusual fire-dependent ecosystem. But after a population decline, prescribed burns on these ecosystems didn’t help the lizard’s recovery much. It took landscape-level burns to get the ecosystem back in working order so the lizards could thrive.

Templeton’s paper on the lizard study is on the cover of the journal Ecology this month. 

Read the story from Washington University here.

Read the original press release from Washington University here.

Read the paper in the journal Ecology. (Free access.)

California Wins Big with USFWS Grants

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Santa Cruz long-toed salamander

California scooped up nearly half of the $53 million in U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund (CESCF) grants that were announced by the service last week. The grants are in three programs: the Habitat Conservation Plan Land Acquisition Grants Program, the Habitat Conservation Planning Assistance Grants Program, and the Recovery Land Acquisition Grants Program.The grants fund land purchases and facilitate partnerships with private landowners, conservation groups and other government agencies.


Forty-eight projects in 17 states were funded. Fifteen of those projects were in California, and they received grants totally $24.9 million.


Last year the service began accepting applications for the grants on November 16. No word on this year’s date.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service’s press release.


The complete list of grants awarded.


General information about the endangered species program’s grants.

Photo: One of the beneficiaries of California’s Endangered Species grant bonanza. Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service

Bad News for Endangered Frog

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The Los Angeles Times reports that 104 of the 106 mountain yellow-legged frogs that were rescued from a wildfire in 2009 have died mysteriously in captivity. There are believed to be about 200 of the frogs still in their native habitat in the California mountains. The species is listed as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act.

The US Geological Survey ecologist leading the recovery effort says he still has hope for the species. And judging by the reader comments on the article, hikers in the region are having no problem finding the frogs, although I have to wonder if they are confusing them with a similar-looking species.

Read the Los Angeles Times story here.

Read the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s species profile here.

Photo: Courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service

Why Did the Turtle Cross the Road?

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bog turtle

Actually, “Where are the turtles crossing the road and getting hit by cars?” is the focus of a Massaschusetts citizen science research project, and it is one of several turtle research projects going on in this year of the turtle. For more info, read this article on the Massachusetts turtle road-crossing project in the Springfield Republican.

Here are seven other sources of information on turtles and turtle research:

Maryland Amphibian and Reptile Atlas (MARA), a five year project that began in 2010 and will end in December 2014.

The USA Turtle Mapping Project is being run by the US Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station. It is focusing on seven species of freshwater turtles and tortoises to find out their current ranges.

Not surprisingly, PARC, the creator of Year of the Turtle has a list on its Web site of turtle citizen science projects. It’s a PDF. Here are some of the US-based land- or freshwater turtle projects on the list that aren’t already mentioned:
Blanding’s Turtle Research – Great Meadows, Massachusetts
Gopher Tortoise Tracker – Volusia County, Florida
Lake George Turtle Monitoring Program – Lake George, New York
North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences Neighborhood Box Turtle Watch
Western Pond Turtle Presence, Absence Monitoring Project -Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, California
Texas Turtle Watch 

Another resource on the PARC Year of the Turtle site is an Excel spreadsheet of 87 relocation, reintroduction, translocation, and headstarting projects. Turtles make up more than half of these projects, the rest are for other reptiles and amphibians. The idea, the site says, is to allow scientists running similar projects to get inside information on what worked and what didn’t so future projects can build on the past.

When it comes to turtles, the news is pretty bad, but it’s not all bad news. In June so many diamondback terrapins headed upland from Jamaica Bay in New York City that a runway at Kennedy Airport was closed. Here’s a news story, and background information from the journal Science.

We don’t normally cover research outside the US, but since we gave wildfires in the West so much coverage earlier this year, and because it is the year of the turtle here’s an exception. A paper in the journal Biological Conservation says that a species of tortoise in Spain can withstand wildfires every 30 years or so and still maintain its population levels. Read an article about the study in Science Daily, or the whole paper in Biological Conservation (or rather, read a free abstract and pay for the whole paper).

Finally, don’t forget our mini round-up of box turtle data earlier this year. You can find that post here.

Photo: Box turtle Credit: Laura Perlick, courtesy of US Fish and Wildlife

Box turtle data bonanza

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Courtesy of US Fish and Wildlife

The current issue of American Midland Naturalist has three papers on turtles, and two on eastern box turtles. The first box turtle (Terrapene carolina) paper examined the clutch size and clutch frequency of box turtles at the Wertheim National Wildlife Refuge on eastern Long Island, NY. The researchers X-rayed the turtles they hand-captured. About 40 percent of the females captured were found to have eggs.

The big surprise for the researchers was that the average clutch size was 4.1 eggs. A previous study conducted in Connecticut (just across Long Island Sound from the research site) was 6.7 eggs/clutch. Yet another study in Maryland reported an average clutch size of 4.6. The Long Island study also found that clutch size did not appear to be related to body size in any statistically significant way. The authors suggest that clutch size may have more to do with specific local conditions than general geographic location.

Another surprise was that 95 percent of the turtle eggs survived at nests protected against predators, suggesting that egg predators play a big role in the population dynamics of eastern box turtles. You can find the paper here.

In the second paper, Indiana researchers radio-tagged box turtles and followed them for two years. They found that 96.2 percent of the turtles they tracked survived annually. Winter survival was lower than survival through the months of the year when the turtles were active (95.6 versus 96.7). Get more information from the paper, here.

Counting parasites when hosts are hard to find

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In this paper from Conservation Biology, researchers counted what proportion of mud snails were bedecked with a trematode cyst that, as an adult, parasitizes terrapins. They felt this would be easier than directly counting diamondback terrapins on the Georgia coast. It has got to be a lot easier to ID a diamondback terrapin than a specific species of trematode cyst, but still, a very cool idea with the potential to be used in other hard-to-survey species.

Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service