Scientists have shed new light on one of the great unanswered questions of neuroscience: How the brain initiates rhythmic movements like walking, running and swimming.

A drug made from the saliva of the Gila monster lizard is effective in reducing the craving for food. Researchers have tested the drug on rats, who after treatment ceased their cravings for both food and chocolate.

The need to have big-mouthed babies drove the evolution of giant tiger snakes on Australian islands, new research shows. The findings offer a new dimension to the study of island gigantism and dwarfism.

A FOAM cooler will be the unlikely vessel carrying the young of one of Australia’s most endangered species from Melbourne Zoo to the marshlands of Mount Kosciuszko next week.

Inside the cooler will be five plastic tubs containing 60 black eggs each. Resting on moss like jewels on velvet, the precious eggs belong to the striking black and yellow southern corroboree frog.

With fewer than 100 southern corroboree frogs remaining in the wild, the species’ critically endangered status means slumming it in a cooler is unusual. Normally this species enjoys the Rolls-Royce treatment.

These eggs started life at Melbourne Zoo’s $75,000 amphibian centre, a purpose-built climate-controlled facility that is playing a key role in the captive breeding program in Victoria and NSW.

And although they will travel to their new alpine address in a cooler, it will be a helicopter that drops them at their remote mountain-top home on Tuesday.

Amphibian keeper Raelene Hobbs said while the zoo had been participating in a national recovery program since the mid-1990s, it was the first time it had released corroboree frog eggs into the wild.

Given the dire results of the most recent ”frog census” taken during breeding season, it’s a tactic researchers are hoping will pay off. Between December and April, researchers recorded just nine males calling in the wild and found just one clutch of eggs.

”It probably means there are barely any females left in the wild,” Ms Hobbs said.

One of the main threats to the frog’s survival in the wild is the water-borne disease chytrid fungus, which attacks the keratin in the animal’s skin cells. Because frogs breathe through their skin, infected frogs die from asphyxiation.

After releasing frogs and tadpoles in the past, researchers are hoping a new approach might help pull back the wild population from its precarious position.

”The eggs can’t get chytrid fungus because they don’t have keratin,” Ms Hobbs said. ”If we continue to release … then evolution might happen in front of our eyes and hopefully the metamorphs might be able to build up a resistance.”

The 300 eggs produced at Melbourne Zoo during March and April will be released with about 500 from Taronga Zoo and 19 from Healesville Sanctuary.

The eggs will be released at three carefully selected sites into 4 degree water and Ms Hobbs said they would hatch within 24 hours.

However, because the frogs only reach sexual maturity at four or five, the effect of introducing eggs to the wild will take years to measure.

”Really, though, we have to release them now because they are going to be extinct in three or four years if we don’t,” she said.

The frog only occurs in the Snowy Mountains region of Kosciuszko National Park. The small ground-dwelling frogs do not hop, but clamber over their mossy habitat.

 

Source: Bridie Smith | Sydney Morning Herald

Scientists have announced the discovery of a new species of lizard from remote, war-torn mountains in Central Africa. The new species is described from the Marungu Plateau, a montane area west of Lake Tanganyika in south-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Scientists have announced the discovery of a new species of lizard from remote, war-torn mountains in Central Africa. The new species is described from the Marungu Plateau, a montane area west of Lake Tanganyika in south-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Biologists have released seven young Louisiana pine snakes on a restored longleaf pine stand in the Kisatchie National Forest in Louisiana. The release is the fourth in two years, part of a plan to restore a very rare snake to its range in Louisiana.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—Scientists are hoping that one of the world’s largest frogs is singing songs of love on the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat and not just singing in the rain. Mating calls would mean the so-called mountain chicken frogs are looking to breed and hopefully dodge extinction. But scientists say the whooping calls they make by night could also be due to the rainy season.

The mountain chickens are the offspring of dozens of frogs weighing up to two pounds (0.9 kilograms) that were airlifted to Britain and Sweden in 2009 in hopes of saving them from a deadly fungus that has killed nearly 80 percent of the species.

In the past year, scientists have brought back nearly 100 more frogs and released them into a rocky valley filled with small ponds where they like to hide. Breeding season has started, and scientists are anxiously waiting to see if the frogs actually mate.

“We were entering a very difficult situation three years ago,” Andrew Terry, field program director with British-based Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, said Friday. “A species we knew well, that was already under pressure, was brought to the very edge of extinction.”

Durrell is one of three institutions abroad that helped rescue the frogs and created a breeding program that has resulted in dozens of offspring. Frogs also were sent to The Zoological Society of London, Chester Zoo and Parken Zoo in Sweden.

The whooping calls on Montserrat is an encouraging sign, and the male frogs also have started to grow a black spur on their legs used to hold females during mating, said Sarah-Louise Smith, project coordinator with the island’s Department of Environment.
But challenges remain.

Twelve of the 33 frogs released earlier this year have died, and the batteries of the radio transmitters inserted into the surviving frogs have lost power after transmitting data for three months, making it harder for scientists to track them.

Of the 64 other frogs released last year, nine have died from the fungus and the last one was seen in November, but Smith said she believes the others have moved elsewhere because they can cover great distances in limited time. One frog traveled 900 meters (3,000 feet), or the equivalent of nine football fields, in only a couple of hours, she said.

The chytrid fungus also remains a potent threat. Cane toads and tree frogs in Montserrat are still carrying the fungus but are not affected by it.

“Their population remains high, and so does the fungus,” she said.

Scientists are awaiting lab results to determine the prevalence of the fungus compared to 2009, when it killed hundreds of frogs by causing the skin they breathe through to thicken. Chytridiomycosis also causes lethargy and convulsions. Eventually the frogs die of starvation or cardiac arrest.

Terry said Durrell will continue to breed the frogs that were flown to the institution and release the offspring into the wild.

“It was a contentious and very carefully thought through decision to release animals back because we knew that the disease was still present in the environment,” he said. “We had to expect that some of the frogs would succumb to the disease.”

The fungus already has devastated the mountain chicken frog in nearby Dominica, whose coat of arms bears the amphibian’s image and where the frog’s chunky legs were long considered a local delicacy.

Source: Danica Coto | Mercury News

Twenty-four new species of lizards known as skinks have been discovered on Caribbean islands, half of which already may be extinct or close to extinction. The loss of many skink species can be attributed primarily to predation by the mongoose — a predatory mammal that was introduced by farmers. Other types of human activity, especially the removal of forests, also are to blame, according to the researchers.

The fungal infection that has killed a record number of amphibians worldwide leads to deadly dehydration in frogs in the wild, according to a new study. High levels of an aquatic fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) disrupt fluid and electrolyte balance in wild frogs, the scientists say, severely depleting the frogs’ sodium and potassium levels and causing cardiac arrest and death.

Scientists have proposed that the bony structures in the skin of many early four-legged creatures might have been there to relieve acid buildup in bodily fluids. Analysis of their anatomy suggests that as they ventured out of water, the animals would have had trouble getting rid of enough CO2 to prevent acid buildup.

Scientists have studied loggerhead turtles’ re-adaptation to the environment. The results show that after a lengthy recovery in rehabilitation centers these animals display changes in behavior and may not adapt well to being free.

Stressed out lizard moms tend to give their developing embryos short shrift, but the hardship may ultimately be a good thing for the babies once they’re born, according to a new study.

MANILA – Two new species of frog have been discovered in fast-disappearing forests in the Philippines, boosting hopes for the survival of the country’s rich but threatened wildlife, scientists said Tuesday.

The new discoveries are a mottled brown frog with red eyes and a broad yellow stripe running down its back, and a yellow-green one not much bigger than a human thumb, British-based Fauna and Flora International said.

Country director Aldrin Mallari said the finds should boost conservation efforts in the Philippines, which has extremely diverse plant and animal life but where many species are threatened by extinction.

“Many (environmental) institutions and funding agencies have written off the Philippines because we only have 20 percent of our forests left,” he said at a forum at the National Museum where the finds were announced to the public.

“Yet many of these species, even if they are threatened, have this resiliency.”

His team discovered the frogs in Leyte island’s Nacolod mountain range in November last year. Their dwindling habitat also harbored 62 other reptiles and amphibian species, 36 mammal species, 112 bird species, and 229 plant species.

“A lot of these are critically endangered because of fragmentation,” Mallari said.

The Nacolod range’s once-expansive forest cover is almost gone, with trees cut down for timber or burnt off to free up land for farming, he said. The remaining patches of forest are no longer visible by satellite.

The long-term survival of the diverse species will depend on the Philippines’ ability to protect habitats from further exploitation, Mallari said.

The brown frog specimens measured about 43-55 millimeters (1.7-2.2 inches) while the yellow-green ones were 20-27 millimeters (0.8-1.1 inches) long. They have not yet been formally named.

US-based Conservation International lists the Philippines both as one of the 17 countries that harbour most of Earth’s plant and animal life, and a “biodiversity hotspot” due to massive habitat loss.

Theresa Lim, wildlife protection chief of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, told the forum that despite this, apart from the frogs 36 new plant and animal species were discovered in the Philippines in the past 10 years.

“We have to do something. We don’t want them to disappear immediately after they are discovered,” she said.

Source: Inquirer News