Seychelles home to new species of caecilian, a legless amphibian

by Mongabay.com on 19 October 2017

The petite Praslin caecilian (Hypogeophis pti) is the world’s newest — and possibly the smallest — caecilian, a type of legless amphibian.

Scientists discover the animal on the island of Praslin in Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean.

The new species is the seventh caecilian species found in the Seychelles, where the amphibians have been evolving for 64 million years.

A team of scientists from Seychelles, the United States and the United Kingdom has found a new caecilian, perhaps the smallest species of the legless amphibian on Earth.

“As soon as I saw it I knew it was a new species,” said Simon Maddock, a conservation biologist at the University of Wolverhampton in a statement. “[It] is a very exciting discovery and I was delighted to be able to formally describe it and present it to the world.”

Maddock and his colleagues discovered what they’re calling the petite Praslin caecilian (Hypogeophis pti), named for the island of Praslin in Seychelles where they found it in 2013 and 2014. They reported their findings Oct. 6 in the journal Zootaxa.

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Protecting Olive Ridley sea turtles in Odisha - Forest department monitors world's largest rookery – via Herp Digest

By Surbhi Kapila Posted On : October 16, 2017 

The smallest of sea turtles found in the world, the Olive Ridleys have their largest rookery in India but are facing a constant threat – the forest department is alarmed now.

Every year, the Olive Ridley sea turtles flock the Ganjam Coast on the eastern Indian state of Odisha. Found in the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, the mass nesting of these turtles is a USP for the state’s tourism business but is calling for a watch.’

Around 175 turtles were found dead on the 40-kilometres-long Ganjam coast in 2015-16, and 153 in 2016-17, a senior forest official said.

An endangered species, the annual gathering of the Olive Ridley sea turtles is going to be protected by forest officials, who have launched a drive to sensitise fishermen to adopt measures to ensure safety.

Experts say most of the deaths of the turtles are caused by fishing trawlers, and hence the step taken is necessary.

Each season, the state government imposes a ban on the use of mechanised trawlers, which set out fishing on the 170 kilometre coast.

From the third week of October to the first week of November is when the Olive Ridley sea turtles start arriving for mass nesting from the mouth of Rushikulya river in the Ganjam district. This is the period when fishing trawlers cannot enter the 20-kilometre ‘no Fishing Zone’.

“We will take stringent action against trawlers found violating the prohibition when it comes into force,” said A K Behera, Divisional Forest Officer (DFO), Berhampur. The fisheries department and forest officials will jointly conduct patrolling to crackdown on illegal fishing activities in the area, he added.

The department has two-speed boats, and at least two trawlers would be hired for patrolling. However, the Odisha traditional fish workers’ union has urged authorities not to impose the restriction on fishing with motorised boats, as it does not harm the turtles. “We also urged the authorities to compensate the loss of livelihood due to the ban on fishing activities,” said its union secretary, K Alleya.

The forest department is also seeking the cooperation of wildlife activists, local NGOs, local industries and Gopalpur Port authorities. Hundreds and thousands of the sea turtles visit Gokharkuda-Purunabandh Ganjam district.

This year, between February 14 and 22, over 370,000 Olive Ridley turtles laid eggs near the Rushikulya river.

The Rushikulya and Devi river mouths of Odisha, along with the Gahirmatha beach are famous as the world’s largest Olive Ridley rookery.

Shrews' Heads (and Brains) Shrink As Seasons Change

By Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer | October 23, 2017 01:40pm ET

In creatures with backbones, skulls get progressively bigger as the animal grows to maturity, but then tend to stay the same size thereafter. However, something happens to the skulls of adult red-toothed shrews that is exceedingly rare among vertebrates: The animals' heads shrink and expand in synch with seasonal changes.

For the first time, a team of researchers has documented the complete cycle of these dramatic changes in living Sorex araneus shrews, describing their findings in a new study published online today (Oct. 23) in the journal Current Biology.

The researchers captured X-ray images that recorded the shrunken and recovered states of the shrews' skulls and brains, finding that the animals' heads contracted by up to 20 percent in preparation for winter and ballooned back to their previous size over the spring and summer. [The World's 6 Smallest Mammals]

This shift in skull size— known as the Dehnel effect — was previously documented in studies of the skulls removed from deceased shrews. But this is the first evidence to track this remarkable adaptation in living animals over time and link it to other biological changes, the study authors reported.

For the new investigation, scientists captured 12 wild red-toothed shrews, so named because of a reddish tint in their front teeth caused by iron deposits in the enamel, according to a study published in 2006 in the Journal of Mammalogy.

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Specieswatch: efforts are being made to preserve the Arctic char in Britain

Some 10,000 young char have been released into Kielder Water with the aim of saving this ancient fish, an important relic of our past

Paul Brown

Sunday 22 October 2017 21.30 BSTLast modified on Sunday 22 October 2017 22.00 BST

The Arctic char, Salvelinus alpinus, is a remarkable survivor from the ice age in Britain, having been trapped in various lakes and Scottish lochs for 10,000 years. As a result, if you manage to catch one, the fish may look considerably different from those in other lakes, because they have had many generations to evolve to survive in local conditions after being cut off from the oceans when the ice retreated.

Some scientists went to the trouble of designating each of these populations of Arctic char as separate species because of these different characteristics, but this idea has generally been dropped as too difficult, not least because there are dozens of cut-off populations, some yet to be described.

Further north than Britain in colder waters, particularly Norway, char are numerous, dominating some rivers in the Arctic regions too cold for salmon and trout. Like salmon these char migrate out to sea, returning to spawn, but do not die with the effort and can return many times. In the UK and Ireland they have adapted to live all their lives in cold freshwater.

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Fear of spiders, snakes deeply embedded in us from birth - (Editor of HerpDigest -Huh? Not me, ever.) - via Herp Digest

10/22/17 Nation, PARIS-Many people would shiver at the thought of a spider crawling along their arm, or a snake slithering up their leg.

But in western, industrialized countries, especially in middle Europe, most people have never come across a poisonous spider or snake in the wild.

Now, researchers may know where this fear comes from - we’re born with it.

Even babies fear images of spiders and snakes, and researchers say the reaction could have been embedded in the brain for an evolutionarily long time due to the coexistence of these potentially dangerous animals with humans and their ancestors for more than 40 to 60 million years. The fear of spiders, arachnophobia, can develop into anxiety which limits a person’s daily life.

Some people can’t even enter a room unless it’s been declared ‘spider free,’ if the fear is severe.

In developed countries, one to five per cent of the population are affected by a real phobia of spiders or snakes. 

Until now, researchers with the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) say that it wasn’t clear where this widespread anxiety stems from.  While some researchers assume that we learn this fear from our surroundings when we’re children, other say that it’s innate.

However, previous studies on this topic are flawed in that they were conducted with adults or older children - making it hard to determine which behaviors were learned and which were innate.

These sorts of studies with children only testes whether they spot spiders and snakes faster than harmless animals or objects, not whether they show a direct physiological fear reaction.

So researchers at MPI CBS in Leipzig, Germany and the Uppsala University in Sweden conducted a study which found that even in infants, a stress reaction happens when they see a spider or snake.

They found that this happens in infants as young as six months-old, when they are still very immobile and have not had much opportunity to learn that these animals can be dangerous.

‘When we showed pictures of a snake or a spider to the babies instead of a flower or a fish of the same size and color, they reacted with significantly bigger pupils,’ says Stefanie Hoehl, lead investigator of the underlying study and neuroscientist at MPI CBS and the University of Vienna.

‘In constant light conditions this change in size of the pupils is an important signal for the activation of the noradrenergic system in the brain, which is responsible for stress reactions.

‘Accordingly, even the youngest babies seem to be stressed by these groups of animals.’

The researchers concluded that the fear of snakes and spiders is of evolutionary origin, and similarly to primates or snakes, mechanisms in our brains allow us to identify objects and to react to them very quickly.