Spring is here!

It's official. Spring is here. I don't pay any attention to calendars, etc.; it's spring when the lizards and snakes come out in force. And this has just happened on the Central Coast.

A couple of weekends ago my students and I took our first big group outing to our field site in the Carrizo Plain. I spent Saturday with the lizard crew, catching and marking lizards as part of a long-term study.

Ben and Kelsey photographing a pretty blue male Sceloporus:

Saturday night we had the first big dinner of the year, yum!

Sunday I joined the snake crew to track the rattlesnakes. About half of our snakes were out basking, and we found several new snakes as well. Here's a large male on SnakeOut Hill (so named by the students because so much snake amor has been witnessed there).

All of the snakes we captured, whether they were radiotagged or new captures, were well under normal body weight. In fact, the lizards seemed quite skinny as well. The drought last year took a terrible toll on the animals, and I really hope they recover this year so we can see how their movements and behaviors change.

Stay tuned for some snake amor photos soon! It will be happening any day now.

Who's afraid of snakes?

Chances are that if you're reading this blog, the answer is: not you. But we all know how many people out there have a snake phobia. Have you ever wondered how much of this is ingrained and how much is learned?

A study I read about today supposedly shows that the fear of snakes (and spiders) is "hard-wired", meaning NOT learned, in humans. Now, I firmly believe that this is true in some animals, and am reminded of this every time my big bad 85-lb German Sherpherd, who has never had a traumatic run-in with a snake, runs cowering into the other room when I remove a shed skin from one of the snake cages. But in humans? This study, which unfortunately will not be published until next month so I can only rely on the media, supposedly shows that snake phobia is hard-wired because pre-schoolers and adults alike notice snakes in a montage of other animals much more quickly. Without having read the paper, and shaped by my own experiences, I am not inclined to believe this science is rigorous in theory or practice. By the way, if anyone thinks that pre-schoolers are too young to have already "learned" to fear snakes from TV, listening to their parents, etc., think again. A recent study of 3-5 year olds found that they thought food tasted better if it came in a McDonald's wrapper. I'd say that's pretty good evidence that pre-schoolers have already begun to form opinions about things based on their experience (and advertising!).

Until I am able to read the paper myself, I will share with you why I believe that the fear if snakes is mainly LEARNED in humans. Put plainly, little kids like snakes. No, they LOVE snakes. I had the priviledge of visiting Georgia Brown Elementary School in Paso Robles this week to teach second graders about snakes.

[I had some photos but removed them due to privacy issues- suffice it to say the kids were thrilled and LOVED those snakes!]

Most adults hate snakes. I believe that this is largely a learned behavior, from watching stupid movies like Anaconda and Snakes on a Plane. Even the nature channels on TV, especially Discover Channel, hype up the snake shows to the point where they misrepresent snakes as being aggressive when in reality they're only trying to defend themselves.

Anyway, thanks to Mrs. Knowlton at Georgia Brown for inviting me to hang out with snakes and second graders, my favorite kind of people (that includes the snakes!).

A Sign of Spring

We went out to the field site this weekend to check on our radiotagged Northern Pacific rattlesnakes. The snakes have been "hibernating" underground in rocky outcrops since November. The weather had been quite warm following our recent heavy rain. Here's what typical rattlesnake habitat looks like in the Carrizo Plain:

We were thrilled to see one of our 18 snakes out basking in partial sunlight. We needed a blood sample to measure the snake's hormone levels, and we wanted to measure and weigh the snake to see if last year's drought had a negative impact. This is C4, a medium-sized male we've been radiotracking since Oct 2006.

Marty tubing the snake:

Marty and the students (Bree, Ben, and Craig) examining the snake:

In a few more weeks... hopefully a few more snakes!

Yawn!

Ah, February is a strange month. It is a somewhat boring month, because it's still too cold for herps to be out in force. But it is also an exciting month, because March is on the horizon! Ah, how I love almighty March, when the oak trees are covered in sleepy lizards and the rock outcrops are full of amorous rattlesnakes.

February hasn't been all bad, especially for amphibians. This is why my yawn was followed by an exclamation point! We've had a lot of rain lately followed by a few days of warm weather. So there have been some signs of ectothermic life. Check out what Marty has found, mainly under logs, in our yard in the past few days:

California newt

California kingsnake

Ensatina

Slender salamander

Western fence lizard basking

Here are a few photos from a recent trip to Tucson to visit da Rev.

Hiking in Pima Canyon

A cardinal (which is a reptile. Ask me why.)

After the Gem and Mineral show:

In other news: revenge of the ticks! I came home recently to find Marty sporting a mild case of Conjoined Twin Myselexia.

Normally the twin is big, grey, and stinky (our old doggie Darwin, who never willingly lets Marty out of his sight), but that day it was one of my good old Ixodes buddies. I tried to talk Marty into letting the tick feed to repletion so I could get its offspring, but he was having none of that!

Hunting for ticks

No, I am not referring to the hunt for stowaway ticks in various body crevices after a hike. I am talking about actually going out on a hike to look for ticks on purpose! What mad hatters would do this? I did last weekend, along with my friend and collaborator Larisa, a veterinary entomologist.

Our mission was to collect ticks for a research project, which brings me to why there is a post on ticks in this Herpblog. Briefly, the goal is to infect lizards with tick larvae to study various aspects of host-parasite relations in a lab setting. (By the way, the root word for herpetology is herpetos, which is Greek for "crawling," another very tick-like word!) We collected adult Western Black-legged ticks (Ixodes pacificus) in order to breed them and obtain larvae.

Larisa and I met at Montana de Oro State Park, an area with sufficiently moist vegetation to support heaps of these ticks. At first glance, the area looks quite dry:But when you hike into the trail a bit, it becomes quite moist and lush:

Collecting ticks is easy, and fun! We use "flags," which are big pieces of fabric attached to a metal pole. We simply drag the flags along the ground as we hike, periodically checking them for unsuspecting ticks that thought they were grabbing onto a big piece of animal fur. Here is a photo of Larisa flagging (Incidentally, if you take a close look at her belly, you'll see that she currently has more than a casual interest in parasites! :-):

And here is a photo of endoparasite-free me:

Female Ixodes are larger than males. Here is a photo of a female (left) and male (right) on the flagging:

We caught about 60 ticks in a couple of hours and placed them in these vials:

We are going to place all of the ticks on a horse on campus to breed them. The males will crawl around the horse looking for females, and they will mate with the females. Larisa told me that the males deliver sperm to the females through their mouths! The females will attach to the horse and become engorged, and we will then take them into the lab and put them in a humid chamber, where they will lay their eggs, and thousands of little tick larvae will emerge. Then we will finally have the larvae we need to infect lizards!

After a day of hiking and tick-collecting, I spent the evening lounging with my tick-free buddy Darwin on the couch.

Boas, beaches, and banditos... Oh my!

I ushered in the new year with a trip to the Cayos Cochinos islands in Honduras to help some friends of mine in a study on boa constrictors. I knew there would be some good adventures, but I had no idea that a whole week of these adventures would be done in one pair of socks...

All four of us flew in from different states -- Chad from Missouri, Phil from Florida, Leslie from Georgia, and me from California-- and spent the night in La Ceiba before heading out to the island. Here are some pix of us at the Expatriates Bar.

We ended up staying an extra day in La Ceiba, however, because our baggage had not arrived on the planes with us! The airline assured us that they had loaded up dozens of bags onto a truck and were transporting them from San Pedro Sula to La Ceiba. So, we left Phil behind to get the bags, while Chad and Leslie and I went out to the island.

Here's what the island looks like from the boat:

We arrived at Cayo Menor the morning of December 28. There is a beautiful little research station on the beach, as well as a nice hilltop restaurant with great views of the mainland.

After breakfast it was time to get started! Chad started gathering up every snake bag he could find at the research station, as though we were going to catch a dozen snakes. How many boas would we find before lunch? I aimed high because I'd been told the boas were common on the island-- 3!! Chad just grinned and kept gathering snake bags. Then we set out on the first big hike up the center of the island, and I soon saw the source of grin-- boas were everywhere!

The pink boa constrictor of Cayos Cochinos is much smaller in size than boas on the mainland. Chad and other researchers are trying to determine why this is, and what consequences it has for the ecology of the snakes. The goal on this particular trip was to measure the total body water of the snakes (in the rainy season) to compare to the value in the dry season (they had already collected these data the previous summer), using stable isotopes. Time to get out those deuterium samples! Er- they are in the luggage, which hasn't arrived yet. We'd better wait for Phil's arrival with our bags the next day.

Phil did indeed arrive the next day, but we grew suspicious when we saw him wearing a La Ceiba tourist shirt. The truck the airline has hired to deliver our luggage had been hijacked by banditos! Of course, the island we were on has no stores. As the reality that we would be spending a week on the island with 1) no clothes but what we had on our backs (except Phil with his new gay shirt), 2) no research equipment to do the body water study, and 3) no toothpaste, soap, sunblock... well, you get the idea. We were four stinky kids.

So what did we do? We alternated between pouting, boa hunting, and iguana catching. Considering the circumstances, we had a really great time. Our discomfort was somewhat ameliorated by Leslie lending us some toothpaste, etc. (she had packed her stuff into a carry-on and escaped the banditos!), but especially by the Flor de Cana rum we talked one of the staff members into getting us from another island.

Here are some more photos:

Tarantula:

Weird cocoon (about 5 inches long!):

Anoles mating:

Treefrog:

Vine snake:

Lessons learned on this trip:

1. Carry on if you can!

2. Get travel insurance! (We still haven't been reimbursed by the airline, and will likely only get a small fraction of the value we lost)

3. Six-day-old socks aren't nearly as offensive when used properly, with Flor de Cana.