Brilliant sound dub on this, by the way. Apparently it’s from one of the Alien movies.

Put a starving frog in front of video ants, and this is what you get.

Not sure where this came from, but I love it.

Amateur Herpetologists, grab your camera phones! It’s time to go lizard hunting for science!

From the website: “There are over 9,000 recognized species of reptile in the world. Many are extremely poorly known and many more are threatened with extinction. The Global Reptile BioBlitz is the sister effort to the Global Amphibian BioBlitz and aims to collect amateur observations of every species of reptile. Together, we can map where these incredible creatures persist and insure their conservation into the future.”

Both the Global Reptile and the Global Amphibian BioBlitz are powered by a website called iNaturlist.org, developed by UC Berkeley students teamed together with Stanford researchers and many other conservation organizations.

What they want YOU to do is to go lizard / snake / turtle hunting, capture pictures of what you find, and upload these pictures to the website along with the GPS position of where you took the photo (most modern smart phones with cameras will do this, as can regular digital cameras augmented with a Eye-Fi SD memory card.

Every observation helps! And what a great excuse to go catch some lizards.

Trust me, this is relevant to the website — just keep watching…

…and the iPod and iPad. Yes, my herp-centric friends, the future is here. You can now carry around your beloved Audubon field guides on your iPhone.

I always liked the Peterson guides better, though, especially the Western guide by Robert C. Stebbins – an exceptional guide by an exceptional Herpetologist who is also an exceptional artist. Too bad those aren’t available on your iPhone.

(I just checked — they aren’t, even as eBooks. So the Audubon version is the best you’re going to get.)

I only have two comments about this video:

1) That wasn’t a water moccasin. You can tell by the head that it wasn’t a poisonous snake.

2) Even if it had been poisonous, it’s still a vital part of the ecosystem, and all the driver had to do is pull over and let it crawl safely off the car.

But these people were terrified, so you couldn’t expect them to act rationally. And why were they terrified? Because of the lack of education about snakes.

Sad.

Interesting article from BBC Nature describes an Anole which has demonstrated actual problem solving skills.

“The results, published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, suggest that reptiles are more intelligent than previously thought.”

Ah, but we already knew lizards are awesome.

Read the full article here:

• Lizard has Problem-Solving Skills By Victoria Gill