Daily Reptile News

Boy, 8, says he was bitten on the wrist by snake at elementary school in Canal Point

CANAL POINT — An 8-year-old boy said he was bitten on the wrist by a snake this morning at K.E. Cunningham/Canal Point Elementary School, officials said.

According to as statement released the afternoon by Palm Beach County Schools, the student told school officials that he had been bitten by a snake during the school’s carnival.

The boy was examined by the nurse who found no trace of a bite, the statement said.

Palm Beach County Fire-Rescue Capt. Don DeLucia said paramedics were called to the school about 11:20 a.m.

They examined the student without finding any evidence, according to the schools statement.

“No students or teachers were able to corroborate the incident,” the statement said. “The parents took the student home.”

Russia may ban tigers, crocodiles as pets

Moscow: Crocodiles, tigers and penguins may soon disappear from Russian homes if the parliament clears a bill that bans “exotic” animals from being kept as pets.

A bill on animal care that is pending with the parliament may include a list of animals that are “inadvisable to keep at home”, chairman of the lower house’s natural resources committee, Yevgeny Tugolukov, said.

The list includes “exotic animals” such as tigers, snakes, crocodiles and monkeys that are popular with Russians, but that can carry dangerous diseases.

The bill was submitted to the State Duma Monday.

Russia is a nation of pet lovers. Even Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has all sorts of animals as pets.

A Siberian tiger cub – Mashenka – was given on Putin’s 56th birthday two years ago, while a labrador named Connie was given to him in 2001 when he was president.

The former KGB agent also has a Persian gazelle, a crocodile, a cat, two poodles and a she-goat and her offspring.

Putin was recently gifted a puppy by his Bulgarian counterpart, Boyko Borisov. The Bulgarian Karakachan puppy was given after the two countries signed a gas deal in Sofia.

DOD tries to uncover secret of flying snakes

An unusual breed of Asian snakes can glide long distances in the air, and the Department of Defense is funding research at Virginia Tech to find out why.

Most animals that glide do so with fixed wings or a wing-like part. But not the “flying snakes” of Southeast Asia, India and southern China – at least five members of the genus Chrysopelea.

As video of the reptiles show, they undulate from side to side, in almost an air-slithering, to create an aerodynamic system. It allows them to travel from the top of the biggest trees in the region (almost 200 feet high) to a spot about 780 feet away from the tree’s trunk.

“Basically . . .they become one long wing,” said John Socha, the Virginia Tech researcher who has traveled extensively in Asia to study the snakes and to film them.

“The snake is very active in the air, and you can kind of envision it as having multiple segments that become multiple wings,” he said. “The leading edge becomes the trailer and then the trailer become the leading edge.”

It gets stranger. During a technique not yet understood, some of the snakes can actually turn in air. What’s more, they all take a flying leap off their perch to get airborne, then drop for a while to pick up speed before starting the motion that keeps them aloft much longer than they would otherwise.

Socha’s initial research was sponsored by the National Geographic Society, but his most recent work and paper were funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The agency is involved in advanced military technologies of all kinds, and Socha said the physical dynamics of snake flight (and how other creatures stay in the air) is of great interest to the agency.

DARPA did not respond to an e-mail asking for more information. However, Socha’s upcoming paper on the dynamics of gliding snakes in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics does list DARPA as its financial sponsor.

Socha was a featured speaker Monday at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Physics.

The snakes, Socha said, spend most of their lives in the trees. They are between 2 and 3 feet long and about as wide as a finger. The larger snakes, he said, generally cannot glide as far as the smaller ones.

The snakes are mildly venomous, he said, but “won’t hurt a human, though they can be fatal to a gecko.”

While the prospect of a flying snake seems strange today, current scientific theory says that birds evolved from dinosaurs, which were reptiles.

Police snake-out

It was just looking for a new squeeze.

Emergency Service cop Michael D’Alessandro carefully holds up a monstrous snake found in a Queens park yesterday.

The boa constrictor was spotted on a bridge in Springfield Park near 46th Avenue and Springfield Boulevard.

“I’ve seen strange creatures around here, but that’s scary,” said parkgoer Lawrence Emerson, 37.

Emergency Service officers were called in to remove the scaly giant at around 12:30 p.m. Stuffed in a Parks Department laundry bag, it was handed over to a local veterinarian.

Iguanas and endangered species

I see that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is scheduled to consider the classification of an exotic lizard called the Green Iguana when it meets next week in Weston.

Theses lizards are already established in South Florida. If  you visit city parks and some state parks , you’re bound to see them from time to time. They’re all someone’s former pet or its descendants.

The question before FWC is whether to continue to allow people to have pets like this. So far, the staff consensus is to let things slide for the moment since iguanas aren’t attacking children or anything.

What they have been doing is eating nickerbean blossoms at Bahia Honda State Park in the Florida Keys and elsewhere. That’s where an endangered species of butterfly called the Miami blue lays its eggs. No one has seen a Miami blue in the park since January. which is significant because there’s hardly any other place in Florida where these once-c0mmon butterflies survive.

FWC has discounted the iguanaas’ role in the disappearance of Miami blues as  an isolated occurrence and nothing worth getting upset about enough to change captive-wildlife the rules..

Butterfly enthusiats  have been less sanguine.

In the current issue of American Butterflies magazine there’s an article titled “Who Killed All the Miami Blues?” by Dennis Ollie ,  president of the Miami Blue chapter of  the North American Butterfly Association.

Ollie faults state wildlife officials, park managers and others for letting one of the few remaining formally stable populations of this species disappear from Bahia Honda State Park.

The only other known colony is on Boca Grande Key in the National Keys Wildlife Refuge off Key West.  NABA officials wrote in August that iguanas have been found in the refuge and more could turn up, possibly as a result of releases by boaters visiting the area.

The real solution is to get more protection  for the Miami blue butterfly by having it federally protected. . The iguanas are one of a number of factors that have affected the butterflies. Weather has played a part, too.

There’s nothing FWC can do about the weather. Iguanas are a different story.

Judge to man: No undoing guilty plea in porn case

GULFPORT, Miss. — A federal judge in south Mississippi says he won’t let a man withdraw a guilty plea to charges of coercing an underage girl to pose for child pornography with poisonous snakes.

John Joseph Maillet pleaded guilty in September to one count of production of child pornography. A plea agreement called for Maillet’s sentence to be 15 to 30 years in prison.

Maillet asked Nov. 8 to withdraw the plea and fire his public defender, Stephen Dick. Maillet said he didn’t know his plea agreement carried a maximum penalty.

U.S. District Judge Sul Ozerden on Monday denied Maillet’s motion to withdraw the guilty plea.

Maillet, of Port Jervis, N.Y., was living in Carriere, Miss., where the alleged crime took place. He was arrested in August.

Snakes initial fault of blackout, after all

Guam – After initially reporting that the islandwide blackout on November 3 was due to systemic failures, the Guam Power Authority is now saying that not one, but two brown tree snakes are to blame for the mass power outage. GPA spokesman Art Perez says the full internal report shows that the snakes were crawling along the main power lines along Ypao Road in Tamuning that night, causing the initial fault.

Perez adds that it is not uncommon for these creatures to end up in areas that result in power outages. Perez, however, maintains it was the protective relay failure that occurred at the Tamuning substation that caused the line fault to persist affecting the entire islandwide power outage. Perez says GPA is working to install backup protective relay systems to another level of protection to prevent it from happening again.

He says the last time a snake played a role in an islandwide outage was in the mid-1990s.

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