Relocated a large eastern diamondback today. I’m shocked the people who called were able to get it into a box.
15.07.2025 21:17
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Relocated a large eastern diamondback today. I’m shocked the people who called were able to get it into a box.
Spent the last couple of days helping with the annual indigo snake release in Alabama. This has been a really rewarding project to work on over the years. All snakes handled with proper permits.
Two juvenile spotted turtles from one of our long-term monitoring sites. Always nice to see evidence of recruitment!
Check out some of the cool research we are doing this year!
Orianne crew past and present from the Annual Southeastern Partners for Amphibian and Reptile Conservation meeting. We gave 4 presentations about our work on indigo snakes, spotted turtles, and flatwoods salamanders.
Our Spotted Turtle survey team is having a great start to the season. They caught seven turtles in Florida last week and are close to 30 this week in Georgia. Valuable mark-recapture data that will help us estimate population sizes.
Big snapping turtle helped across the road today. Look at that face!
Young planted longleaf stands often develop pretty poor conditions as the trees get bigger and shade out much of the understory vegetation. Thinning and planting native ground cover will ultimately be needed. Long process to restore an ecosystem.
All the herp journals seem to be incredibly slow
We recently worked with partners to develop methods for detecting indigo snake DNA in sand. This tool offers practitioners another method to survey for this hard to detect species. Will allow landowners, particularly DoD, to have more confidence in snake presence when planning operations. #eDNA
A poster called Snakes of the United States & Canada, featuring every species of snake found in these two countries, all arranged by relative size and taxonomy, all smiling.
A close-up of the poster, with a variety of cute snakes, from watersnakes to hog-nosed snakes.
Happy year of the snake! I would argue that the snakes of the United States are just as varied and pretty as our birds. A few years ago I made a poster to try and prove it. Drawing this took many months and a lot of research. You can get it here:
topatoco.com/collections/...
Good hashtag!
A timber rattlesnake from a hilly central hardwood forest in southern Indiana. #snakes
An eastern copperhead from a wetland in southeast Georgia. #snakes
Effective #management must ultimately support populations that are resilient to habitat loss, climate change, disease, introduced species, and more. The principles outlined in this work can be used to identify species in need of #conservation and define important considerations for management.
The #diversity contained within reptiles and amphibians is staggering to consider as a whole. This can make it challenging to implement effective conservation and management, especially when data are limited. The number of threats facing these groups is high.
I recently worked with collaborators from Virginia Tech to publish a paper outlining 10 principles from evolutionary ecology to guide the conservation of #reptiles and #amphibians. These principles are divided into landscape and life-history topics, relying heavily on existing ecological theory.
Going to give this a try. Posting mostly about conservation work with The Orianne Society. Lots of cool reptile and amphibian research. This Eastern Indigo Snake is one of the species that we work with a lot. Endemic to the southeastern US and the longest native #snake in the US.