American Crocodiles & Jaguars

Magnets May Halt Disruptive Crocodiles

Florida wildlife managers have launched an experiment to see if they can keep crocodiles from returning to residential neighborhoods by temporarily taping magnets to their heads to disrupt their "homing" ability.

Researchers at Mexico's Crocodile Museum in Chiapas reported in a biology newsletter they had some success with the method, using it to permanently relocate 20 of the reptiles since 2004.

"We said, 'Hey, we might as well give this a try," Lindsey Hord, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's crocodile response coordinator, said on Tuesday.

Crocodiles are notoriously territorial and when biologists move them from urban areas to new homes in the wild, they often go right back to the place where they were captured, traveling up to 10 miles a week to get there.

Scientists believe they rely in part on the Earth's magnetic fields to navigate, and that taping magnets to both sides of their heads disorients them.

"They're just taped on temporarily," Hord said. "We just put the magnets on when they're captured and since they don't know where we take them, they're lost. The hope would be that they stay where we take them to."

Hord and his co-workers have tried it on two crocodiles since launching the experiment in January, affixing "a common old laboratory magnet" to both sides of the animals' heads. One got run over by a car and died, but the other has yet to return, Hord said.

Once an endangered species, American crocodiles' numbers have rebounded to nearly 2,000 in coastal south Florida, their only habitat in the continental United States. That puts them in increasing contact with humans, especially in areas where backyards border on canals around Miami and the Florida Keys.

Crocodiles are still classified as a threatened species, so game managers are reluctant to move them to new areas where they might be killed battling other resident crocodiles for turf rights, Hord said. Unlike alligators, which are far more numerous, each crocodile is considered important to preserving the species, he said.

"These crocodiles are unique and valuable creatures and we feel like we have a responsibility to live with these animals as much as we can," he said.

Many frightened residents don't share that view, although crocodiles are shy creatures, Hord said. Wildlife managers will try to relocate any thought to pose a significant risk, mainly those that seem to have lost their fear of humans.

Most crocodiles in Florida are tagged as hatchlings so biologists can easily recognize them, Hord said.

Any that come back twice after being captured and moved are sent to zoos or otherwise placed in captivity, something biologists hope to avoid if the magnet experiment works.

"This one is by no means a really well-developed scientific study with a control group. It's just something we thought we would try," Hord said. "We do have to make some room to live with them."

This story gets my blessing because of the fact that these people seem to get it. They realize that we need to learn to live with these ancient creatures instead of trying to destroy them. I hope this program works out well for the crocs and the people.

Here is a link to another animal story that is really on pointRare Jaguars Spotted in North America this is one I want to follow. Jaguars are such magnificent cats.

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Survival, Dog Style! Could YOU?

Dog found after missing 6 months in Montana

HELENA, Mont. — A 7-year-old golden retriever named Buck, startled by a train whistle last summer and lost for six months in north-central Montana, is back home in Washington state thanks to the efforts of several Chester residents.

"I've never had a miracle happen to me, so I don't really know what to think," said Kim Halter of Bonney Lake.

Halter said she, her husband and two of their sons were on a family trip to Montana in August when they stopped at a rest stop along U.S. Highway 2 in the small town of Chester.

"The dog was normally never on a leash. Big mistake," Halter said Thursday. "But he was always next to my son. He never left his side, so we never really had a problem.

"We were under the trestle when the horn blew. When Buck heard the whistle, he took off like a shot. None of us even saw him."

Halter said Maxine Woods, who lives across the highway, was waving her arms and trying to tell them that their dog ran away.

"He just basically disappeared," Woods said Friday. "He was just going faster than any dog I've seen run."

Woods joined the search for the dog.

"She got in her car and then she started calling people and before you knew it everybody around there was looking for our dog," Halter said. After two days of unsuccessful searching, the Halters, brokenhearted, resumed their travels.

"We went to the library and the librarian in Chester made us posters and wouldn't charge us a dime for them," Halter said. The family put up posters in banks and post offices in the small towns around the area.

"That was about all we could do," she said.

After a few false sightings, the family didn't hear anything for six months.

As fall turned into winter, heavy snow fell in the Chester area and temperatures occasionally fell into the 20-below-zero range.

"Every time we'd hear about the weather we would just cringe," Halter said. "I would just cry even harder, thinking 'Where is my Buck?' And of course I couldn't let my son (17-year-old Jason) know. I never let him see me cry because he kept the faith and kept the hope.

"He would tell me all the time that Buck's coming home," she said of her son, who had had the dog since it was a puppy. "He actually thought he was going to walk home like in (the movie) 'Homeward Bound.' "

It was about 27 degrees below zero early on Jan. 25, the day Jason Wanken spotted a stray dog on his family farm just north of Chester.

"We spotted this dog out here on the farm, just on and off, going through the creek and whatnot," Wanken said. "We just never had a prime opportunity to go over and get him."

Later in the week, Wanken used a snowmobile to bring some food to the dog, which had taken up residence under a collapsed building.

Wanken's mother had remembered the name of the golden retriever that had gone missing last summer and told Wanken to see if the dog would answer to the name Buck.

"The next day, I took the boys out with me and I had a full bag of food with me and I just rattled that bag," he said. "I started to feed it and could actually pet it then."

Wanken and his wife were able to use food to lure the dog into a kennel.

They took the dog to Woods' house.

"I thought it couldn't be this dog, though, it's been too long," Wanken said.

Woods called Halter on Saturday, Jan. 31.

"She e-mailed me three pictures and when I was on the phone with her I received the pictures, and we both started crying and I said that was him," Halter said.

Confirmation that the dog had an underbite sent the Halters on a 750-mile trip. "We drove all night," she said, arriving in Chester Sunday afternoon.

"When we got to the Wankens, he ran right up to us and it was absolutely without a doubt him," Halter said. "It was a miracle. He looked at us, and we looked at him and we were all crying. It was beyond amazing."

No one seems to know where Buck had been between Aug. 13 and Jan. 25.

"From the time he left us until the time Jason Wanken found him, there is no clue where he's been or what he's done," Halter said. "Only he knows. I almost feel like taking him to a pet psychic to see if they could tell me. Only he knows his secret and he's keeping it to himself.

"I tell ya one thing, he hasn't stopped smiling since he got home and neither have we."

I posted this not only because it is a tear jerker feel good story, which we could all use, but, it is an incredible story of "survival" to the ultimate. In this day and age, with all the garbage happening to alot of us, this should be an inspiration in getting your act together and moving forward despite all odds.

Think about it. This amazing animal soul was hundreds of miles from home and anyone he knew. He had to deal with weather conditions almost unimaginable. He had no one feeding or providing for him. He probably had to deal with and defend himself against wolves, bears and mountain lions. Yet, this amazing creature kept on pushing forward until he could return to the life he knew. Not just 6 days or 6 weeks, but, 6 months he persevered. He did not sit around waiting for someone or something to make things right for him. He did what he needed to do for his survival. Why can't all humans be like this? Humans may be the "dominant" species on the planet today, however, "the animals are light years ahead of us and will be here long after we are not"!

Here is a link for another touching animal story Koala Rescued From Scorched Land

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Reptillicus Gigantis(Big Snake)

Click to enlarge Credit: Jason Bourque

Ancient Snake Was Longer Than a Bus

Never mind the 40-foot snake that menaced Jennifer Lopez in the 1997 movie "Anaconda." Not even Hollywood could match a new discovery from the ancient world. Fossils from northeastern Colombia reveal the biggest snake ever discovered: a behemoth that stretched 42 to 45 feet long, reaching more than 2,500 pounds.

"This thing weighs more than a bison and is longer than a city bus," enthused snake expert Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was familiar with the find.

"It could easily eat something the size of a cow. A human would just be toast immediately."

"If it tried to enter my office to eat me, it would have a hard time squeezing through the door," reckoned paleontologist Jason Head of the University of Toronto Missisauga.

Actually, the beast probably munched on ancient relatives of crocodiles in its rainforest home some 58 million to 60 million years ago, he said.

Head is senior author of a report on the find in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

(The same issue carries another significant report from the distant past. Scientists said they'd found the oldest known evidence of animal life, remnants of steroids produced by sponges more than 635 million years ago in Oman.)

The discoverers of the snake named it Titanoboa cerrejonensis ("ty-TAN-o-BO-ah sare-ah-HONE-en-siss"). That means "titanic boa from Cerrejon," the region where it was found.

While related to modern boa constrictors, it behaved more like an anaconda and spent almost all its time in the water, Head said. It could slither on land as well as swim.

Conrad, who wasn't involved in the discovery, called the find "just unbelievable.... It mocks your preconceptions about how big a snake can get."

Titanoboa breaks the record for snake length by about 11 feet, surpassing a creature that lived about 40 million years ago in Egypt, Head said. Among living snake species, the record holder is an individual python measured at about 30 feet long, which is some 12 to 15 feet shorter than typical Titanoboas, said study co-author Jonathan Bloch.

The beast was revealed in early 2007 at the University of Florida's Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. Bones collected at a huge open-pit coal mine in Colombia were being unpacked, said Bloch, the museum's curator of vertebrate paleontology.

Graduate students unwrapping the fossils "realized they were looking at the bones of a snake.
Not only a snake, but a really big snake."

So they quickly consulted the skeleton of a 17-foot anaconda for comparison. A backbone from that creature is about the size of a silver dollar, Bloch said, while a backbone from Titanoboa is "the size of a large Florida grapefruit."

So far the scientists have found about 180 fossils of backbone and ribs that came from about two dozen individual snakes, and now they hope to go back to Colombia to find parts of the skull, Bloch said.

Titanoboa's size gives clues about its environment. A snake's size is related to how warm its environment is. The fossils suggest equatorial temperatures in its day were significantly warmer than they are now, during a time when the world as a whole was warmer. So equatorial temperatures apparently rose along with the global levels, in contrast to the competing hypothesis that they would not go up much, Head noted.

"It's a leap" to apply the conditions of the past to modern climate change, Head said. But given that, the finding still has "some potentially scary implications for what we're doing to the climate today," he said.

The finding suggest the equatorial regions will warm up along with the planet, he said.

"We won't have giant snakes, however, because we are removing most of their habitats by development and deforestation" in equatorial regions, he said.

See, this is what nightmares are made from. Please, can YOU imagine hiking, biking, camping or, any outdoor activity, and running up on this?! Oh well, we are getting another step closer to finding Godzilla. By the way, there were other new discoveries made recently. Click this link to check some of them out

10 New Amphibian Species Discovered

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