Reptile Fight Club - Ethical obligations of Scientific Literature w Zac Loughman

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

In this episode, Justin and Rob discuss the ethical obligations of Scientific Literature with Zac Loughman.Who will win? You decide. Reptile Fight Club!Follow Justin Julander @Australian Addiction Reptiles-http://www.australianaddiction.comIGFollow Rob @ https://www.instagram.com/highplainsherp/Follow MPR Network @FB: https://www.facebook.com/MoreliaPythonRadioIG: https://www.instagram.com/mpr_network/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtrEaKcyN8KvC3pqaiYc0RQSwag store: https://teespring.com/stores/mprnetworkPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/moreliapythonradio

Hey, this is Zach. And I'm Clint's, and we wanted to thank Exoterra for sponsoring this episode of Calubrid and Calubroid Radio. Exotera is the industry leader in glass terrarium enclosures, and we are a big fan of getting to see the species we work with, both at home and at the university. We utilize Exoterra caging here at Metazotics, and in addition to top-quality terrariums, exoterra offers an array of heating options, lighting, supplements, decor, and truthfully anything needed or wanted when keeping reptiles. Exotera for supporting Caluberid and Caliburian. Just gave that to it for fun. I feel like I'd be like, hey, Clint.

I guess that's in the show, so we're getting his endorsements. I expect a paycheck after this one. There you go. Well, welcome to the first episode of 2026, Reptile Fight Club. My name is Justin Joolander. I'm your host, and with me, as always, Mr. Rob Stone. How you doing? I'm doing great. Good to be here.

Excellent. Excellent. And if you didn't hear before, we've got Zach Loeffman here with us as well. The illustrious Dr. Loeffman. Dr. Thank you, Doctor. How's it going? It's going. First week of classes, like I was telling here earlier. Yeah.

I'm a little rough. I'm happy to be doing this tonight, so this should be an interesting one. Yeah, well, we're happy to have you on tonight. So yeah, speaking of cook, man, it's hot in here. I left my fever on and I am just sweating. So hopefully I don't pass out or go to sleep during the episode. Oh, my goodness. The sauna effect, safety of humidity part.

Sauna. Well, how's things in the reptile world for both of you? They're good. I actually went to Pomona over the weekend. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. And I just, I go to, I've been to 10,

now a handful of times Pomona. And I might be a little bit more team Pomona than team Tinley, to be honest with you. Really? Why do you say? There's more diversity. And like the venue isn't as new and modern, but it's bigger than Tinley. So you don't have that suffocation effect that you get when you're at Tinley. Okay.

Walking up and down the aisles. But there's also more Calubrids at Pomona. So that's kind of my champ, as we all know. You just went to check it out. You didn't vend or anything. Our friend for Calibrient and Calibrated Radio, Kayla Martin, she had a table. And the way to do tables is you get two tables at Pomona. And she basically asked Clint and I, you want to set up your CCR shirts and just kind of be present.

And I was like, yep. And so it flew out weekend before school. so I haven't had day off and like it feels like forever. That's why you're still burnout after a week of school. I was like a week of school, that's not that bad. But yeah, if you're coming back from Pomona. Yeah, I literally went from one side of the country to the other. But it was all good though.

Yeah. Thanks. I had a great time out there. Talk to a lot of awesome people, met a lot of new people. And just trying to get this week done. First week of classes is always great when you're the guy in charge of the department because I have to sign every single kid's form that forgot

to sign up for this class or that class or sign up for graduation or anything like that. And it's all electronic now, but I still have to get emails. And if I don't email them back within 2.5 seconds of getting the email, they're at my door. So yeah, it's been, it's been intense. But it's been good. So tomorrow's Friday.

I can make until then. Looking forward to tonight. We're good. Yeah, I can't say I ever had an interest in being an administrator. Oh my God. I had no interest. I was voluntold. You were voluntold. Yeah. That was how that happens. Yeah. That happens. I would much rather be in the classroom or outside with my students. Right. Right. In meetings. That's for damn sure. Yeah. And now are you teaching as well? Or do you have your, yeah. Yeah. And I have a really large teaching load this semester. We had a professor that went to another university. university. And I didn't want to, I got, I have a lot of young faculty members that have grants that are

kind of figuring out how to professor. Right. I say all the time. So I didn't want to dump that guy's classes onto them. So I was like, I can do it. And so I'm doing the chair gig. And I've got a, what the hell is it? It's insane. I think it's a 16 hour teaching load this semester. Wow. But it's all classes I love. So, you know, being in, and the funny thing, and I hope. And I hope. nobody from what's literally listened to this, I would rather be in those classes because that keeps me out of all those meetings. So you see. Right. Yep. Yeah. So it ends up working out for the better in the end. So I'm cool with it. Nice. Yeah, we just had our faculty meeting yesterday and I tried to sneak past. So there was one open spot around the table next to the department head. And then

there's like these three tables over, three soft chairs over in the corner by a little table. And I tried to sneak over to that pastor and she's like oh you can sit up here at the table i'm like yeah yeah you know and then the the associate dean came in late and she sat at the table behind me so i'm like man saving the seat for her and then they i don't have any classes so i just sit there and got to zone out right next to the department head it's not great yeah oh my gosh yep yeah well good times yeah it's uh actually starting to get some snow around here starting to cool down a bit so that's that's been good i guess uh things have been kind of warm in the reptile room so nice to have or cool uh versus the 50 degree temperatures we had

all last couple weeks through christmas and everything it was crazy yeah over here in the east uh as i'm in west virginia the we have actually had probably the most normal winter in recent memory. We, of course, go to the 50s for like two or three days. Right. But we've had plenty of nights in the 20s, even down into the teens. So I'm really kind of hopeful that Brumation is working. Yeah.

That would be kind of nice to have a normal year. Right. Yeah. Yeah. The Ovi average temperature where I put all my snakes right now is sitting at a perfect It's 49.8 degrees. And I'm like, I will take that. That is cool.

All right. Yeah, I'm trying to see how this is going to affect Python breeding. We'll see how it goes. Oh, yeah. How about you, Rob? Well, Tom had gone out to Pomona, too, Zach. So I heard about it, and he was sending me some pictures and things from out there. So that seemed pretty good.

I think we wound up getting some Peters Banded Skinks, which are pretty cool. Oh, cool. Yeah. Somehow he is telling me, yeah, kind of interesting. As per usually as a flare for the dramatic or for the interesting tables or whatever that looks like. So, yeah, so good stuff. We, yeah, otherwise, just kind of trying to, well, actually planning this episode, and then we got a handful more that are planned consecutively that it feel really good about.

We'd take kind of, we had our usual record day on New Year's and Christmas, so we wanted to take it a little bit of time off and kind of refresh, refresh ideas and hopefully get, I think we got a good plan going forward. So I'm really excited about, you know, putting out good content and things. There's been a bunch of good, cool shows that have come out lately. So it seems like hopefully maybe everybody's in that same space. To that point, your show with Gerald Merker was cool. I enjoy it. Thank you. Yeah. We have fun of that one. That was a good one. I had some comments out of that or some thoughts. Maybe that we'll swing back to you later, just concerned one one thing but uh yeah no it was really good and it's cool to have uh gerald be

willing to come on um for sure just as a super influential guy it was funny to hear his sort of context that really writing all those articles into the books became a venue for him to show people as pictures that was pretty yeah that was crazy i i was expecting you know oh it was such a you know all i wanted to do was polish things he's like i just wrote my pictures and things. I'm like, oh. Yeah, that's kind of cool. I like that.

Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Well, as an author of a book, I love it when people want to show off their pictures in a book. Yes. Especially if they're nice pictures. Oh, yeah.

You can't get them all yourself. That's for kids. Right, right. Yeah. That's the way it goes. But yeah. Still, still working on a few pygmy pythons. I've got, I think, maybe at least,

half of them eating now. So, you know, there's such a pain. And then my single blackhead python that I hatched out is still giving me fits, you know. What do you do? Just keep on it. But, yeah. And, yeah, I'm looking forward to this season. All the inlands are eating great.

And they're starting to look really nice, starting to get some sheds and starting to have this really nice, contrasty pattern. This is from a dark male. And they look really cool. Cool. Very cool. Of course, I've taken pictures, but I haven't gotten them up on morph market or anything. I'm kind of just busy with other stuff.

But, yeah. And things are great for shipping right now since it's so mild. You know, we haven't had, we had a pretty good storm, snowstorm. So there's still just a little bit of snow on the, but I mean, I can see green grass, you know, no problem in my yard. And it's like, come on. Give us some more precipitation. Yeah. We had a lot of rain, which was weird for descent.

in January. So who knows. We'll see how it affects everything, but what do you do? Yeah. Well, I guess we know Zach. We don't need to give him much of an introduction. If you want an introduction, go listen to Kluber and Klubroid and Klubroid Radio and you'll get all the introduction you ever wanted. So, yeah, we're really grateful to have you back on the show and talking about an interesting topic for sure regarding ethical obligations of, you know, in regard to publishing scientific literature. I'm sure you have plenty of experience with crayfish and maybe some other things, but we're going to be obviously, you know, with a little bit of a focus on reptiles, but I'm sure we can draw examples from other areas. But we'll kind of be discussing the obligations of the

reader versus the obligations of the writer of the articles and and kind of go through that. So I guess without further ado, unless you had anything you wanted to chat about before, beforehand, we'll go. Thank you for having me back. Yeah. No, no, we love chatting with you. It's good to have a sharp scientific mind on here. Oh, thanks.

Absolutely. Yeah. I don't know how sharp that mind is, but we'll go with it. Yeah. I'm filling it too. We had water polo practice. And every other practice we have to work out in the hot pool. And it's like 85 degrees and just it's not fun.

You're trying to do a swim set and you're just dying from the heat. And then, yeah, so it's not great. So you went from the hot pool to your hot room. Yeah, exactly. So it's not a hot day today. Yeah. I open the window. It's not helping much.

So if you hear snow, morning just uh yeah yeah all right well let's go ahead and uh flip the coin rob you can call this one heads it is tails um but i will defer to you you can uh take this one today because uh i think you put a little more thought into it and and uh you know kind of came up with the the idea so i think you'd be good to discuss this was act so all right well ahead obviously feel free to jump in as yeah of course of course yeah All right, Zach, go ahead and call. Heads.

Heads, it is Tails. Man, we're a Tales day today. So, you guess, Rob, you get to choose which side you want? Is it the reader or the writer? Yeah, absolutely. I think, well, it could be fun to roll reverse. I think we should lean into our strengths. And my role is to be a reader, a consumer of this information,

and kind of focus on the ethical obligations that I have where my, you know, stuff meets and ends. And, Zach, I think you should speak to the author piece, you know. And if you want to use the crayfish history as examples, rather than getting into specifics, you know, that's all the better, whatever you want to do. No, I'll definitely take the writer's side. All right. But I will chuck you. And you kind of give an introduction in terms of, you know, kind of your, your Francis piece on your approach, your paradigm for when you're writing this stuff out, the approach you want to take.

You want me to do that now? Yeah, okay. So obviously people listening, I can't really give the perspective of a field herpetologist publishing herpetology yet. The key word is yet because we officially started our Herp Lab with grad students and undergrads, and we already have two or three papers in preparation. Oh, nice. That's cool. Yeah, we do this again in a year.

I can actually give it from the perspective of a herpetologist. But so when you're, but the thing is, it doesn't matter if it's a bird or her, a crayfish. They all kind of follow the same format. So like a standard paper that I write all the time, all the time with crayfish. Since crayfish are an understudied group, nobody knows anything about them where they are and how common or rare they are. So that kind of density piece when you're out in the wild. And so a lot of the papers that have come out of my lab, including things that I published in my dissertation, were we call them blank of blank papers. So you put in the blanks.

So it'll be crayfishes of the Ohio River floodplain. That's one that I did, you know, feels like forever ago at the same time yesterday. And so when you write these papers, it's standard issue to define a couple things. first you have to define your study area because I'm not writing crayfish of the world. I'm writing about we'll just stick with the Ohio River floodplain. You know, the floodplain of the Ohio River because that's a, that's the only, it's one of the few that's a better way of saying that. Large tracks of bottom land slash wetland forests in West Virginia.

We're Appalachian Mountains, Montane. That's what made that unique and obviously crudeds are aquatic so that you get a unique cratefish community there. And so when I write that paper, I have basically the limits of my study, higher a floodplain, and then I kind of define, put some definition in there, which is the counties, the major tributaries, and if there's any major wetland complexes, and this is all presented in a map. And it's standard issue. And I feel like it should be presented in a map where we run into problems, potentially, is how much information you put on said,

map. So a common practice before the interweb got to the point it is right now is we would have what we call a dot map, which is you take your decimal degrees, you plug it in the GIS, it puts a dot where you found your animal, and then you usually will have a bi-colored plot. So empty circles, I looked here, I didn't find it, solid circles. I looked here, and I found it. And that at minimum is what is normally presented in one of these. publications. Not so much now, but back in the day,

it was also standard practice to have a table in your map where you would basically have site 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And it was very, very common to put decimal degrees in there. And then across the top of your table, you would have your species,

maybe your habitat types. And so then you can go down through this matrix and see at site 7, They found species A, species C, species D, and species H out of A through K. Okay. And so, you know, that was standard issue. Why did we publish that back then? We didn't have these little handheld computers in our pocket with Google Maps,

where you can plug the freaking coordinate in and walk right to it. Like my mind exploded as a field biologist the day I found out that I could take the coordinate that I used to have to find triangulating on a DeLormy Gazetteer, and I could just not only put it in my phone, but my phone is then I hit this walking icon, and it can tell you how to get to it, or the driving icon, and I can drive right to it. Like, that was just boom.

And I know there were a lot of people that do what I do that were that way. Like I remember in 2002 being blown. away when you could put a coordinate into a handheld GPS and it was like you would just kind of walk with this little compass and hope to get the bearing and then you would it would say like you're 327 feet away and you would have to walk slowly because you could if you're walking too fast the satellites wouldn't talk to the thing you'd walk like a whole football field beyond it before it caught up with things and now we have that so so today People usually, I'm saying usually don't actually publish the coordinates because it is so easy to get to the locations.

Dot maps are common. It's kind of a standard practice in a lot of disciplines, not to use a political map at all, not to put trails, roads, you know, manmade things, unless that's a key part of the story. especially if you're working with rare and imperil taxa. And the idea is you got to like, you have to present the data. You have to present the data. That's the point of the paper. But you don't want to present the data so much that you have a treasure map so people can go straight to the treasure.

Like that's the issue. And that's just basically a result of technology. And so that's kind of what my responsibility is, is to provide enough information for this to be useful to the scientific community. but at the same time, I don't want to, if I have something that could potentially be captured, present that information. So that's kind of the blank of blank issue. The other thing is, a lot of times people have long-term study sites. And if you have a long-term study site and you go to the same location over X number of decades sometimes,

giving the keys to the kingdom of where your study site is, that gets to be this kind of wonderful, nebulous gray area because you obviously as an ecologist want to tell the world where you're studying your creature. Right. Because that's going to, like, you're probably not studying the whole global distribution. So you want to present which populations you're studying

because the environment dictates the population response and the data that you're going to get. But at the same time, giving a roadmap to your long-term study site can be a disaster. And it's funny because, like, way back when, in the 50s and 60s, there was a lot of, I studied this in this county.

And then in the 70s and 80s, it was like, I studied this in this park on this trail, next to this parking lot. Here's a map. And it stayed that way until I would say, actually, like 2005 to 2015. Somewhere in that window when I Naturalist started popping up, we can put stuff into our phones and go wherever the hell we want

and everybody has a phone in their pocket. I can say that that is when a lot of people that do the kind of fieldwork that I do started getting a little bit more conservative on what we were relaying out to the universe. And I thought about why at a later point time. Yeah, that seems like almost backwards. Like, well, information's out there. Like, why are we hiding it now? You know, kind of thing.

Yeah. Like the newer studies, and, you know, if you're studying an animal in an area where it's protected, like if you're in a national park. Right. Pretty Smoky Mountains National Park. Right. You're probably going to say where you're at because there's rangers patrolling that park. There's people to make sure that your study site doesn't get wrecked.

Well, unless there's a government shutdown, which we saw in Utah where there's people out vandalizing, like, you know, ancient American sites. They're spray painting over. I'm like, what is wrong with people? Like, you're waiting for no rangers so you can go spray paint on a petroglyph site? Yeah. What morons? And for the record, it's those morons we have to be worried about.

I'm not worried about an ethical naturalist at all. In fact, I want to celebrate ethical naturalist. You study cradads and somebody shows up and they're remotely interested in. and what you're doing. You're like, oh, my God, I have a fan. This is possible. Exactly. And they've dug into your papers to try to find out where they might get the chance to see these things.

Those peeps at all. It's the unscrupulous peeps people that, you know, want these things for fish tanks or want them to ship overseas, where there is actually a market for very colorful, great fish. Those are the people that I'm not publishing this information because I don't want them to get it. right you know what I mean um so okay Rob how about you uh give your perspective there yeah I think that makes a ton of sense obviously all that stuff it hit into points that I was considering I wanted to ask you about sort of the difference between kind of protections on the space even private land versus public access generally versus sort of um you know unimpanged or

limited resource public public access stuff I think obviously there are different considerations there I think there's probably different considerations just based on the species, even species types that we're talking about, right? So I would imagine that crayfish are pretty, uh, sight, um, pretty loyal to their site, right? There is a lot of site fidelity within that. So a specific record is more useful to someone as a treasure map in that context than it would be for, you know, a garter sank, right? Most North American Calubrids, right, there's a ton of range to those things, and they could be, you know, they could be in front of you one moment and a thousand feet away five minutes later. So that, like, the idea of, oh, five years ago, right on this spot, there was one that doesn't tell you a whole lot, versus a timber rattle, a granite outcrop that's home to a timber rattlesnake den slash rookery. You know, that's probably been there and used in that context for centuries, right?

and obviously is more susceptible than even a record on an H-Rox or any, you know, a random generalist, you know, Western crotolus that's out on the landscape somewhere. Again, that's, and that's probably even different than, oh, the context was we always find these under cover, you know, whether it's flipped under rocks or under logs or whatever it might be. well, there's just a gradation in risk associated with all those different things, depending on those characteristics. So I would imagine that that has a role, you know, a role to play in this as well. Yeah, so those are kind of the initial considerations. We had come to this based on research that I was doing, right, into a couple different things, a couple different trips, both trips that have happened, trips that may be forthcoming, those sorts of ideas, reading through papers,

taken in social media content, those sorts of things, and saying in a couple different instances, wow, I think they're telling me a lot more than they intend to be telling me. And not that I'm going to use that in a problematic manner, but it's one of those where, wow, I really don't, I can't imagine this was possibly their intention, was to give me the the level of information uncertainty that they are giving me. And almost certainly, if I were to tell them that, that they would be upset about it. you know, they would have various feelings. And probably I just figured Zach would be great to talk to you about this in that context

of saying like, okay, well, if you thought you had done written a crayfish paper and you thought you would have done a good job masking it. And then I walked up to you and said, hey, Zach, I made a map of your, you know, your locale is based on X, Y, and Z in your paper. You'd probably be frustrated, you know, frustrated about that, frustrated with me. and that was really kind of getting at that nexus or getting at that feeling is what I really wanted to hit on here. Oh, no, totally. Yeah.

And this has happened to me. When you describe a species, there's a section and a species description. And most species descriptions across taxa share some common sections. And it's called the Specimens Examined section. and that's basically where you talk about, you know, you define the organism's distribution, and then you list all the animals that you looked at within that distribution that helps you generate the hypothesis that this is an undescribed species. And it was an extremely common practice in crayfish biology anyway to throw in the coordinates.

So you would basically put like Fish Creek, Marshall County, West Virginia, comma, and then a decimal degree at the end. And keep in mind, this was before the phone. Nobody knew the phone was coming. So, and so because, you know, back in the day, it was very difficult to get there. And then around, you know, and so some of that, well, I'm getting at myself. Some of the crayfish that I described are actually very, you know, they're cool looking. They're bright blue.

There aren't too many blue animals. and they're also narrow endemics. So they're basically found in two counties in West Virginia in this high elevation wetland system. And the, you know, with those, put the coordinates in. And next thing you know, put papers published, Jay. And it was a couple years later, I went to the type locality, which was in a state park, which makes it even worse. And this is a burrowing species.

So this isn't one you flip rocks over. and kick in a kicknet. This is one you've got to find little chimneys. You got to dig a hole. It's an extremely destructive practice to get them out of the ground unless you're willing to become a herper for the night while you're looking for your crawdads and go out at nighttime with a headlamp

and throw worms down in their burrows with fishing lines and you can fish them out. It's actually a lot of fun. And so that's what my students and I did so that we weren't obliterating the colony. Well, when I got to the site to check up on them, about somewhere between a third and a half of it, it looked like somebody had buried dynamite in the ground

and let it explode. And what it happened is there are actually, shocker, people that go out and collect crayfish for their tanks, and they want the pretty ones, just like people want a mountain king snake over a dirty chain king snake, even though I want the dirty chain king's snake. Anyway, and I was just kind of like, what the hell is going on?

And so I realized that these papers I'm writing, A, people are actually reading them. That was kind of interesting. And then B, I'm literally guiding these, the unscrupulous people straight to them. And so, you know, I will say that that's kind of a sickening feeling. I then explored it a little bit more and found out that there were people coming over from Korea. because in Korea,

crefish aquaculture for the aquarium trade is a big deal. And they would go on a road trip and basically hit a bunch of different burrowing crayfish populations, just like we would go on a herping trip, and then they would ship the animals back to Korea and, you know, set them up in aquariums over there. And they don't, like, you know, and for the record, I have no issue with people collecting the crayfish.

I like, if you're collecting the crayfish, you probably appreciate crayfish. It's just the way it was being done was leading to destruction of a narrow endemic that I was kind of charged with keeping tabs on for the West Virginia DNR. So subsequently there's been, I described another blue species and that one, I put the type locality, I mean, you've got to damn near except that your truck is going to be destroyed to get to that one's type locality. And you have to hike into it. You can't drive. So it is on top of a mountain in Pocohannas County, West Virginia, which is desolate. And then all the other specimens examined, I basically said a list of the sites is available upon requests to the author.

And I just put the counties you find the thing in. And that was all I published. There's a dot map. But the dot map's blown out so much. You're like looking at West Virginia from space. And I made the dot. they take up like 50 square mile. So,

yeah. So, you know, but the species as a whole is common. It's, it would be, it'd be equivalent to like, looking for some of the rare or less common garter snakes in California.

You're going to find them if you're in habitat. It's just going to take you a while, you know. And I do remember when I published that paper, I was kind of like, what the hell is going on? This is what I have to do now. Like,

it was just, kind of, it's kind of strange. So, you know, as an author, I learned why that has to happen the hard way, and that's why I did it. And it feels a little bit hypocritical because, you know, I'm a herpetoculturalist, so I want these animals, but at the same time, you know, it does bother me that a new species of gecko is described, and then 10 months later, it shows up a Tinley. Like, I got, I have some problems with that, especially when the author's like, we think this thing is rare and you know you can't be exported and then it ends up in you know at i'm not picking on tinley a reptile show there you go but yeah so i don't know if that answers your question or not but that's just

kind of a real world example yeah no i think it's great and i so it i think naturally it flows to the comment i was going to make out of the alternate episode right and sometimes i think the where i can I don't think this is so much in a published material context, but it happens a lot of the time in conversation or in podcasts or in YouTube that there can be, it can be a little silly from the opposite angle in the sense. So you said, well, Gerald, you don't have to talk about specific localities. And I had to laugh out of that when I heard that because in Alternate, at least amongst the community that is invested in this, right? the names of the types are the localities, with a few sort of limited exceptions, right? So Christmas Mountains, it's not exactly clear.

That one, the name doesn't make totally clear where that is, right? Meaning what cuts you're looking on for those snakes? But if we're talking about like, you know, state park pets, or we talk about Olympia, even, you know, some of these things you have to be able to read them up. You need to understand context. You need to understand sort of the habitat type and how they use it. What would be good habitat versus not, right, within that space? But, like, certainly nine miles north of Sanderson, it's very clear where that's from.

And it's from a massive cat, you know, but here's the thing. I don't know that we need to be super protective over that information, as opposed to the crayfish spot. Like we can say nine miles north of Sanderson, A, because it's very much out there, right? In any way I would think who's potentially a risk to utilize the information unethically, they've already heard of that. So the only people, when we say, oh, we won't name the. the giant cut north of Sanderson, the only people that were hindering are the people who probably aren't a threat because they genuinely don't know. You know, they don't know enough to be dangerous at this point, right?

Not least the fact that I've now done it three times and have seen a grand total of zero, I'll turn over this thing. So, yeah, I think it really is a function of, right, the timber dent, a specific granite outcrop that contains a timber den slash rookery is very different than, say, a nine-mile north of the sanderson and like we don't have to treat those like their equivalents right we can look at it and say okay actually the fact that it's just this public right away on this giant road cut that they blasted through and in reality but so few roads out there we're talking about roads running through probably one percent of all viable alternate habitat that this really isn't

a threat or a concern someone can know that and I can tell you from having been there and having that found alterna that just having that piece of information You know, that and $10 a buy you sandwich, sort of deal. Right. No. Well, the population density of the animal in question also really dictates whether you should be putting this information out. So I've described stream crayfish. If they live in one part of the river, they pretty much live in the whole damn river.

So I totally will put the decimal degrees in that species description because you're not going to do any damage with pretty much, with the exception of one that I described. I don't care if you go out and find it because it's a habitat journalist. It lives underneath flat rocks. There are hundreds of thousands of flat rocks in the river. So with that one, go for it. You know, have fun. But with these burrowers, which have very narrow habitat requirements, and you can do a lot of damage, you can screw up the hydrology of the seat they live in by digging too much and creating a ditch that drains the seat,

then basically makes it in-hospitable for the crayfish. that's where releasing the information, I'm not doing that. So there's absolutely a continuum. And with like Alterna, I've thought about Alterna a lot. Not that I've been to the, I haven't been to West Texas, but I've been all over the desert now multiple times. And that's a case where I don't think Alterna are in any danger of extinction at all.

I think their populations are probably very similar at carrying capacity to where they were, you know, 200 years ago. because they're a crepuscular lithophyte. Like they need that tallusy, rocky crevices. We can't get in there to get them. And we're only looking on cuts. If you go back into those mountains, there's probably thousands of them.

They just don't live in a place where we can find them easily. So it's a detectability issue that leads to their perceived rarity, when in reality they're probably not that rare. And then that happens with a lot of animals. because we throw around the word rare a lot, and it bothers me as a guy that goes out and finds these. Because oftentimes things are rare until we figure how to find them. And then we figure how to find them, and then we find them, crap, it's not that rare.

Now, if their habitats being completely demolished by people, you know, that drives rarity. But when you have large tracts of natural spaces that aren't really being impacted that much, And we need to preserve those as much as we possibly can. The species that live there, there's a high chance that it's perceived rarity and not actual rarity. Right. And I think, too, I was going to ask about, you know, study sites. Is there a push for researchers to do studies, you know, have some agreements with landholders and do studies on private land. So you have that extra buffer of somebody guarding their property or no trespassing signs.

know, trespassers will be shot on site kind of warning to keep people from going in to illegally collect things. It really depends on where you are. So where we study the hog-nosed snakes in Iowa, if you listen to our show, Clinton and I have our nonprofit, you know, and I've now taken the university, created this lab. We go to Iowa. We study Western hog-nows snakes in this, or Plains hog-nowsnakes in this sand prairie snake community, that is actually a private reserve that we are on. And it's awesome. I can honestly say

working on the private reserve is a lot nicer than working on public land. Because the irony of ironies is, which many people don't realize, is if I want to go on the public land and do a study, or I want to go on the public land and herp it, as long as I'm allowed to herp it, I can just go herpet. But when I want to do a study, I have to get a scientific collection permit. I have to let the national forest, which is probably what it's going to be. The headquarters know what I need to do. I need to submit a study plan. I need to get the study plan approved. I need to give a duration of the study plan. And I oftentimes have to tell the biologists that manage that land when my students or I are present.

And the people that are just going out looking for snakes don't have to do any of that. So there's actually a little bit more oversight over the people doing the science than there are the people that are just kind of out enjoying the land. And I think that that actually should be the way it is. I think they should know where I'm going to be because that helps them. Then they know, you know, when there's a bunch of people walking through the forest with snake hooks, they're probably the snake biologist. We can't do that.

Like my students, we went down and did a snake biology trip for spring break last year. And we had a guide. We thought we were on private land. We were in Ocala National Forest. And we came out of the forest. Every single person had a stump ripper in their hand. That was an interesting 20 minutes in the parking lot. So you can't necessarily run a muck.

But there's way more oversight when you're doing the actual science. that I think people realize. Right. And that's why the private land stuff's great. You still have to get a state collecting permit no matter where you are. Like for Iowa, we have to get the Iowa DNR to sign off on what we're doing, even though we're on private land. But once we get that, you know, we work with the industry that manages that space,

and they tell us what we can and cannot do. And nine times out of 10, industry, you know, they have this space because this is their kind of environmental contribution. they can be much easier to work with because they want to be able to say we're managing this space. Yeah. We have this project, this project, this project, this project, this project. Right. So don't ignore what we're doing to the land.

See all the good things are doing. A little bit of what we call greenwashing. Right. Right. That totally happens. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was, I was fortunate my brothers, wife's aunt has access to one of those private areas

from Kennecott Copper Mine in Utah and so you know these wetlands and so we were the only people out there birding you know and there were all these cool things that I hadn't seen before so it was kind of nice yeah when you have that access but that's not common you know a lot yeah we were the only ones out there for for that time yeah she was kind of the steward of the land but I think she was kind of an activist so they're like okay well you take the you know kind of help us out here and you can manage it and make sure that you know things are above board you have to you have to honor fences when you're in those kinds of properties. Which I, you know, when you're running around with a bunch of 18, 19 year olds that are super enthusiastic and the snake goes over the fence or under the fence. Yeah. You know, to them that's just a barrier. And I've literally dragged a student off a fence and they'd like to stay on this side. Right. Like, we go over there.

We're going to lose our privileges. You know what I mean? We had that in Texas. My first, or our first, or not us, the Blacktailed rouse. Yeah. Nexus there. And it was across the fence, but I reached my hook over and put it on the, you know, put it on the road, took our pictures and then put it back over the fence where it was. My first hog nose that I got in Colorado was that way. Yeah. And I did kind of figure out that you

can catapult a hog nose fairly far distance with a snake stick when you're excited. So yeah, anyway. But yeah, no, that's kind of how this all works. So it's, it's way more nuanced and complicated than people realize. Like you all can come to West Virginia right now and pick up a Crodad out of any river, put it in a bucket. I can't do that. And I'm the freaking crayfish expert for the state

right in the book, crayfish is of West Virginia because I'm a scientist, which means I have to turn in a study plan. I have to turn in, you know, all the animals I catch. I have to turn those in. I have to pay for a scientific collecting permit.

It's not, you don't get any privilege as a scientist. I will, flat out tell you that. Yeah. Well, and I think there might be, you know, there's some historical issues that, you know, probably are a result of that because they overcollected a site, you know, gathering specimens to do their study or whatever. And then all of a sudden, now you can't find them there anymore because they collected too

many and they didn't know they were over collecting at the time because it was a new population or whatever. Yeah. The other thing that really killed me is, is they were doing a study at my university on banded geckos. you know, from southern, southwestern Utah or somewhere. And they had like probably 50 of them or, you know, maybe 100 of them in their study. And they brought them out of the wild into captivity to do their study in a controlled setting. But then after the study was over, they had to euthanize them all.

I'm like, you've already taken them out of the wild. Just, you know, give them away his pets or something. But I guess you don't know if a disease manifests itself. Yeah, I wasn't. suggesting they should re rewild them but at the same time like give them to the kid down the street or me who would have loved to have kept a couple of them you know yeah and that that that's that sucks if you're on the reason like i one of the reasons i jumped from herpetology to asticology crayfish was when i was in grad school i was you know we would find something for the first time

in a county and it was like bring it back to the lab shove a needle and a needle and in its heart, fill it full of chloratone, and then pump it full of formalin and put it in the museum. Right. And I was like, what? Yeah, that's one of the things that kept me from going down the herpetologist pathways. I didn't want to kill herps. Like, I wanted to study him and enjoy them. And so now I get to do that.

There was this one time when I was going to my master's in the Herp Lab, I found a wood frog in a new, new location. And I was like, damn it. I didn't want to kill it. And we were driving around. and I drove around an extra two hours, and I finally found one that was smashed on the road. And I could steal off the road that just had enough bits left to be identified as wood frog. And I was like, okay, this one's going back and I let the first one go.

Yeah. And it's funny when you see herb collections, oftentimes, they're just pulverized animals in there because, you know, DORs, that serves a perfect. You can get tissue from the DNR. You've got a diagnostic character. there's a couple snakes in Marshall University's collection where I peeled them off the road and then that night I skinned them and threw the carcass away and that freaking milk snake skin

was in a jar in the cooler where all our food was until I got back to Marshall to put it in the in the collection so because I didn't I I'm happy to say I didn't kill I killed a couple frogs I killed a couple salamanders but no turtles snake I couldn't do it there's no way I can do that Right. And I've been, I mean, you'd almost these days, like the photos you can get, you know, are diagnostic in in a good way. And I mean, I see that there is value in having those specimens preserve somewhere for, you know, future studies or, you know, whatever. But at the same time, like, how many do you need? Maybe, you know, for a, you know, holotype or whatever. Yeah, collect those. But for the others, grab pictures. Because I don't know, I was at a visitor center in Western Australia. they had a rosent snake, you know, in a jar, like as a specimen from a museum with a little tag and a little thing around its neck or whatever. And it was labeled as a Stimson's Python. And I'm like, that's not a Stimson's Python. That's a rosin snake, a little, you know, semi potentially dangerous elapid, not a python.

You know, and I'm like, yeah, they kind of have a similar pattern, but this is absolutely, oh, no, no, our scientists have identified this. you know, this is from a museum collection. They wouldn't get that wrong. And I'm like, well, they did. You know, so a lot of times, you know, like, and I, I'm, you know, faced with that when, you know, writing these books and I'm looking to see, you know, where, where populations are. And you see these records from the 30s or 40s or 50s or whatever. And there's no photo.

There's no, you know, you just have like a dot on a map. Do you trust that, you know? Did it? The other great example is Prithensis. the pygmy python where or antio python where they they called them prethensis because the specimen was collected shipped down to Perth and then that was used to describe it and they said well it must have come from Perth because that's where the specimen was and so they called it Prothensis even though they don't occur anywhere near Perth and so you know you run into those kind of issues as well and

you know did did the scientists collected and was he on a trip and then he's like oh crap I forgot to get the, oh, well, I'll just say it was from here, you know, or I think I got it there, you know, I can't remember. I forgot to write it down. So, you know, I think that can happen. I've got a bunch of notes from the trip I did where I found a bunch of prithensis and I, and I logged the, you know, location where I was. But then I've lost those notes. And so I'm like, okay, where did I see those? You know, I can't even include them on my own range maps in, in the books I'm writing kind of thing. So it's like, you know, those things happen. And no, you know, it's not a perfect thing.

Oh, no, no. And there's also sometimes where, you know, people will say, well, we found this here, but it turned out to be something different or, you know, that kind of thing. And then, but that gets perpetuated because they get cited by, you know, future writers to go back and say, oh, well, they said there was a record here. And then it turns out that original, you know, record was wrong or didn't come from that area. So then you have like, well, they did find this one specimen here for 20, you know, 50 years. They're saying the same thing, but it's not real.

You know, so it's like kind of a. Now, I mean, I can't, I don't, I tell my students, I really have a hard time calling this thing a phone because it's so much more than a phone now. But there's an app that we use in the field to kind of avoid all that from happening now. It's it's totally It's made all my training from 2003 Completely irrelevant Yeah Because I was, you know, taught you do field notebooks

In a right in the rain notebook There's literally one right here Right, right Because they're non-destructible And then when you get back, you scan the notebook as soon as you can And And then you do everything

Like you put the notebook in a fireproof safe Because your whole freaking life is in this notebook And now there's this app called Survey 1,2,3, which you can use for any organism on Earth, and it basically is a way that you have your phone, you don't need Wi-Fi, but you have your GPS in your phone,

and then you have your data sheet, which used to be a freaking piece of paper. It's embedded in the phone. You download it, and you can fill in all the relevant data that you would. The awesome thing is you can take a photograph right then and there, and then that photograph gets linked to that data sheet. And then as you're driving around, as soon as you hit Wi-Fi, boom, sends it to the cloud.

And now all this data is in a place where our absent minds can't lose it. And you also have that photograph. And so what we started doing is with the rare crayfish is we, we don't preserve them. I am responsible for, and I'm not proud of this, probably two to 250,000 crayfish have been pickled by my students because of me or me. Because you can't name a species without the animals, and it's very hard to measure a crawdad with its claws. Like, they don't like that. So a dead specimen is easy to do. So we would like limit the number number of animals we would take. Or if we're in an area and the species are common,

it's, there's a lot going in the jar. That's all I've got to say about that. But now we don't have to necessarily do that. Now you can get the photographs in the field. You take a little bit of tissue. You put it in a, you know, DNA cubet and then, or tube. You just, that's the only area where there can be fault with the technology because it's the only human part is the tube. Right. And it's amazing how you can screw that up. So anyway, but, you know, we don't have to necessarily kill the animals the way we did in the past, which is nice.

Yeah. I would say that. Right. But, but, you know, that data being available in open source, I don't know. One of the funny things is, I was working with one of my collaborators, colleagues and he emailed me and was like, Zach, you share your records for this crayfish Atlas I'm doing. And I was like, sure.

And, you know, I thought, book, Atlas. And it's online. Yeah. And my entire district, like the entire state of West Virginia, including all those rare blue crayfish that I went to great lengths to hide. Right. You can go to the website now and look on Google Maps and get exactly where they are. So, you know, it's all open source.

Right. It's actually worse than I naturalist because I naturalist you can do the thing where you distort the record. Yeah. These are the legit coordinates I gave them. Oh, no. You know, I've set students out and they, you know, they're like, where are we going? And I'm like, well, get on the crayfish Atlas website and hit all the sites in Putnam County. And they're like, oh, okay, you know.

So in the end, you are correct. if you dig enough with the technology today, if you put a point on a map and the resolution it is at a certain level, anybody's going to be able to get there. I mean, that's just like kind of the reality. And I do have people that I know that publishes stuff that take on that attitude.

And they're kind of like, if they can get it, why not just put it out there? We can't stop them. Right. You know, the listing process for fish and wildlife life is insane. You have to write a thing, a listing document, and then you write something called a species status assessment, an SSA.

And oftentimes, all the records of occurrence are listed in the SSA. So, and they're even listed in a way where it's like, here they were in the, here's where they were in the 20s, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, the 60, like, you know, so that can get you into some issues as well. And then you have to have the means to protect them or to patrol and make sure, you know, I mean, that's very rarely does that work. I mean, there's a few things like maybe a twin spot rattlesnake where there's enough wildlife officers out there making sure that people aren't going up there and collecting or

even picking them up and or accessing their site during certain times of year. I've heard of people getting, you know, popped by fish and wildlife and getting a nice, hefty fine for messing with the wildlife, which is, which is great. I mean, that's a good thing, you know, there needs to be. be a deterrent. You can't just say, this species is off limits and then never, you know, address that again or something, you know, yeah. So that can be tricky. I almost wonder in that context, too, whether sometimes for something like that, as an example, whether there's a benefit to, especially with a site that's been historically, I mean, Coughville was writing about, you know, Barfoot in

right, right? Right. So that that's certainly a well-known, been-well-known spot to giving that framing and then giving that protection around that known spot. It kind of gets everyone's efforts focused into that spot as opposed to going and looking in other places. Right, right. There's actually sometimes maybe utility to that, to having sort of a sacrificial known spot, whether, you know, in the pricing context, they're really protecting that spot then that has that association. but there are other things that are equivalents that don't have that equivalent protection, but it's kind of if people are going to go look for this, the place that's known to go look is this place. And really that has potentially a sort of protective effect on the rest of the population.

Right, right. That's sort of the one, oh, everyone goes to look for that there. Yeah. That was kind of the case with Wheatbelt Stimson's pythons. They're kind of a limited. Oh, okay. Go ahead. So my question or the thing, the thing I,

wanted to raise in terms of ethical obligations from a reader perspective, right? As someone who's reading these things to try and go find him in the wild is exactly what you said, Zach, in terms of the detectability problem, right? And if we're in a space, Justin, I was exactly thinking Wheat-Simson, if we're talking about something that's where we have that detectability problem, it's an animal that lives undercover, but the really the only way, realistically to reliably turn those up is inherently destructive. And Zach, this is going into the brewing crayfish as well, but saying like, if they're not out, up and out, or you don't have access to, say, those trails at night or that property at night because

it closes, you know, at night or whatever, then an unscrupulous person might destroy that habitat for the opportunity to seize. And it being Australia, most Australians probably to take, you know, the Wheatbilt Stimpsons that they encounter or whatever, but that's inherently destructive in the same way as, you know, flipping the cap rocks in Southern California looking for Mountain Kingsnakes, right? it's really if we as readers certainly you know i've never been in a spot won't be in a spot where i'm going to um flip a rock that i can't return right or that i'm going to break if i do so or that's it will be irreparably damaged destroy the habitat to do that my ethic demands that i

don't do that right that i don't ruin that habit and i do think that's sort of certainly that's a very clear obligation that i would say any reader of this scientific material has to take that you can't be going out there literally destroying the habitat so that those things can't be there. Yeah. And unfortunately, from a conservation point of view, we don't, the rules are not made for the people that are following them. They are made for the people that won't follow them. And that is who we have to always be taking into consideration.

And I've seen this because I'm the rare individual that is a, you know, academic conservation biologist and a private herb hobbyist. And I've been in the room and I've heard the conversations. And we in herpeticulture, there are plenty of good actors. But when we have bad actors that do things, they break a law, they smuggle a critter in. And then they kind of get celebrated or we kind of do the whole. Well, we wouldn't have them if so-and-so wasn't willing to bring them here. the conservation people hear that and they're like that's why we have to keep these places secret

because there's always one person with that mentality out there. And so if you want to see these things, oftentimes it will get you nowhere at first. But if you are willing to communicate every now and then, if you can prove yourself to be a not a turd, we'll be there. You can actually potentially get volunteer status to help on surveys and things like that. A lot of people don't realize that like me, I've got all the fancy letters behind my name, but I also have this podcast that I'm in the private herpeticulture space. I get shut down. First time I tried to get out to look for hog-nosed snakes,

I reached out to an individual at a state who remained nameless and said, I'm writing a book. It's on herpetology and herpetoculture hog gna snakes. I really need to see these things in the wild. Is it okay? What would I have to do to get the permits to go look for them? And I was essentially told by the state herpetologist Pound Salt. So you didn't see college professor,

conservation biologist, he saw herpeticulture guy potential poacher and as a conservation person I'm actually not upset with him doing that and that's like the dirty secret because I knew okay round one he wins now I'm going to wait a week or two and I'm going to like change my approach and once I was able to get through like hey I'm not who you think I am you know, I give a crap about these things. Now we're on a first name basis, and I got, you know, told. Now, granted, I don't think it's going to happen to the average person because I've got the credentials behind my name.

And I, you know, and I'm not saying that I'm all big and bad because I have them. I'm just simply saying those do kind of matter whether we want to admit it or not. But if you kind of go with a HIPP society, or you find a friend of the person that can do the introduction, or, you know, even talk to the freaking biologist. I'm going to flat out tell you something. Snakes in particular, they are an absolute bitch to study. There is a reason why this guy was doing his master's degree on snakes and then was like, eh, no, I'm not doing this.

Crodads, here I come. I flip a rock and I find eight of you. I put in over a thousand hours to find the first Eastern Hognos snake of my thesis. Okay? So having more eyes out there to help find these animals. certain situations, it's a good thing. There's places in Ohio, for instance, where they have snake days, and you can actually go out with the biologists during the snake days, and that would be a really good opportunity for you to introduce yourself, you know, show the world, you're not an unscrupulous

person. I had to catch myself there. And you end up being a volunteer, and the next thing you know, you can go look for these things with the biologists when they're doing their surveys, because in many instances we want the extra eyes. Like, you know, and like I said, before we came on, I know lots of people that have really fancy letters behind their name. They can't find anything in the woods and they trip over their own feet and they're actually scary to have in the field. Are you going to break your leg now or later? Right. And meanwhile, I know plenty of people that don't have any letters behind their name and they kick my ass as a herper.

You know what I mean? I want that guy helping me or now. You know, that's not that my sample size is going to go up. I just got to make sure that that individual is legit. That's it. And another story, just to kind of drive this home, the scientists are also being governed, which I don't really think people understand. So in the crayfish world, you know, I'm the species expert for two species that are federally protected.

So when the reports come in, you know, the fish and wildlife will send them to me, make sure the identifications are correct. I get funding from them to answer key questions to get these animals off the list. And so I got this grant to do a population genetics study because we're going to propagate this crayfish to release. And we have to understand the haplotypes. So the population level genetics. So I have a federal permit to do this work. And I asked the field office that I work out of, I said on my permit, it does not have gathering.

genetic samples. Do I need to put in an augmentation for my permit to have that added? And the person that read it, who was helping me with the funding, said, no. It says that you can perform biological activities with the crayfish. It's vague. Okay. So I get the grant. I now have the grad students ready. We're going to go. And I wrote one freaking email too many. And I wrote an email to another biologist and said, okay, I am good to go. I am good to go, right? Because I don't want to get arrested. Like, I is the crayfish guy can be thrown in jail for doing the wrong thing with the crayfish.

And that biologist was like, well, you don't have one there taking genetic samples. And I said, well, okay, what do I do? This whole grant is based around genetic samples. I make a very long story short, it took 17 months for me to get the permit changed. 17 months. The project was only

30 months. So you see what I'm saying. Like I can't go and do this. And I'm the guy that they lean on to do this. So we had to actually make arrangements for a biologist, which was really awkward because it was my former student. He called him permit for the weekend because he was our living breathing permit because every fish and wildlife biologist at this, you know, they didn't need, they were a permit. And so my student, my former student went with us on the trip and, you know, he served as the permit. And then after we got done with. the field where we got the permit back. And I'm literally the scientist that's doing this work. So a lot of times I feel like in herpic culture circles and herper circles, there's this kind

of like, well, they can do anything. And we are totally under the thumb way more than people realize. And then in that instance, what was even worse was I was getting like these by monthly emails saying, we need a status assessment. You're not turning in what you're doing. And I'm like, I'm not doing anything. You won't let me. Like, I have nothing to update. I'm stuck inside until I get this, my permit augmented.

And now, of course, the permit's augmented. We learned from our mistakes. Right. And we're good to go. But like, I don't, you know, and that's me. So. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it also depends on like where you're getting funding sometimes. Because I remember we got some funding. sources where they'd, you know, you'd put in your proposal and then you'd go to do the studies. And if, you know, along the way, you're like, oh, well, maybe I didn't think that through well enough. And, and, you know, I'd like to restructure the study. Oh, no, you're locked in to what you proposed. You will do what you said you would do. And you're like, well, we're going to be wasting your money

because I realize this is not the best approach through, you know, other studies. And so, yeah, that can be kind of crazy too. So, yeah, it depends on who you're getting funding. from sometimes too. Yeah. Kind of crazy. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, we do kind of think that a little bit, I think, as the layperson, like, oh, the wildlife

biologists get access and they're kind of like flaunting it in our face, you know, like, oh, look at all the stuff I got to find. We're like, when you've gone through all that heartache, getting the permits, staying within the bounds of the permits, getting the permission, getting the study site, making sure you got the permits again. You got permit A, permit B, permit C. You got to tell the people you're going to be on site. You then get a study that's working.

You're finding animals. You got this badass study after five years of work. And then you roll up on your site and there's four people with snake hooks. You know, flipping cap rocks and jabbing into crevices, it definitely makes you territorial. Because if they

were to, you know, you've got to assume the worst. to protect your research. Now, once you know that's not happening, you can relax. But I'll, I'll flat out admit. There were been a couple studies, weren't snakes. They were crayfish related where I saw people flipping rocks trying to get bait. And I was ready to throw down because I had animals out there with transmitters that cost a couple hundred, you know, bucks a piece.

And yeah, I know people are going to pick that up and be like, what's on this thing? Is this like an alien? It is West Virginia. If you got a telemetered rattlesnake, that thing's already under stress. Right. And if you're like, even if you're just simply pulling it out to get a picture, you got two to six hairless monkeys dancing around it, taking pictures, you know, that could then make that animal do a panic response and a long distance straight line movement.

And once that happens, you're done. Like, you know, you might have. track the results. Now it's out of its home range. It's not doing what you perceive to be normal behaviors. It's now out of the study. I as a biologist, I'm not going to be happy with that. But if that same individual reached out to me and I found out that they were, you know, okay,

with the high likelihood that I would then go, you know, potentially allow them to go out with me. Because scientists are also all about science communication. Like we want people to know what we are doing. And we want people to say good things. not getting political, it's not a good time to be a scientist right now. Yeah. We can use every bit of good PR we can get. And so if I can tell my funder, hey, I took some people from the public out, you know, that might make them happy.

Now, the other funders just don't care. Right. You know, so that's just some perspective. Yeah, totally fair. Other things that, you know, kind of in the same vein. And I believe I'll get this at least directionally correct. Nipperwick can chastise me later, should I get it wrong. But he had highlighted instances where researchers talking about Montane European Vipers

had included photographs that then included a background, essentially that the beautiful background imagery was sufficient to identify the location, particularly with the additional details in the textual narrative. No, you're not doing your study, any good if you are identifying it to the universe if it's not protected. And at our site in Iowa, there's a very, the only policy that exists is that you can't have the horizon on any picture. That's the only thing.

And there's a couple key landmarks that they are not allowed to be in the pictures at all. And that's actually not, that's the scientist that I work with. but it's also the company. They don't, a lot of companies are kind of interesting. They'll have private land and you can go and study it. A lot of them want you to know, want the world to know they're doing research there. There's others where they're like, yeah, we don't want people to know you're doing this.

That has always baffled me. I've worked on a couple of those. I will happily take their money to do the research and I won't tell a soul I'm there. You know what I mean? But, yeah, if you're doing that, you're publishing that, that's on you. That's my perspective. You're just, you're not, you're, you're looking at your pretty picture and you're not

thinking about the potential repercussions. Right. Another big factor, right, is sort of the uniqueness of the habitat, the instance the jumps to mind and Justin and I have both spent time there and thought about it a lot is only probably Python's, right? That the answer is, okay, well, really, they're fundamentally living in, you know, crevice work in the escarpment country. And the limiting factor, to the point that you made,

either before we started talking or while we've been on record, is it's, I think, principally a detectability issue along with sort of scarcity of that habitat type, right? There's a varying capacity within that type of habitat within the area it exists, and it's a limited area that supports that habitat. So, you know, really there's only so many, especially in that context, a lot of that is very, very limited, so that you're, you'd be on inappropriately or illegally on Aboriginal territory, let alone the, you know,

there's very limited access. So it's not nearly, you know, if we're talking about localities or where did you have this observation or whatever, there's a lot less utility to it to saying, oh, well, you know, yeah, sure. Owen Pelly Python was in the, you know, Kakadu side of, you know, the escarpment country. Or it could be even much more specific than that. and it's really not going to help you all that much, right? Because those are, to your point, those are the only places they would be.

And we even see this, you know, I know we had this conversation on the show a little bit. And then, Zach, I know you had commentary around it as well. And I'd like to include it here if your game was the idea of there's a lot of discourse around Hurtmapper being vastly different from my naturalist in terms of sort of the level of granularity, right? that if we're talking about HurtMapper that it only goes to the county level, whereas iNaturalist could be a pinpoint locality. If it's something that's within that jurisdiction, so right, if it's listed as threatened or endangered within a state, then there are no pinpoint records. It's automatically obscured.

Or people can choose to obscure it, or they can have it be a private location entirely, depending on their preference and how they input the record. But just for clarity, if something's threatened or endangered within that state, So Etchidatus or Oridus within Florida, all of the records are automatically obscured. Within Georgia, they are not because they're not arches of threatened species within Georgia. So there are pinpoint records. If you look in Georgia, they're not in Florida. But sometimes HurtMapper and I naturalists are not all that different.

We're talking about something with an extremely limited range within a given county, right? any of those coastal Florida County things. A, Florida's been super developed, you know, especially in those coastal areas in the bottom half of the state. So that if it's a record there, okay, sure, you can say that county, but there's only one or two places realistically that that could be. Right. Oh, yeah. No, wholeheartedly. I don't know. For the longest time, I was a flipping crotchety, crumudgeon when it came to iNaturalist. I freaking hated i. as a conservation guy, because I had plenty of friends that had their study sites just getting wrecked. And then what would happen with Inatrolist, which is a little bit different, is, you know,

somebody read your paper, find your study site. There's no, you know, as a scientist, I have not put anything on I naturalist because I don't want people to know where my research is happening. Then I publish a paper and say, here they are. And then some 16-year-old hops in their car and wants to flex, finds my study animal, and then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It just drops those marks and now it's there for the entire world to see. And I know I'm not the only person that was like, what is that? Like, I remember when it came out. And it was one of those, wow, this is kind of cool until it happened to you.

Like that was, you know, and that's where, I think that's actually where the, the, um, can distort the record kind of thing. But I also know that there's like tricks to get around the distortion. I didn't realize what those tricks were. We're not going to talk about. No, Zach. Yeah. Okay.

What, you know, once you're in the club, no, no, no, well, I had a couple of grads students that we're like,

no, you know, this is how you get around it. And I'm like, what the hell? And sure enough, you know, so I don't know.

Well, I mean, there is one that's to see, it depends. We'll have to talk. We'll chat off line. We'll take this off of, but,

we're not going to, I'm going to throw that out there. There's one that tricks you. But I would say that there's not a, if you think that you're seeing sort of a true and accurate record, based on that, an exact pinpoint, that's not correct. I've made that mistake.

I know what that is. I can explain that to you. But directionally, absolutely there, if you understand algorithms and how they work and things, sure. Look at enough records and you'll have some ideas for sure. I'm kind of a fan of Hurtmapper because one of the guys that invented it is one of my people that I work directly with in Iowa. And, you know, he is extremely conservation minded.

And that's why it just pops up at the kind of level. And there's a lot of people that say, you know, well, where's this data going? I don't have access to this data. And I can honestly say, you can get access to the data. you have to go through the HurtMapper team, but a lot of good has come from HurtMapper. Like, damn near every state uses HurtMapper when they're doing these things called their state wildlife action plans,

their swaps. And here's where herpers can actually do some good, because a lot of species that are state protected, and if you're in your car, I just used air quotes. What they really are what we call DD, which is data deficient. So the default is to protect it, put it on a no-go list until we know it shouldn't be on the list. So if we got a lot of herpers out there and you're finding these animals and you're using HurtMapper,

you're adding all the data that then might make that animal so it's not state listed. Because you're doing this as a passion project, you're going to do far more records than the actual state herpetologists are because they have to do all these reports and stuff. And I can tell you that information shared. A lot of people, I've heard criticism where like, well, the HurtMapper people are just recording it off for themselves. I can absolutely assure you that's not happening. And it's getting to the people that it needs to get to.

And they're rather proud of the fact that some species have been downlisted because of the records that came from the herping community. And in other species were uplisted. You know, they were listed as a state because we've got all these trained herpers out there. And they're not finding these things. So they might actually legitimately be, it might go beyond a detection probability issue. They could actually be rare. So that's where using HurtMapper over INAT is, it might be a little bit more advantageous for all the herpers listening to this.

Because I can't flat out tell you, you want to make a difference. You want your data to actually get to the hands of people that will use it. it's getting to the hands of people I can use. So there you go. Sure. And that, you know, I think sometimes we have too much weight to those, the failing to appreciate the politics behind some of those listing things, particularly, it feels like it was a lot easier to get things listed in the 70s than it is now, right? If we're talking about, where we look at stuff that's, you know, you're talking about the southern pituitophis, right? Those are things that have been known to be rare since the 1930s.

They talk about them in right and right as being difficult to find in the 20s and 1920s and 1930s, right? The idea that those things weren't considered sufficiently uncommon to receive some sort of protection until what the last 10, 15 years is a little bit wild, to be honest. I mean, it is the reason we have captive populations of those snakes that are doing well, right, and do mitigate any risk of trying to find. one of those southern ghosts out in the wild. But it is, it's crazy that, like, that's not a data deficiency issue beyond the fact that finds the angs are, you know, ghosts of their Sand Hill habitat. But that's clearly not what that is, right? That's not what we're dealing with in that context.

Interestingly, those are, a lot of the protection, both in terms of the habitat type that they require and, you know, the features of, I should say, of the habitat that they require, and the fact that it is protected align with military reservations. Yes. There's definitely commonality to that in terms of the features of that habitat use, shall we say, and what that creates in the habitat phenotype and their preservation and protection. No, wholeheartedly.

Military bases, especially in the southeast. in the Gulf Coastal plane. Thank God they exist. That's all I'm going to say. Yeah, absolutely. I was thinking about it the other day in the context of, you know, our South Carolina buddies associated with the THP network and all that stuff. And, hey, I want to go, you know, if they ever asked me about where we go look for a pine snake,

I certainly have ideas. And it's, you know, not on that property, but maybe close by. Yeah, no. And I've been fortunate enough to get on a lot of those. those bases. And they have wildlife managers whose job it is to control them. And they can be some of the best southeastern habitat, like legit turkey oak scrub, long leaf pine trees, which we don't really ever get to see anymore. Because they were. There's like 50 to 100 acre plots, tracks of those in places in Georgia and South Carolina on military bases. It's, it's

pretty freaking if you ever get the chance to go on them and you're you want to volunteer or help with those i think you should put the rest of your life away do it because i can tell you that i thought i knew what longleaf pine forests look like and then i went on one in a military base in south carolina and was like whoa right this is crazy and it was like literally i mean that's the habitat indigoes and southern hogs and southern pines gophers and gopher frog like all these things were there. You're tripping over, take me rattlesnakes. They're so common. It was ridiculous.

That record would turn it up immediately for you. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. And you know, you just got to be okay with them dropping a bomb on it every now and then. Maybe a tank can go through it like once every five years. But, yeah, but like they're so large that you, it's enough forest to get the whole ecosystem function piece. Like a lot of state parks aren't that big. Like, they're big to us. but for the ecosystem, it's not big enough.

But these, you know, 50,000, 75,000 acres, that's big. And so when you start burning it and doing things like that, you actually see the ecosystem get restored because you have a natural fire cycle where you can imitate lightning strikes and things like that. But, yeah, no, super cool stuff. Seems like a lot of protections, too, are almost protecting them into oblivion, you know, where they're not addressing the problem.

They're just saying, these are rare. We don't touch them. Get away from them, you know, but they're not, they're not solving the issue of why they're disappearing and why they're rare. You know, it's because their habitat is gone, you know. And so, of course, you're not going to find them here because you cut down all the trees in the 1930s and replaced them with this other that's not suitable for their habitat. Yeah.

And all these things. Or Western Australia. You can't pick up a snake, but you can strip my. strip on it too. Or you can run it over on the road. You know, yeah, there's,

it's crazy. The other glaces that way. You, you're not allowed to harass, you're harassing wildlife when you're shuffling it off the road. Yeah,

but you can drive 80 miles an hour. I don't want to be obliterated on the damn road. Like, you know what I mean? Right. So, so yeah, the bureaucracy definitely can get in the way a lot.

And I can say as a card, you know, conservation. biologist here, vast majority of animals are going to be massively impacted by habitat, way more impacted by habitat, destruction, fragmentation, degradation, than they're going to be by collectors. It's just the few species where there's just not many, or it takes a long time for them to reach sexual maturity, or they have low carrying capacity to begin with, they will be

impacted by taking a few, and I'm not advocating taking them. I don't want this to be misconstrued by anybody. Right. I'm just simply saying that habitat destruction is way, way more important for apparelment than over collection. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you look too like it, you know, some things that are, you know, don't touch them. They're disappearing here, but they're commonly bred in Europe. You know, you've got San Francisco garter snakes coming out of their ears. And, you know, we could, I guess the pine snakes are a great example of that where we have a stable, healthy population of pine snakes in herpeticulture. But, you know, yeah, you don't touch them. Don't even go near them in the wild because they're rare and endangered.

And I guess the point is who's going to go out and mess with those and collect them if, you know, if there's a suitable captive bread population, unless there's some kind of genetic crash or something like that. I don't think that. But somebody would probably On the conservation side, get that. Right, right. Some do. You know, others don't. And it's been kind of interesting.

One of my favorite games to play when I go to these meetings is everybody listening to this knows me for snakes and CCR and all that. But in my professional world, I'm wearing it on my sweatshirt right now. I'm the crayfish guy. And so I'll be sitting there. And somehow it'll come up in conversation. at least two or three times a year with all the things I go to

and it'll start somehow it's always reptile people and then I don't say a word I just keep eating I'm like gonna do I just want to like it's like I feel like a spy like I'm just gonna hear what their perspective is

and it's almost always that like well you know those people that keep snakes they can't be trusted or they're they're you know and then I will I've about half a dozen times they're like, well, I do that. And oh, the buttpucker is wonderful to watch. No, you don't. And then I get my phone out and I start scrolling Instagram. So I think it is almost our duty. If you are one of the people that are, you know, I say to everybody,

are you a bad witch or a good witch? If you're a good witch, you need to let the world know that there are good witches and you need to like talk to these people right you know and let them see that there are actually herpers and herpeticulturalists that that that don't want these things I got into a great big conversation about two months ago with somebody in the AZA world and they were talking about how um uh you know herpeticulturalists are catching all these box turtles to ship over to Asia. And I was like, I don't think they're doing that. There might be like one or two or maybe a handful of herpetoculars that do that. Right. But all the people that have been busted in West Virginia were people that were contacted by people in Asia through Facebook Messenger.

And they had no clue box turtles were rare. And then they were told, I'll give you like $15 for each turtle you ship me or each turtle you ship to this guy. They don't keep turtles. Right, right. You know? And so I educated them. I was like, I think the reality of it, though, is this. And then I explained, as a herpeticulturist, I don't want an emaciated, parasite-laden critter that's going to die

if I can spend an extra $25, $50, $500, get one that's born in some guy's basement is eating frozen-thod mice. Like, that's a better investment. I don't have to worry about that. animal dying. And when you explain that, you can actually make some inroads with some of them. Some of them got their mind made up and your public enemy number one, no matter what. But I would honestly say most of them, most of the conservation folks, if you have a, you know, you're not an ass about it. You have a nice conversation. And I also remind people like,

do you know how many biologists became biologists because they had a crest of gecko in their bedroom when they were 10? Right. Or they watched Steve Irwin. or things like that, yeah. And technically, they're a keeper. Right. You know, so you can't just say all these people that have with Bronn Brush, all these people that are doing this are bad. That's like just, that's complete BS.

Well, and it goes both ways too because then you have the herpers. They're all these scientists, Bogart and, you know, all the, they get interactive. And I mean, you do see some, like, who was it? Like, was it, um, Jeff Corwin or somebody? Like, nobody should be able to do this. but, you know, me. It's the kind of thing, you know. Yeah, exactly.

Like, don't let some random person have this amazing experience. It should only be done by, you know, yeah. So, you know, I think it does go both ways where we kind of, there's this infighting that shouldn't be, you know, between zoos, academics, and herpers. That's kind of like, yeah. That's kind of what I've dedicated the second half of my career to is literally, like, I somehow am in all of it now. I have a PowerPoint where I put up a Venn diagram of all the facets of herpeticulture. And it's academia, zoos, private sector, conservation. And then the next thing I hit is it is my face and it pops up right in the middle where all the circles overlap.

Right. Right. And I think. I've heard all from, I've heard the positives from each side. I've heard the negatives from each side. And if you ask most herpers, yeah, we all kind of fit in that same Venn diagram for the most part. might have less in this area, but it might just be because you don't know how to contribute to that area, you know?

I mean, I think in a lot of ways, you know, the really good field herpers might know things that the biologists don't know, you know. They can definitely help, you know. They absolutely do. There's plenty of examples of that, you know. But at the same time, the academics kind of make it difficult for the herpers to contribute, you know, and you, well, you need me more than I need you kind of attitude or I'm going to take what you're telling me and just kind of cut you out or things like that. That definitely

happens. It's not great. Yeah. So that's the trick, I guess, is to let's just all work together. Can we all get along? Well, Ocean County Northern Pines are certainly way more available on market than they are in Ocean County. Even just the experience to go photograph on. Right. Right. Like, that's absolutely true. You know, it's way cheaper than it is to, you know, go to pine barons five years you know five five five years oh yeah and i have those and i can find i'll tell you i would much rather have a captive bred one then go to the pine barons lose all my blood from all the insects and pull one out that's going to just be hissing and biting and you know right unfortunately there is probably a snake guy out there right now or gal that's like i could just go there when they're

hatching and get a bunch and go to hamburg or whatever they call hamburg now and put them on my table And that guy is the guy we all need to call out when the opportunity. Like, I don't, I think just turning a blind eye, no, I think there's something to be said about being like that's wrong. Right. Or, God forbid, now that I might piss people off, maybe be the person that's like, hey, Joe Schmo is actually poaching pine snakes. He's going to be at Hamburg on Saturday. Right. You might want to go say hi.

Like I have no problem doing that. None. Absolutely none. Because I want to advocate for the guys that are captive breeding and hit their stock. You know what I mean? And I've heard this argument. Well, those animals that they had initially came from the wild, that's true. But I think Ocean County Pines have been around probably long enough that those original ones you could catch with no permit, no fishing license,

because they had absolutely no state protection whatsoever. Right. You know, because I know that they've been bred since the middle 80s. So I don't know. Well, and to that point, actually, so, Zach, one of your students had reached out to me asking about the fabled Inornatus article in Reptiles magazine that was so inspirational to me. My, you know, memory going on 30 years later had been a little confused. I was framing that as a June or July publication, but it was actually December.

I think of that first year. So it was a few months, six months later than I thought it was. But I had sent it to him and then I was just reading through it, right? In the context of I had pulled it out and was just checking it out for all the other things. And in the letters to the editor, actually, there was a comment from someone in PA who worked for PA state fishing game. And he was highlighting the fact that in the previous, and again, there's naturally some delay on all these things or whatever. but so the letter to the editor says, hey, you ran a classified ad for a dude who's selling maps to timber rattlesnake densites. And they hadn't picked up on that.

You know, it hadn't been caught sort of in their process. And, you know, the letter to the editor also noted that this person had gotten in trouble for illegally interacting with Timber rattlesnakes in Pennsylvania and all this stuff. And, you know, the response was, yeah, absolutely, sorry, we didn't do good enough. you know, we shouldn't have run that out. We didn't check, you know, we didn't realize that that was what was happening. You know, didn't catch it as part of our process. I'm boarding it. We have pulled it, you know, and then they published the editor highlighting the fact that all that had happened.

So that was funny. Just sort of that, I randomly happened to run into that, you know, going on, you know, whatever, 27 years later or whatever, based on the fact that your student had reached out, hey, hey, can you, you know, take me pictures of those articles or whatever? And I was just looking at and said, hey, this is actually on point to exactly what you're talking about, right, for someone engaging in that sort of problematic engagement activity. No, totally. So we just police ourselves, that's all. And then when we do good, we got to celebrate the good

because we are really good at flaming the bad. But I think that when we do good, that needs to be put out into the ether as well. So there you go. Sounds like we're at a conclusion. or anything else to add there? Okay. I just, I, I, my big thing, I was on Joe,

the DiStefano show, which is Calubricor corruption radio. I know you, I think you've been on that, Rob. And he was asking me hard questions because I told him I wanted to go on. I wanted somebody to just really go out. me because I was I was tired of going on and people being like Dr. Lofman. I'm like, no, I want to like challenge. Like let's go kind of thing. And he asked me like what do you think everybody in the HIRP community needs to do to be better?

And my answer and I'm sticking by it is just freaking relax. Like take a breath before you respond that these scientists are rarer, just think about what the scientist is going through, and that's their livelihood. And I think the scientists, when people are reaching out to them, they're not reaching out to them because they think they suck. They obviously are taking some kind of inspiration in what you are doing. Plus, I look at this all the time.

Like, I am one lucky SOB that I get to get paid to go out and do what I do. I could get paid a lot more money doing something else. But I would rather have, you know, that whole, I get to get paid to go out to Colorado and look for hoggno snakes and meet Bob Rock here. So I think the scientists also need to breathe. Don't pass judgment immediately. You know, engage. Don't blow off the email. Maybe talk to them on the phone.

Make it personal. And then just kind of figure out whether or not they can, you know, this person can go. And if they can't take the time to explain why, you know, you might actually get an ear of someone who's like, oh, I kind of understand it. I didn't realize that if I find the rattlesnakes that has a telemetre in it and I start taking pictures, that might cause a panic response that makes the snake go out of the study area. Now this dude's lost data. You know what I mean? If that's not explained, we can't assume a scientist that people are going to understand why we get upset. So it's just about communicating and talking.

To be honest, that the implication of that is something that, yeah, even sitting here, I hadn't considered it within that context, right? Most of the consideration is through the framework of saying, sure, if we're talking about conserving a population, you know, and we're concerned about people taking an animal, right? An animal is always relatively fungible, right? N is better than n minus one, but for the most part, that's fungible. But if that happens to be the thing that you're specifically tracking,

And then that does cause a disturbance in the day forward for it to be entirely lost. Yeah, I can appreciate your point as to that, right? That's a little bit more impactful than just saying, well, that also could have just been switched by a car, you know, or whatever it would be. Yeah, no, totally. And an example from Iowa. So, you know, we have this study and the whole reason why, like, I'm doing, the research that we're doing in Iowa is completely for two purposes. Purpose. One, obviously, understand the natural history in community structure to then conserve that population. That's the primary reason why we're out there studying those things. But the other thing is, I'm a herpeticulture guy. So I want to gather up all this really cool data from nature and kind of present it to the herpeticulture community so they know natural growth rates, natural feeding rates, what temperatures they are throughout the day, what habitat they're using throughout the day, how to set up your rack better. to mimic those temperatures. It's a really cool thing. And one of the things with this whole idea of like,

well, I'm just taking one, when we started our study, the previous year, the people that worked there before us, they were fortunate enough to bumble into a bull snake clutch when it was coming out of the nest. And bulls are big enough as babies that you couldn't put a pit tag in them. So they pit tagged the whole clutch, like 20 plus big. babies. Now, me personally, they told us that they did this and they weren't like saying like, oh, it's amazing. It was just like, hey, we were fortunate. We got a whole clutch. None of us thought we would see those baby snakes again. It's a freaking 1,500 acre plot of land, dude, and it's a grass prairie and they can dig. But somehow we just serendipitously put a drip fence right where I think

about six of them were hanging out for the summer. And so we had their birth weight. Like the curuncle was still on their nose when they took these pictures. And now we've caught those individual snakes over the whole summer. And that has changed my whole perspective on feeding calubrids. Because these little boogers have gotten to like three and a half freaking feet in a year. You know, and we talk about like we feed them slow. We feed them. I'm not doing that anymore.

I don't even know if there's a such thing as power feeding, dude. Like these things, if I would have caught these bulls myself, I would have made an assumption that they were two, maybe three years old. So if you show up and you just happen to catch that as the snake you take away from there, I just lost data that I can use and publish to help you as a herpetococular list. Now, that's not like a normal situation for most scenarios, those animals leave. We've got a problem.

So with our study, every snake we catch gets pit tagged. We pit tagged close to 1,000 snakes last year. And the recapture data, it is just blowing my brain as a naturalist and as a herpetoculturalist, how fast and how much these freaking things are growing in a gear. But what's interesting is not all the snakes are growing fast. the freaking hog no snakes, which in captivity, you can get a hog to breeding size easily in 15 months if you don't brumate it. They're growing really slow. So, you know, maybe we're feeding them too much.

If you take those things out, I don't have that data to share it with you as a scientist. So it's just also respecting the study sites. If you go to the long-term northern pine snake study that the book was just published on, for the love of God, leave the damn snakes there. Don't take one out of the wild. That's a data point that's going to help you potentially. And so that's the final point I want to make is that if the scientists are doing their job, now not everybody does it this way.

You know, a lot of people are just looking at genetics. They catch the snake to take a sample. They put it back. But if they're doing long-term monitoring, every snake is precious because they're so damn hard to find. So just leave them all there. Or you're really going to piss people off. in that situation. So that's the final food for thought.

I guess I would lead people to chew on a little bit. And I can't wait. I had to slow my role. I told the grads, we're publishing this now. And then I came back to my office and was like, wait a second. It's only been a year. What happens when you get them at the end of year two

if we're fortunate enough to do that? But no, totally. Oh, and racers? racers just race around whatever habitat they're in demolishing everything. We had racers that had the pattern on their backs, like we all know as baby racers in April. Those same individuals were like two and a half, three feet long in August. Like they were increasing their size by 75 to 100% a month. I mean, it's insane.

Yeah. Yeah, we were looking for a rattlesnake species and found a big racer with a snake-sized lump in his belly. It was so, you know, like, do we palpated out and see what it is? Or would that just make us sadder, you know, to know if it ate our target species or something? Right, we were thinking there was, yeah, at same area, there was a ton of whip snakes, a ton of masticophist. And it was like, well, this is probably a dispositive for this being an area we would anticipate finding small rattlesnakes. Yeah. No.

There's some new studies that have come out of PA, Pennsylvania, that show that when the timber rattlesnakes drop their pups, suddenly black racers descend on the dens and are literally eating the babies. And then they leave. It's like galls eating sea turtles on the beach. which is just crazy to me. Yeah. And there's no wonder they're hanging out with their mothers, you know, in the rookeries or whatever to, yeah. Yeah. Protected, hopefully.

Yeah, crazy. Yeah, it's a, it's a very complicated thing to study reptiles, you know, and we need to give the scientists all the benefit that they can have, you know. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And hopefully, as he said, that they are open. I guess that would be the thing, Zach, right? Both the experiences, several of the experiences that you've detailed, but also I think just generally the mindset and mentality that you both have

and encourage in others when you're engaging with them, be an herbiculturist, zoo people, conservationists, you know, wherever it is of saying like the willingness to be open-minded, like our experience in Western Pennsylvania, right, in terms of the Eastern Mass saga leading to the, hey, yeah, feel free. It's only essentially here are my ground rules for your engagement with this area. And as long as you're respectful of this very limited limitation that I want to apply, go nuts, man. You know, engage with me with your, what you find, what you find, what you find out,

you know. Yeah. I mean, you run into both scenarios where they're either very facilitative and helpful. And that just really builds a positive experience for both, you know, versus the, hey, you're a dirty, you know, herper, get out of here. Because you're probably going to try to steal the animals or something, you know, to go off the, you know, that kind of idea. So, yeah, there are definitely, definitely things on both sides that need to improve a little but. Yep. Yeah.

Great conversation. Thank you for coming. Yeah. No worries. Bringing your expertise. Yeah. And one other thing that I need to toss out there in case you didn't hear it. I don't know if you heard the instance when I was on with Michael and Dom on reptile rejects, but

in a long, free form. conversation. We ultimately had reached a point where Michael started getting super excited about crawfish and he expressed interest and he wants the content. I agreed with him. I said this would be both fascinating, unique in the space, certainly stuff we're not seeing. He wanted, hey, give us your 90 minute on crayfish. You know, just, just you should record, as a podcast episode, you know, as sort of an extra surplus, whatever that looks like and just say, well, I actually have a plug right now. If you're interested in crayfish, and this isn't me, this is the other Zach. So I had a postdoc in my lab, Dr. Zach Graham, and he just published a book last week.

And it's called, I think I'm going to get it wrong. It's crayfish crawfish, a natural history of crayfish. If you want to learn about crayfish biology, and you do, by the way, you just don't know it. You need to go on Amazon and buy that book. It's only like 20 bucks. It's not an expensive book. It's got lots of good photographs in it. And he did an excellent job, but he kind of follow.

There's a nice introduction to the biology of crayfish in there. And then he follows crayfish biologists. There's a chapter on my lab working in the Coalfields, West Virginia with the endangered crayfish. There's a chapter on people describing crayfish. There's a chapter on the forest crayfish. But you want that book. So go get it.

It's just a good read. I, of course, got it. and sat down on my couch. I got my copy on Tuesday, and I had had a long day. I was like, I'm just going to skim the chapter he did on me to make sure the facts were correct. And I read half the damn book,

and I went to bed at like 3 o'clock in the morning. So Graham did an excellent job. So that would be my piece, but I'd be happy to talk about crayfish at a later time just to get the word out because they really are cool. And there are tremendous associations between burrowing crayfish and herps. Lots of co-evolution going on.

That was one of the coolest things that found out when we're looking for the eastern Massachusetts. Yeah. They do that. Yeah. That's crazy. We have a project in Iowa that we went out there and word got out. There was a crayfish guy. And the next thing you know, I'm getting crayfish projects thrown at me.

But one that was like, I was like, yes, we're doing that is there's a Massasaga population. That's conveniently 25 minutes from our. hog-nose population. I got to go out when they did the field surveys last year, which was like flipping amazing. But the thing that limits the Massa-Saga's is the crayfish burrows. Like literally, however many crayfish burrows you have equals the hibernacula. And so they were asking, like, do you think you could add to the burrowing crayfish colony?

And I had to do that. Ironically, full circle with the podcast, the species I was talking about that they destroyed the type locality collecting, there was a gas pipeline that was going through the largest population. And to the gas company's credit, that was a state listed species that they did not have to put any money towards, but they chose to. And so they gave me a lot of funding to move the crayfish from one colony to a wildlife management area where there wasn't going to be any pipeline. So we figured out how to move burrowing crayfish. It's super easy, by the way. Oh, that's good.

And they were like, so when he asked me that, I was like, yeah, I can do that. So now my two worlds for the first time ever are crashing together, because we're going to be doing Mass and Saga surveys to figure out which colony has the most animals in it coming out of hibernation. And then we're going to try to make it bigger by seeding a bunch of burrow and crayfish on one end of it. That's very cool. Yeah, very, very cool. I can't wait to do that. I'm the only human you're ever going to meet that can't wait to go to Iowa.

Freaking love Iowa. So no one has ever said that ever. No offense to people in Iowa, but I've literally had people in Iowa say, you really like it here? I do. Why do you want to come here? Now, I have a question that I have for you, just in general, in terms of the world dynamics you have,

we all, as reptile folks, know the experience of people, engaging with us when we express our love reptiles by talking about how they either hate reptiles or kill reptiles. How do you feel about people talking about the fact that crawdads are delicious? I eat them. I eat the hell out of them. If you look at the Calubrid and Calibroid Radio Facebook page, Clint and I, when we were going to Pomona, we met in Dallas, and we went to the Cajun restaurant.

And I love that too fit. I love them a lot. I just don't eat the endangered ones. Right. I eat the invasive ones. Yeah. I don't know. I think they all taste the same, to be honest with you.

I get asked all the time, do you eat crayfish? I always say it's a good thing. I don't study pandas. You know, I would probably eat the hell out of them too. I don't know. We ate crocodile parm in Australia. I've had an alligator in the southeast. It's very tasty.

No, I will definitely. eat crayfish. I just don't eat. I don't eat the crayfish that I study because they also understand how they bio magnify all the mercury and every other heavy metal in their environment. There's this tradition they do in New Orleans where you rip the carapace away from the tail and then you turn the carapace around and you suck on it and no, do not do that. I'm ruining this for everybody listening. You are sucking in so many worms. Hundreds of worms per crayfish. head. They're all up in the gills. They're in the hepatopancreas and crayfish are infested with parasites. Like they are the intermediate host for lots of things. So first time I saw someone do that

when I knew what I was watching, it made me sick to my summit. I don't get sick. The tail meat, eat the hell out of that. But don't do that. Don't stick your finger on the head thing. No. Wow. That's just rough. Don't do that. But we had a when I was a scout, you know, we had a overnight camp out. And fortunately, me and another scout had done our overnight survival thing where you go and build a little shelter. And so we were away from camp. But back in camp, they caught all these crayfish out of the reservoir, cooked them up and ate them. And the next morning they were all vomiting and they were sick because they didn't cook them properly or something.

But yeah, we were like, oh, we dodged that bullet. Yeah, that's a hard no for me. Yeah. I'll eat the tail meat. I'm not doing anything else. Right. Right. Yep. Oh, good times.

All right. Well, yeah, I guess people know where to find you, but maybe throw it out there for them. Yeah, sure. You can find me on Dr. Krodd at an Instagram. You check out our podcast. I guess I'll do that, Caliburit and Caliburid Radio, part of the Morelia Radio Network, Marilia Python Radio Network, just like these guys. Yeah.

And then the other thing is Clint and I have a new conservation fund that's funding all the research we're doing. And so that is the Calubrid and Calubroid Conservation Corps is what we call it. So it's our nonprofit. And it's actually it's gaining some traction and all the money I use to fund all the research that we are doing for Calibrid Conservation. So I felt like that was worth plugging with this particular talk. Definitely. There you go. Cool.

Well, we appreciate you coming on. And we kind of like to throw out towards the end of the show, like any cool things that we've seen in herpetology or herpeticulture can take that opportunity to throw things out. But I listened to a couple really cool podcast episodes. One was herping herps and herpetology in Iran with, let's see, what was his name? Nathan Kutok. Kutok. Yeah. Really cool.

he worked it so he could go to iran and herp and said it was the most wonderful experience everybody was very welcoming and hospitable he says he's never seen such a hospitable people as the iranian people and they were very excited that somebody from the u.s was coming to iran so that's pretty awesome gives me hope and went and found spider tail vipers and all sorts of cool herbs so yeah pretty pretty awesome and then the other one was Will Robertson talking about Ox turtle ecology. That was pretty cool. Yeah. So. I actually have a thing. I always forget to talk about this. My graduate advisor, Dr. Tom Polly at Marshall, he just put out the second edition of the amphibians reptiles in West Virginia. Oh, cool. As in, I got my copy yesterday. And like this arguably the six, the six, single greatest moment of my career is when Dr. Polly called me and was like, hey, do you want to be one of the editors?

And I was like, are you freaking kidding me? Yes, yes, I do. So I'm the last editor. Yeah. But I read the whole book like three times. So, but he did the thing where he had the kind of the resident expert for the species in West Virginia wrote the species account. Right. And then Polly is where my love of natural history came from.

And he was a massive proponent of field notes. He taught us how to take field notes. He made us write field notes. I still do field notes. And it was super cool is with each of the species accounts. It's kind of your classic state book. But at the end, there's this field notes section. And it's like individual accounts by individual people that worked with the animal about like, you know, in April of 2000, so-and-so found a coal.

skink nestled in a jumping mouse burrow. And then on so-and-so date in 2007, it had rained extensively, which led to a mass migration of the salamander. And I love that stuff. So you can get it on the Amazon, but it's definitely, if you're in the central apps or the East Coast, you need to get that book. Not just because I'm involved with it, but it's really good. I've had a horrible time going to bed because I got Graham's book on Tuesday was all about crayfish.

And then yesterday, which was Wednesday, I got the freaking second edition of the West Virginia book, which I've only been waiting since 1995 to get. It was just really cool to see it in its final form. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah, I guess my contribution. Speaking of field guides, my fill guides still in process. There you go, cool.

Nipper and myself. And hopefully we'll see a blue line here soon. I was promised one, but yeah, it was. And now I think Bob is in Australia. So there you go. It might be delayed further. He said the editor got a girlfriend and hasn't been seen since or something. Oh, dear.

Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll see how, see if I see it anytime soon. But I'm anxious for it to come out. I'd like to have it out before herping season starts, you know, so people to go out and see, enjoy the reptiles of Utah. It's kind of a double-edged sword because you kind of want to keep the secret of how cool reptiles are here in Utah.

At the same time, you know, you want people to appreciate them and hopefully, you know, conserve them and not pave over their habitat. No, totally. Yeah. So we'll see, see when that comes out. but hopefully sooner than later, but it's making progress. Very cool. It hasn't been abandoned or anything. Rob, anything to add?

Yeah, I guess, you know, in the same vein you were talking about, so much Pingle, just listened to the Herb Science one with Justin Lee on a ligadon. And the ligadon have always been fascinating critters to me. I had a former sanis years back that had been sent as a freebie to Cameron, beautiful little red, you know, red snake. It was amazing to grade apinks. I think it was the one that had been around the shop forever, and they'd sent it as sort of a, hey, check out that we could be offering you these or whatever as well if they're of interest.

And truly amazing, amazing how many species are in that genus. Yeah, there's so many different niches we get within the space. They're using those teeth to cut open eggs and consume the contents. They do the same, at least some of those species do the same thing with frogs and toads. and slice them open and come in, go inside and eat. Yeah, you're grisly. And then leave the husk. Yeah.

So, yeah, they're neat, really neat snags. Absolutely. And it's a cool episode. Interesting backstory on the guy. And I'd say, too, that actually was sort of the in reverse, the INAT situation. I was looking at INAT records for a specific thing that led me to all the observations by a specific person. And then when I went to their bio, they said, oh, I'm, you know, a researcher at X, which then, so looking at INAT observations led to me reading this person's published papers.

That's cool. So it was the reverse, right? Instead of finding the person and then looking at the records, this was the reverse. I was looking at records. This person's done some interesting things. And so I'm going to reach out to that person and who knows. Maybe that person will be a future expert. There you go.

When we grill is part of our sequence. Right. I had a similar experience with INAT too. I was looking at some records and somebody mentioned a publication. in regards to the Varanis Tristis complex. And so I think he'd gotten the authors wrong, though. It was like a different author set. But they had done a, like a, I think it was similar to the work with Antaresia,

where they had a very similar, you know, plot and things like that. But they identified like a, you know, diversity, of course, is what you'd expect anyway with such a widespread species complex, but showed, you know, potential justification for several different species within veranistrisis or subspecies or whatever. I don't think they even went to the point where they named them or, you know, but they just showed kind of the relatedness or diversity or whatever. So it was pretty cool.

Yeah, I didn't know that was out there. So that was kind of fun to read about it. I love Australian verandad, so it was right up my alley there. And I, you know, I didn't read the whole thing yet, but I, at least it's on my radar. I just found it yesterday. So your comment kind of reminded me of that. Yeah, really recent stuff that we've been looking at. Yeah, I'm so good through those papers and things.

Yeah, and there's so many things to read. I'm just behind as it is. You know, I've got a lot of more to read. So I have to just add it to the pile, I guess. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Well, thanks again for coming on.

Thank you. Yeah. Thanks to the Merli Python Radio Network for hosting us. And we'll catch you again next. time for Reptile Fight Club.