Reptile Fight Club - Grilling the Expert w/ Dallin Kohler

Episode Date: June 13, 2026

In this episode, Justin and Rob are Grilling the Expert w/ Dallin KohlerWho will win? You decide. Reptile Fight Club!Follow Justin Julander @Australian Addiction Reptiles-http://www.australianaddiction.comIG https://www.instagram.com/jgjulander/Follow 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

to Reptile Fight Club. I'm Justin Joolander. You're here with me. This is Rob Stone. We will be your host this evening for our show. We will be grilling an expert this evening as well, so we're looking forward to that. We've got Dallin Kohler here,

the author of the book Piro. So excited to talk to him about the book, about his experiences and herping and all that kind of stuff. So grill them a little bit here tonight. So that'll be good. Welcome to the podcast and thanks for being here, Dallel. Thanks for having me, Justin Rob, happy day. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, yeah. So you're currently in China. What time is it there? Yes, it is 9 a.m. here. So morning here, evening over there. Not crazy middle of the night or anything like that. That's good. Yeah.

All right. Well, yeah, thanks for taking the time. out of your schedule and being here with us. So I've had an adventful week this week. I did. I was just kind of thinking about the long weekend and we had stuff to do. So I couldn't really. My sister was in town.

Her daughter's having a baby. So she, they had like a little baby shower. So I went, you know, that was Saturday. So I was thinking, oh,

Friday, my brother-in-law is in town. Maybe I'll go and ask, Kim and my dad if they want to go look for snakes. And I'd gotten a hold of Pat May down in Orom area. And so he went out with us as well. There was some crazy traffic. He got a little delayed. So just kind of picked a spot south of where the traffic ended and went up one of the canyons. And we'd been looking flipping rocks for a good 45 minutes or so. And my brother-in-law is like, When you said look for snakes, I didn't think we were going to be lifting rocks on steep hillsides.

He's not, this is not the funnest thing. I'm like, fair enough, you know, but I just thought we'd spend a little time. But I'm like, you don't have to flip any if you don't want to. You can just hang out or walk around and see what you can see. But of course, Pat shows up. Third Rocky flips has a gopher snake under it. And then while I'm photographing that, he walks up the canyon a little further. And so after I finished photographing the gopher snake,

is I headed up the canyon. His son's coming back with a bag. We got one and he had flipped a milk snake up the, up the canyon. So one, I was, you know, happy of the spot I chose. I thought, this looks like good habitat, but I, you know, I didn't know if you could find him there or not. And he, yeah, confirmed that that was a good spot. So it was nice.

That's only the second milk snake I've seen. I guess a little bit. And then we'll get into this, I guess, when we start to go. grill you on you know with pyros and stuff but um i was always a desert rat i didn't realize what how many cool snakes lived in the mountains and so i'd always kind of focused my efforts at the you know in st george or moab or something like that and so um you know i i hadn't really started looking hardcore for these snakes until fairly recently maybe within the last five 10 years or so and mostly through Rob here.

He got us into going to like the sky islands and stuff like that down in southeast Arizona and looking for, you know, montane rattlesnakes and some of these other cool calubrids and stuff. So this was only my second milk snake in the wild and, and I've only found two pyros as well. My dad actually found a pyro back in the 60s. And so on other, I guess, book news front, the field guide to the reptiles and amphibians of Utah has been printed, and I'm receiving my advance copies, a couple of them tomorrow. So that's kind of exciting. I'll have the book in hand and be able to check it out.

And hopefully the rest of them will make it over from your neck of the woods to be here in time for the IHS meeting. in July. It should be plenty of time to get them here. So we'll see how that goes. But yeah, excited to have that in hand. Should she get those tomorrow. And then yeah, it was fun to, fun to herb with Pat again and fun to find some, see another milk snake and, you know, film it as it crawled back under the rocks. And sure enough, I mean, Pat, you know, his wealth of information, And I think he's already found nine milk snakes this year. So he's not a newbie when it comes to finding those things. But I don't know if I'm just getting old, but I'm like, yeah,

maybe I prefer to look for pyros over milks just because you don't have to flip so much. Yeah, about the only way to find a milk is getting really lucky and find one on the road or flipping them. Once in a while, you'll see him out on the crawl, but not very often. And then today, my pygmy bames. of pithons have hatched out. Got 100% hatch rate. Also got some California king snake eggs this morning from, I saw the female laying as I was unpacking a new pair of rough-scale pythons.

So not a bad week and day. Also got some Western Simpsons python wheat belt Stimson's eggs a couple days ago as well, although they look like they might be going bad in the incubator. Not quite the complete failure season. I thought it might be with the warm winter temperatures, but so things are looking up. How about you, Rob? How's your herpetological ventures going? Yeah, okay.

Excited for the forthcoming venture. I'll talk about that on the way back. And, yeah, otherwise, I don't know, more of the same. So I'll get it. When do you head out? Sunday. Sunday. And you got eggs, didn't you?

Didn't you get eggs this week? I did. I've gotten three clutches of rhino-rat snake eggs. There you go. Yeah, probably a few more by the end of the year, so it'll be good. Nice. Yeah, one of them not nested great. So, you know, that probably falls into that same box you're talking about with Western stems.

But, yeah, should hopefully have some. And, you know, that's always fun. Yeah, that's awesome. All right. Well, let's get to grilling here, Dallin. Why don't you give us a little bit of background in yourself and maybe kind of where you fit into herpetology, herpeticulture, whatever? I guess I'll start from the beginning. I guess I grew up as a kid, probably like most people listening to this, that I like looking for snakes outside, love watching Jeff Corwin or those kind of nature. documentaries. And so I always had interest in snakes as a kid. In my undergraduate, I did my undergraduate at BYU, major in biodiversity and conservation. And while I was there, I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Allison Whiting with some Pyrrero Research, as well as working in the

Bean Life Science Museum Herpetology Collection for a time there. And then after my graduation, I worked very briefly for just one field season for the Great Basin Institute doing some desert tortoise work down in southern Nevada, Las Vegas area. And then the last three years, I've been in China, actually, studying at Nanjing Forestry University doing my master's program there. The master's programs there are three years, and this is the final year. So I graduate. I already had my thesis defense, and I'll have graduation in a couple weeks, and then we're

done with that. Very cool. So you grew up in Utah then or? I grew up in Idaho in the Boise area. Okay. Okay. Yeah, that's some good stuff up there. I went up there once with a friend to look for some stuff. We found a couple rattlesnakes and, you know, some a bunch of Mormon crickets were out. Yeah. Yeah, I grew up as a real desert rat. as I enjoyed being out in the desert. Waihi Desert is a nice place. Not a ton of her diversity, but it's a nice place to grow up.

Yeah, yeah. What was kind of your target or what were you really interested in finding up there? I don't know. I think when I was younger, I didn't have as much of a target mindset. I think I was happy with whatever. I think the rattlesnakes were always cool. I really like to go for snakes and things like that. More incident.

herping rather than focus. Yeah, just like I'm going on a herb trip. So did that change with your undergraduate degree? Is that kind of when you got into like more focused targeted herping? Yes, yeah. And that's essentially where my book kind of follows that journey of where for two or three years my target species was the Arizona Mountain King Snake Lampapelopefell. And so it was the first year I didn't see any.

And so it was a kind of a frustrating experience at first, but then I got them eventually. Very cool. Yeah, yeah. It was a really fun read. I really enjoyed the book. And it's really like, I guess, I don't know, an easy read for lack of a better term. You know, it's just keeps you engaged and it's really well written. So congratulations. That's, you know, when people, a lot of people could press. probably tell some good stories in books, but it's hard to actually do that. I actually put pen to paper, I guess not anymore, but ink to screen, pixels to screen, however you want to say that. But yeah, so very, very nicely done and really enjoyed it. So also helped that I knew Mark Hazel,

so it was fun to see him pop up in the book. And yeah, really cool. Well, and Justin, you were part of those surveys, right? That was some of the information for the paper that Dallin had written. Right. Peripherally. I mean, that was kind of the, so yeah, they did the surveys back, when was that, like the early 2000s? And I had started grad school up at Utah State, so I was up here working on a master's and then a PhD. And so I didn't have a ton of time. money or, you know, more than one vehicle that I could go out and hurt. So I kind of did stuff

around here, which was not necessarily helpful for a milk snake or a mountain king snake survey. And I did, you know, do a couple of trips down to, you know, Twill area to kind of look for milk snakes down there, but didn't have much luck finding them. So folks like Brian Eager and Mark Hazel and those guys were much more informative. for those surveys. I just kind of got a free couple nights of herping, you know, on the Utah government. But it was fun. I mean, I found a few things and reported them back and all that good stuff and for the reimbursement of my gas money. But so it was a, but it was fun to be involved with the group and to kind of meet some of the guys and get to know,

you know, some of the local Utah folks. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They, If you don't see them, I think part of what made that survey data useful is that it will also have the negative survey data. And it's not for so much biodiversity data, especially with I naturalists nowadays, we have so much positive occurrence data and yet very little no definitive negative occurrence. And so even if you don't see the targets, I think that's still useful data. For sure. Yeah. That's the trick, I guess, is, you know, where there haven't been observations, it's usually where people, don't go very often or people that may may have seen them there didn't report them or didn't

know what they were looking at. So yeah, it makes it makes it a little tricky. And, you know, as anyone knows, it's put together either a paper on a species range or done a, you know, field guide or something, it's really difficult to kind of pin down some areas, especially in like places like Australia where there just aren't any roads into the area. So you're like looking at an area the size of Texas that has like two records, you know, and you're like, there's more stuff there. I'm pretty sure. It's just nobody can go there and record that.

So it makes a little tricky. But how was that experience, I guess, with your paper on Piero, the range in Utah? Yes, so for that paper on Piero range, it kind of expanded to cover the whole range. of the species. But for a big source of the data was these surveys that you had participated in that we talked about done by a lot of citizen scientists in Utah in the early 2000s. So I had it's part of the project a big big binder of these surveys that I had that I digitized with all the coordinates for and then in addition to that then I pulled in information from my naturalist and from

museum databases as well as from the different state agencies in Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico where pyros are found. And then essentially, once I had the data, the project was relatively simple and just trying to draw map. The nice thing about pyra's is they're mountain snakes. And so if they're found in one mountain range, you can be pretty confident that you can kind of draw the line around the mountain range. Right. Yeah. That's cool.

That is an undertaking, though. yeah, to get all those records. And then to pontificate on mountain ranges that are either, you know, kind of, like you said, in between different putative species or different ranges and trying to figure out what goes where. And that's the fun of it, I guess. Absolutely. How did you come to write the book? How did you find a publisher?

What prompted the book? There's multiple questions there. So I'll start with, I guess, how did I find the publisher? I'll do that. So the book was published by Torrey House Press. I don't know if you guys are aware of them. They're a publisher. They're based in Salt Lake, and they publish about, I don't know,

10 to 15 titles a year, a combination of fiction and nonfiction. With their nonfiction, especially, there's generally an emphasis on environmental issues in the Western United States. Okay. And so this is actually, it had been recommended to me initially by my dad. My dad had read a lot of books published by Torrey House. And so when he knew that I was working on a book manuscript and thinking about pitching it to publishers, he had recommended that I reached out to Tori House Press.

How I started writing the book, I think it was probably in the second year that I was. So the first year that I looked for Pyros, I didn't see a song. single pyro. And I definitely was not dreaming about writing a book then. But then the second year, after I had seen a pyro and my research projects on the species were kind of starting to get some subtraction. I just felt like I had some inspiration that I, I've always kind of had it in the back of my mind that I'd like to write a book. I read a lot. And I think that, I don't know, and that there's a dearth of creative nonfiction related to herpetology. If you go to a library, you can find tons of books about, especially mammals and birds.

There's lots of books written by journalists or by scientists that are written, not just to inform, but also to entertain. Whereas for herpetology, I've always been kind of disappointed, I guess, that there's very few books that fit that niche. It seems that the herpetologists, if they're publishing, they're off. Oftentimes, it's field guides are the first thing that the herpetologists always seem to work on. And so, and there's fewer herpetologists to begin with than those other groups. And so I had always kind of had a desire to maybe make that a little contribution into that nation to kind of marry the science and the stories together in the combination.

Yeah, Bruce Means is a really good author in that vein. And like, you ought to check out his books. They're really, really entertaining to read and exciting and kind of draw you into the story. I think one starts with him crawling across the swamp of Florida because he'd been bitten by an Eastern Diamondback rattlesnake. And he had to get in a canoe and paddle his way over to his car. He lost feelings in his legs. So he's like crawling across the parking lot to his car. And then he got himself to the hospital somehow and, you know, just crazy.

but yeah, and talking about different adventures in different countries and stuff like that. But yeah, there's not too many, but I think it seems like there's kind of an increasing number, and it's nice to see that because it is a little more entertaining to hear those stories than to try to dive into like a scientific work and things like that. Yeah, and I was going to ask if you were familiar with, familiar with inspired by the Carl Koffel books from the 50s 60s. If there were any other other herp authors that you did find motivating or inspiring anything like that.

Other herp authors, the first, the other one that comes to mind other than Caulfield, Archie Carr, I think is his name. Another herpetologist kind of from the more decades ago era of herpetology. He had some books I'm blanking on this. title but he had at least one or two that were kind of nonfiction for a general audience that were percolated very cool well I thought we'd hit on some topics that arise in the book that works for you and the we've already mentioned it a couple not a couple times even mentioned the context of the debate it's a fight club topic that we've discussed previously or at least

bandied about the idea of there is something folks in the community who, well, it's I naturalist. Then it's sort of the context of I naturalist rather than Hurtmapper or vice versa. And there's a lot of sort of politics around those things, different thoughts. My own expressed opinion previously on the podcast is that I think in some instances people, they're not as different in practice if you're talking about small counties on the East Coast or if you're talking about places that are limited by. ocean and things like that where O'HRPRAP are just going down to the county level. But if you're talking about a county on the ocean in Florida, it only has one publicly

accessible piece of land that has habitat. Well, it's nowhere near as different from an IDAT pin as folks would like you to believe when they have kind of present that. But feel free to take it however you want. It's sort of our style. So you just mean in general, like kind of my perspective on the degrees. of which we should be open with sharing coordinates, I guess? Is that the question?

I mean, that's part of it, right? Or obviously, well, I say obviously to me, because this is how I got in touch with you. But you do post your records on I Naturalist. Do you post comprehensively? Is it everything you find? Is there limits to that? I do post almost everything on I naturalist. I think that if I see a lot of one species in a certain spot, I'll probably photograph the first.

two or three or whatever and then I'll stop after that. But I generally do fall on the relatively open to sharing end of the spectrum. Very rarely will I choose to obscure the records. I generally keep them open on I naturalist. And I think obviously there are people that tend to prefer more secrecy, I think. I'm of the opinion that it's better to foster an attitude of openness, but with the assumption that, I don't know, that wildlife is supposed to be enjoyed in the wild, I guess,

and I hope that the book communicates some of that idea of that the wildlife is supposed to be, belongs to the wild. I guess that's where the wild part comes from. And I think that the problem, the root of the problem is not the availability of information, but rather the people that choose to use that information to go collect the things and collect a problematic number of things. And obviously that's, I think, a reality in some places more than others and with some species more than others.

But I think that having the information out there is something that's beneficial for citizen science. It's beneficial for other herpers. I think for my experience being here in China, there's very few eyewaturalist records in China. And so it's oftentimes I may be a couple pins in an area that I might want to go check out. But part of why I've been diligent about in adding my finds here is hopefully that other people herping after me, whether those be scientists trying to study these species or just

recreational herpers, they can look at my record and say, okay, he saw a lot of herps in this species. This is a good spot to go. And I think that that information, when people are respectful of wildlife, is something that's good for it to be out in the public sphere. Yeah, absolutely. In terms of the book, right, there's kind of a range of specific in terms of locations that you find animals that you present, did you have, find a challenging at all to kind of navigate the right depth and detail? As you say, there's often sort of a presumption or prevailing opinion within the community to be guarded and reserved, even when they're referencing spots that are easily known, easily identified, easily, you know, a single

Google search would turn up that particular place. People can sometimes still be reluctant to talk about that. Did you find it easier to do in the context of a book? Maybe there's an inherent time lapse, right, between when you did it. So that's another sort of thing we asked when we talk about iNaturalist or HurtMapper records of if you're putting them up in the real time, semi-real time, you know, a year later, when you're in the winter, when you're not finding anything, any of that? Sorry, the Wi-Fi, the video lagged for a second.

Can you hear me all right right now? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So in terms of the book, I think, yes, like you said, that there's, it did help that there was sort of a lag between publishing the book and when I was having these experiences. I think I wasn't overly concerned with being super secretive in what I'd disclose in the book because almost everything that's that I write about in the book is also.

documented already on i naturalist and so i wasn't necessarily in terms of discussing locations i tried to be um i don't know i think i was more concerned about like from a from a literary standpoint of how to make it make it sound good and what level of detail felt relevant um i think that i do talk pretty openly about some of the localities um but kind of just knowing that i think that i don't I'm not the most famous. I'm not a very famous person at all. And so I don't think that having these localities disclosed in the book is necessarily going to generate a huge amount of traffic to any of these areas. So that wasn't something that I was super concerned about in writing. So on some of these, right, and you alluded to it earlier, you went out with other Utah herpers.

Did you have any conversations with them either at the time or retroactively when you're writing in the book or after the book came out about sort of the level of openness. You know, you talk about going to a deep creek with Mark Hazel to see, oh, okay, did cool, we turn them up there. Was that a conversation, either beforehand or retroactively? That was something I've talked with, with Mark, a fair amount. Mark Hazel, it sounds like Justin knows. Mark's, I like Mark, Mark's a good guy.

He's more of, it sounds from talking to him, he's more of in the camp. of that he's more open to sharing information, I think, than some of the other herpers that he knows. I think some of the herpers in the Utah, the herping community that I don't really know personally, I think tend to be more on the private side of things, whereas Mark was more generally more open. I know he had a post on Field Herp Forum, I think it was, from years ago, where he speculated or gave information on a bunch of different mountain ranges,

remote mountain ranges where pyros may or may not have been found at. And I think especially in the context of the deep creeks or other really remote mountain ranges, from my perspective, with these places, they're hard to get to their difficult access. And if pyros are there in them, they're not in very high densities. So I'm not really worried that even if everybody knew

it. There were pyros in this mountain range, but I don't think it would, I don't know, maybe you get two or three more people a year that go and maybe they bag one or two pyros. And I don't think that that's like a huge concern, I guess, in my opinion. I've talked with Mark a little bit about kind of those different perspectives that are out there. The other guys that I heard with a lot in the book, Jacob Searcy and Taylor Proach, They're both younger guys like me that probably are more on the closer towards the sharing is openly sharing and not collecting. And this is the way of it goes where they fall on that spectrum. Right.

Yeah, that's tricky. You know, you get some people that just don't want to give up any information or have any, you know, thing that would give away their spots. And, you know, I can respect that. like it's hard if you've you've kind of scoped out or found your own spots. But if you're just going on well-known areas where everybody goes, you know, then there's not much to really hide there because most people already know it's there or could suss it out, you know, pretty easily. And, you know, getting in, we, we have very little information on the range of pyros, you know, how far do they go into Nevada and, you know, it's very poorly known. And same with, you know,

the milk snakes and stuff. So it'd be really great if more people went out to these remote areas and we're willing to share that information rather than just kind of hoard it and keep it to themselves. You know, I always worry about that. Like if they're, you know, we call it the bus effect. You know, if you get hit by a bus tomorrow is the information you've spent so much time and effort and money gathering, is that going to do any good or is it just going to die with you, you know? So it'd be, I think it's important to, to, you know, benefit science and society by sharing those kind of things. But that's, that's a mixed bag, I'm sure, for some people. And of course, you know, you go to a spot sometimes and you see people who have just flipped rocks and don't put them back or, you know, that are unscrupulous.

Or, but, you know, every once in a while, you'll get kind of a glimmer of hope that people, are doing it right and and the more that people know you know the less they're going to do that kind of stuff and um i don't know i always try to tell people if if i'm herping with them oh put that back you know a little better or make sure you're you're keeping the seal there because that's important to the to the animals that might shelter under there but you know sometimes it's impossible to get them exactly back how you found them but give it your best effort yeah um I was going to say, though, you know, having people that are willing to share information with you and help you kind of guide you as, you know, really helps people do it the right way, in my opinion. And I think it seems like less people are out there just to collect.

At least I haven't run into that too much, but I guess I don't run in those circles. So I don't know. Yeah. I always wonder if Caulfeld did a disservice. I mean, it was the time, but man, his books,

you're just reading and everything he finds, he collects and takes back to the zoo or whatever. And that was just the way it was done back then. But, you know, I've herped with a couple of people that were like, I guess you'd call them flippers or, you know, they just get wild animals and sell them,

basically. So like anything they saw, had a dollar sign on it, no matter how little or how much it was, you know, they, they'd collect it. So it's, uh, it was, it was hard to be out with those folks because you're just like, yeah, it's going in a bag, you know, it's, I don't even want to alert them to the presence of this animal because I just know they're going to collect it or something. So, yeah. Yeah, and we mentioned this previously on, um, on a trip, uh, that Phil and I had taken, we wound up, um, going out with some folks who are really into sort of locality, a locality-based community.

And there was a different vibe and aspect to where it was, it was almost sort of a possessive, there was a possessive quality to each find in a way that is not the case in sort of the group. You know, as Justin says, we run in the same group. The, you know, groups, the circles that were running in of like, it's almost like, oh, this was person X. They found this club right. in a very specific, very possessive kind of way that I found very foreign. Sure, you could say, oh, yes, particularly if you're out hiking in the environment or whatever, that person X found it.

But R.S. Well, you highlighted it, not for the purpose of collection here, but even, to be honest, it struck me a little bit wrong that Pat's son brought it to you in a bag. I don't like, to me, in my own sort of my herping experience, and I know I'm not the only, I'm certainly not solely representative, but I'm not the only one either. That means that I didn't see it within the context. You know, if I saw it on the rock that it was sitting on, if you put it in a container, show me at the car, I didn't, I don't count it the way I would if you said, hey, Rob, come over to the rock and take a look at.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, to be fair, they almost lost it. So he lifted the rock and the snake took off into the grass. Sure. So, you know, yeah. But, you know, I'd rather see it than not see it. But yeah, I get what you're saying. And I kind of wish I was a little closer. You know, I could have been nearby to hear him. Oh, I got one kind of thing. And then run over and see it, you know, under the rock or, yeah, shortly after under the rock, I guess. But I was okay either way, you know. And I think more so the learning about, you know, where, you. he had success finding it was more helpful than anything, you know. So, you know, he took me back to the spot. We released it under the same rock, that kind of thing. So it was like, you know, back back to where it was and that kind of thing.

So I guess I could have come back the next day and see, you know, lifted the same rock, see if it was still there or something like the Zanada in California that we found where it was still there the next day. But, you know, I just. And it's also nice having, you know, those places where you know you're going to be able to find, potentially find something there, you know. Oh, yeah. I don't mean to say there's no utility to it, no fun, you know. I'd rather, yeah, as you say, I'd rather see it than not see it. I'm just saying, you know, it's a good thing. That wasn't your lifer because then you might have a quandary about the situation.

And we've seen that on various things, right? My first, the first gruber that I saw. And obviously, different people kind of differently. Nipper, right, wants to see an animal in habitat, and I count. That's his structure. You know, mine is more pressing than that so that my life were Ruber, you know, the first one that I saw, sure would have qualified under that, but Lane Mazzetti, right, had cruised it. And we probably have been talking to him and stuff. It wasn't what I would call common venture.

And, you know, he was standing, you know, standing there next to it at the time that it wasn't, you know, we were driving different cars and things like. done. So to me, that didn't count. Even though I had seen it. Well, if you're herbing together in different cars, I think it would still common venture, but yeah. In the context of that particular situation, it didn't count. Right. It didn't count for me. But again, Nipper was saying, what do you mean? You're saying you're saying you're going to have to go back and try and find another one, you know, to have a count. And we saw two or three more in the next day. So it wasn't. Fortunately, it resulted. You didn't need it to count either.

Didn't need it to count. And it was easy enough emotionally to say that. But yeah, I mean, I do think it raises an interesting point. As you say, right, there is utility in seeing them learning about the habit that is more than half of them than just the fun of seeing it and seeing it be released. I mean, heck, Dallant, you know, part of in the book, I thought you had a beautiful discussion around the joy and seeing things, you know, slither away into the environment, right, if you want to talk about that. Yeah. that I don't remember if I mentioned this in the book, but there's a

like a Buddhist practice of mercy releases. I think I mentioned this. But where the Buddhists will essentially take an animal that was either like captive pet or destined for the dinner plate and then release it.

And that's a practice that in reality causes a lot of ecological problems. That's where like the bullfrogs or a lot of red-eared sliders here in China that I see have all been released because of these mercy releases. So as a religious practice, I don't recommend it. But I think that that feeling of like letting something that you see this thing,

you could take this thing, but just to be able to let it go and to let it live in the world, I guess, let it be, let the wildlife be wild. I think it's something that is a good feeling, a good feeling. Right. Yeah, that is a, I do. enjoy letting stuff go, but sometimes it's a little harder than others when you, you know, you're like, such a beautiful snake or, you know, but yeah, it's better off in the wild, I think. And that's the nice thing about this day and age, as opposed to Carl Calfid's time, is that

so many are available as captive bread, healthy, non-parasitized, you know, parasitized, you know, animals so it just makes it a lot easier they're they're used to eating lab mice and rats or something you know for the most part so um yeah yeah absolutely and i i do think kind of in the excuse to the extent it needs one right that is some of the caulfeld thing of saying like well you know the all the only way is a possibility of captive breeding so you know that was the way that they had animals to display and work with and even utilize to acquire new animals and those sorts of things, right? You don't want to collect corn snakes in South Carolina or Diamondbacks or whatever it would be, gave them currency to get, you know, get, so I could have all the rattles, maintain all the

rattlesnake forms in the U.S. at the time, at a single point in time, right? It was something, you know, a bartering chip or whatever. So, yeah, absolutely. I think there's, you know, something to be said for the fact we don't have to do that now and the other part of that, too. and, you know, Dallan, I'm curious to your thoughts as well as Justin, on the idea that I think there's almost also some utility. So, one, I would say that there's a presumption that people who are willing to go and either just put in the effort to find these animals, even for the purposes of collection, or to break laws by illegally collecting things and selling them and, you know, engaging in that trade. I think there's almost often, and maybe it's just villainizing them generally, but there's this idea that they're all so stupid and that they couldn't work stuff out for themselves. They can only, you know, it's only a threat if we tell them the pin, you know, otherwise they'll just sit at home and eat cheeseburgers. You telling them where it was is the only thing that will let them know about that place existing.

And to be that's so, you know, it's too self-important because that's obviously not true. You know, there was someone on a podcast, this was the most egregious example I'd ever see. He wouldn't say what he went to go herping for because that would put it at risk. And I just, that's, that's, yeah, that's pretty funny. Like, it's so. I can't, you know, I can't. Yeah. Okay.

No, yeah, yeah, yeah, to comment on that. Yeah, I agree that the people, yes, there are some people out there that either for their own collections or for the purpose of selling it. that do collect the herps in the wild. But I think that you make an excellent point that these people are generally people that have as much herping knowledge as you and me. It's, yeah, I agree that they're not somebody that's, if you don't give them information,

that they're just not going to collect anything. That's certainly not the case. And so I think that better to have the information out for all of the people, the majority of people who are going to be herping ethically who are going to put the rocks back who are not going to collect to a degree that's illegal

or bad for the species and so yeah. Yeah, I think too, like the I think that motivation also makes

sometimes makes them better herpers. Like they can find stuff really well because feeding their family depends on them finding stuff. And so they're just like keyed in to find that because that's their paycheck basically. So, you know, I agree that saying, oh, if we don't tell them, then they will never find out is a little, yeah, silly to think. And if they've done enough looking and herping for collection purposes, they're probably going to know where things are and how to find them, even if it's a new species that they have never found. know you might have a better chance than most of finding that.

And I've found that to be true with folks that I've hurt with that are collectors. But at the same time, I think, you know, like that, that push or that drive to do that is waning. I think those people are, you know, fewer than they were 10 years ago. So that's kind of nice. But in some cases, it's not that great because we, you know, there's still some things that need to be collected for, you know, display in zoos or reptile parks or things like that to get people to know about them or to be excited about them or to establish captive populations that are self-sustaining that kind of thing, you know, and to just say, let's cut the, you know, no more collection ever. I think that's

unrealistic as well. And I think one of the things, too, I wanted to ask you about, Alan, is the reason I didn't go down the herpetologist road is because I didn't want to pickle them. I didn't want to kill them for the collections. And I understand the importance of collections like the Bean Museum collection is fantastic. And a lot of that is probably DORs that people are collecting for the pickle party or whatever. You know, that's, that's great. You know, put put the dead on the road ones to use. But to euthanize a healthy thriving animal that, you know, you caught out of the wild, that just, that hurts my soul a little bit. So I couldn't, I just couldn't. do that, you know.

But what are your thoughts in that regard? Yeah, that was something. I mean, I was described it well in the book, but yeah. Yes, yeah. In the book, I tried to capture some of that, the real ethical quandary that, right, the emotional pain that I felt with. You are right that most of the specimens added to the Bee Museum nowadays, the majority of them are DORs, things that are just essentially salvage.

But the collection there has over 40,000 specimens. and most of those were collected by people intentionally out collecting. As part of my time working there, I did do some collecting, as is described in the book. And I think it is something that did cause me a lot of emotional pain that I tried to put in that. Especially I read about the instance of we had caught an alligator lizard, Taylor and I down in Arizona. and when we, after we euthanized it and cut open the abdomen, they get a little piece of the liver. The liver tends to have higher DNA concentrations.

It's better for DNA extractions to be taken the liver and cut it open. And there's eggs in the individual instance, grabbing. And that was something that it's just like, I don't know, made me sad that it's not just that I sacrificed one lizard, but I also sacrificed these eight eggs of the other lizard. and so that was something that is I don't know it was something that I was supposed to do

needed to do for my job for the for the museum and I think that there is definite value in having specimens obviously you need to take specimens for your species descriptions and specimen records are good and especially DORs are helpful

for you can get genetic samples from DORs no problem, but oftentimes the snake is mangled and you maybe aren't going to be able to get good morphological measurements if that's something that you're interesting in studying. And so I think there is a place for a limited amount of specimen collection in science. That being said, I think it's the amount that there should be is a pretty low amount. And I think that any project that could be done with living specimens without needing lethal sampling is obviously the way to go. For my fieldwork here in China, the lab that I've worked with the last three years,

we do mostly amphibian work. And the vast majority of our sampling, we do bucle swabs. And so for the amphibians, you catch the frog, you have a cotton swab, like the COVID swabs that would go up your nose, that kind of a swab. And you move it around in the mouth for about 20, 30 seconds. and then we're able to extract DNA from that and get pretty good DNA high enough quality for not just traditional sequencing, but also for next generation sequencing techniques like RADC. And so there's the potential for minimally invasive sampling things like Buclod is definitely

out there and something that I think that more of the perhaps traditionally minded scientists would benefit from moving over to us. Right. And I mean, as the tech. technology develops and improves, it also becomes less expensive and more powerful in some ways, or you can do more with less, I guess. You know, instead of getting a piece of liver, you can get a bucle swab and have the same results. And also that, you know, like E DNA is really cool too because you don't even actually have to find the animal to document presence necessarily. So that's kind of an exciting move towards the future that we can maybe.

find some of these less easily found species like we were been talking about in areas where they're not necessarily known from. I wonder how that'll shape up. But I guess that's the fun of it, right? As these new technologies develop, trying to figure out how to utilize them and make sense of what comes out the other side, you know. I struggle with taxonomy and some of the choices that are made there and how inconsistent. it is between the different, you know, taxa. Yeah, there you go. So this brings up another topic from the book that I did want to touch on.

And exactly in line with your commentary, Justin, would be to say to me, there an issue that I have with taxonomy, as you expressed it there, is the idea that Dallan, you mentioned there are so many whip bales and leopard lizards and things that are going that you didn't even, you know, we're like, okay, I'm losing count on. you know, trying to identify them. They're cons-specific in these areas, all those different things. Simultaneously, that's happening within, that conversation is happening within the paradigm of saying, well, we're going to lump together plastic, high-banded, you know, lateral-banded Nablachai with all the pyros up to the south rim of the Grand Canyon.

When we have 14, you know, cons-specific whiptails and leopard lizards and things that are in that same area, That speaks to the authors being lumpers, slitters, the course of time, all those different things, lends me to being a forms herper rather than someone beholden to taxonomic anarchy. I did think you did a good job about talking about that. Yeah. Yeah, that's a tricky taxonomic. Taxonomy is always, I'm sure there's differently older herpers that have different opinions on on the tax on me, especially seems that people just don't like, you know, people are often

resistant to change when you grew up one way and then they, then it gets split. Then it seems that it's easy for, as humans, to kind of default. It's the way it was before, is that not better? And I used to think that that perspective was really, really silly. And then now I've been in herpetology long enough that it's like, okay, species that I knew before in the last couple years or whatever. Now there's taxonomic changes. I'm like, wait, why did that? And I feel a little bit of that, that inertia, that resistance to the change.

And so I feel that. At the same time, I will say that my perspective is generally that, especially with the advent of molecular work, that taxonomy is improving, that things are getting better, but that it's not always linear, that may be the taxonomy and the way that the definition of the species for a certain group, what counts as a species, what's been split, while it maybe doesn't, isn't every single change is necessarily perfect. But I think when you look at it in the long run, especially looking back like 20 and 25 years ago,

that I think that overall that the current taxonomic paradigm is getting closer to matching biological realities. That being said, because biological realities are often messy and hard to put in boxes, a lot of that progress along the way is maybe two steps forward, one step back sometimes. So I'm personally interested in regards to the Arizona Mountain Kingsnake versus the Chihuahua' Mountain King Snake split. I'm interested to see at some point if people do a study using RADSEC or more genome-level approaches versus the the split, which was mostly based on, I'm trying to remember how many genes. I think three genes or two mitochondrial, one nuclear or something like that.

I'm blanking on the details of the paper. But nowadays, we know that that can be relatively shaky evidence for splitting a species and that it's quite likely that there may be admixture there, and so maybe it's best as just one single species. But until somebody actually does that genome-level study, we're going to have to, it's best to go off of the best information available in the right now is a northern and a southern lineage there. Right.

Yeah, I think that's fair. I think the other thing that I kind of take issue with, and again, so Justin is a birder as well. I'm not sufficiently advanced to be interested in not at the point. He's not old enough yet. Yeah, that's it. is the idea that sometimes I think I see within papers almost either patronizingly or the opposite. I don't know. Just specifically saying, oh, those were only split six million years ago.

They're not different enough. Ludac on its face to me, as someone appreciates that I won't be alive nearly that long. Right, right. I still think about that study that they did. They moved a species onto an island or studied an island population. No, they moved the species there. And then there was like a war. This was in Russia.

There was a war. And so they couldn't go to the island for a few years. And then they went back like a decade later. And this lizard, they thought they were just going to find no lizards because they weren't, it wasn't ideal for them to live there. And they found out that these things had changed. their diet. They now were vegetarian instead of insectivorous. Their gut anatomy had changed. And this is only in the course of 10 years. They've had all these adaptive changes. And things can change pretty quickly if there's a drive and there's an adaptability, I guess. But, you know,

is that a new species? Is it the same thing as they put on the island? And there's always that fun little factoid that Ben Morrill used to say is like as soon as you take it out of the wild, you've changed its evolutionary trajectory, so it's no longer a part of that species anymore. Technically, you know, that's a little extreme view, but I guess, you know, it's kind of right. If you're removing it from the selective pressures of its particular environment, are you, you know, what are you changing in that animal? And I mean, now it's, it doesn't want to eat toads anymore. It wants lab mice, you know, that you, you,

that are dead and you thaw out and give them to them. So, yeah. And I will say I will never accept Adder as the scientific name for a check wall. It's always obese to me. What a stupid change that was. Obesis is such a great descriptive term for a check wall. Absolutely. And there are a couple, I thought in the book you did a really good job of integrating different concepts, herpetological concepts.

So I wanted to run through a few of those in terms of referencing, not necessarily the details of the study, but sort of the idea or what you were trying to capture by including it. The first one, because it's local to me, I did actually, you mentioned that, so here in Colorado, we also have the Western Terrestrial Garter, the vagrants, elegance vagrants. And you had found it interesting that they had conducted a study and found that only 60% of them. would musk when they were grabbed. And you found that sort of atypical to your experience with them in Utah. The thing I was going to say is that, actually I'd say my lived experience in Colorado

where they are probably the ubiquitous snake, particularly on the east of the mountains, if you find something, that's almost certainly what it's going to be. That's probably about the percentage I would put on it as well. Right about half. You know, half of them do, half of them

down. Yeah. which was in conflict was sort of your lived experience. Well, it's interesting to hear. Yeah, like it's just something that sticks out because when it happens, it's so horrible that you just, it just stays with you. Whereas if it doesn't happen, you might not really pay as much attention. There's a bias in your memory based. Yeah. If you're not recording each interaction, you know, is it just anecdotal?

Yeah, no, yeah. I feel like especially in Idaho too growing up, that was one of the more common. common snakes that we would see. Yeah, maybe it is just my memory bias, but it does feel like all of the the wandering garters snakes always must. So it's very interesting to hear that in Colorado that it's apparently not the case.

So it was bad enough for me in Utah that I just stopped picking them up at some point. I'm happy to just take a picture from a distance. I don't need to squeeze on. Yeah, there must be something different to it because Justin can attest that I often will send him pictures of me holding three or four of them at a time. Well, and you're not afraid to get must either because that one, I almost had to have you walk home because he got back in the vehicle. Checkered Gartersnake on.

There was a really large checkered gartersnake in southeastern Arizona. And it was horrible. It had copious amounts of shooys. and it unleashed all over Rob, and he gets in the vehicle. I'm like, I don't know about this one. You might have to ride in the back of Dustin's truck or something. It was pretty bad.

I've got a great shirt that Jordan, well, no, anyway, it's like a perfume commercial. It's got a perfume bottle, and it says Nerodia by Calvin Klein. or so they're by, no, it's by Carl Coughfield. It's pretty great. So, what a, good stuff. Another study that you mentioned there is the idea of detectability of snakes from associated with Guam and the brown tree snakes.

They had put radio trackers into 87, brown tree snakes. And then they had people, so they were able to identify where they were and then could compare that. to the amount that were detected visually. And the ratio on that was one of the 87 was visually detected. If you want to talk about that, that's pretty amazing. And were those herpers or were they just randos? I don't remember if they were herpers specifically.

But this was an interesting study that was initially covered on the Herp Highlights podcast, Tom Major and Ben Marshall many years ago. I wish I remembered the episode number, so you could go. listen to their description of it because it's great. But the study that they reference is so interesting because, like you said, they have the radio tractors and then they have the people go out and look for them and then whenever

the person passed within, I think it was like a two meter window of the snake. They considered that like a potential detection. And it was fascinating that out of the 80-some-od opportunities that the spotters only spotted a single

snake. And I think that maybe brown tree snakes are probably harder to spot than pyros, I think, but they, maybe the comparison is not perfect, but it really does speak to the fact that there's so many snakes that even a seasoned herper is probably walking past every single time you go out into the field. I think we like to think that we have good eyes and that we can spot snakes and probably herpers are better at spotting snakes than regular people that don't have experience. We know what to look for and we know what sort of micro habitats are good to look at.

But yeah, I think that there's, we definitely walk past more snakes than we think we do. Right. Yeah, I found especially lately in the last few years that I'm finding more by sound than sight. Like I'll hear them kind of going through the grass and I'll, you know, train my view that way and catch them that way. But, yeah, it's tricky. I mean, that's what they do well as they blend in. And it's always fun if you do spot one to see if your herper friends can find the same animal. You know, I had some mountain horn lizards that I kept for a while.

And they, you know, I had this, you know, terrarium or whatever. And I'd lose them in the cage. You know, it's like a four by two area. And I couldn't find them in there because they're so well at blending in. And once you see them, it's like, oh, well, they're right there. They're right in front of me. But, yeah, until you see them, it's very difficult. Yeah, and that fits into, you kind of hit in different ways, different aspects of the same idea of the message that it's, and I honestly, this is one of the points that I really appreciate it in the context of the book.

And maybe it's a reflection of reading 240 pages, whatever it is, as opposed to. to 10 seconds looking on Instagram or whatever, but the message of the difficulty of the thing. And that's actually what makes it great, right, and the satisfaction of the motivator to find the target, the satisfaction of finding it, and that us looking at that as the audience, not as the person who put forth that content, but just really the expression of the work, effort, toil, blood, sweat, and tears literally often, you know, that went into finding that and someone just press and like and scrolling on, there's no justice to the thing.

So maybe that was a big part of what appealed to me about the book, is the idea of like, no, you spent, you went for a season, you couldn't find what you were looking for. That didn't deter you. You were, if anything, more motivated to go do it and all the time and effort that you were putting in to do that. And I think that's really positive messaging to be putting out, especially in the face of all the social media content that we see now,

that makes it seem, from my perspective, too easy. Yeah, it does. definitely does seem scrolling through Instagram that it just, it does seem so easy that it seems like, oh, it should be, whatever target species is out there, it should be easy to, easy to see because such and such saw multiple times or whatever. They have a picture with two of them in it. But yeah, I think in the book, I did try to capture some of that,

the feeling of the journey of really looking for something. And it is funny to think that I think if you had told, if I had a time machine or whatever, and I went back in time, and I could have told my previous self that the first year that you look for pyros, you're not going to see a single one. I think I might have switched target species, or I think in terms of at least my ideas for scientific research, I think if I had known that my initial idea,

while neither of the projects that I ended up doing involved, like samples that I had found, because they were either based on museum records or things like that. I think that I would have maybe switched to a species that I could find easily and knowing what I know now about how difficult they are to find. I might have switched, but I am glad that I went through that, that the blood, sweat and tears, the journey of the experience. And so I'm glad that you appreciated that, that,

that element of the book. Right. I think those of us that have searched for something difficult and, you know, I've had a hard time finding it, uh, appreciate those photos or videos or whatever, much better because we know it's not just a, you get there and you see it and you go home. I mean, sometimes it works out that way, but usually it doesn't, you know, like Rob's experience with pyros is different than our experience with pyros, but yeah. Yeah. And then, but. vice versa, I'm sure, with other things as well. You know, and I do like the idea that, and again, talk about it in the book or kind of, the spirit is within the book of saying you're going out there and there could be anything, right, within meets and bounds.

There could be anything, but it's probably, you're probably going to find nothing. And that's okay. And that's part of the thing. Yeah. I always tell people, and if you're herping in Utah and you don't find it, at least you got some great scenery, you know, because Utah is a beautiful place to herb. Whereas somewhere like the featureless moon planes where you're looking for an inland high pan and that's about all that's out there and you know you might spend a week and see nothing.

Yeah, it can be difficult. Yeah, it's nice to go herping in areas where, yeah, that even if you were just treating as hiking instead of herping, that it would still be a good experience. Yeah. Yeah. A couple more concepts from the book that I wanted to hit on a little bit. was, and this actually falls back into what we're just talking about in terms of detectability, you get into snake detection hypothesis, the fear of snakes, and whether that's sort of a driver.

That's an interesting conversation. I don't know if any of that stands out to you. There's a lot that could go in with snake detection, but I think the, I don't know, the biggest thing for me is that it seems to be, or I guess my, my major, opinion in this regard is that humans definitely don't have an innate fear of snakes. And I think that was something from my time, part of my time at the Bean Museum, I worked as a museum educator and we did some live presentations with snakes. And the kids, you would have an auditorium full of 200 kids. And none of the kids, as long as you didn't show any fear of the snake, none of the kids would be afraid of the snake. And yet the teachers that came

with the kids, the teachers would be afraid. And so I think that for me, it's very clear, at least from my anecdotal experiences, that the fear of snakes, it's not really ingrained. And then when you get into the literature studies on non-human primates, there's kind of evidence for both sides, I think, that there's some, it seems that snakes have played some evolutionary role, had some evolutionary pressures on primate ancestors. But the people that go so far as to say that snakes were a huge driver in primate vision,

I think that has probably gone way too far. I did see an interesting story. And I don't know if we talked about this here, if you guys saw this, but there was a herper out with a primatologist and was watching some chimpanzees. and they made a call and the primatologist was like, oh, they found a snake. She could understand, you know, enough of their language or whatever to know that they were sounding an alarm call for a snake. And so they went over there and it was a ball python.

And the majority of them had cleared out, but there was one, like one of the dominant females was sitting in a tree overlooking the snake. And the guy went and picked it up and the chimp like screamed at it. like, what are you crazy? You know, like, put that down. Like, what are you doing? You know, and he's like, no, it's okay. He's kind of handling it.

And then he put it back down and the other chimps kind of came over and checked it out. So I wonder if that's the same thing. You know, the chimps maybe just have a blanket innate, you know, or not innate, but learn fear of snakes. And if they're taught otherwise, they might change that. I don't know. There was a thing with macaques, right? For some reason, I'm thinking Japan that was sort of the same idea. that it would, and I think it was with snake replicas, but essentially that it was pretty clear that it was being learned, learned behavior associated with the young animals that had no exposure were initially interested.

And then they introduced these adults who had an acquired response. They then demonstrated that response. And then after that, the young ones engaged in the response. And you wonder if it's like just all snakes or if they can discriminate between dangerous, Is that actually, did he potentially create an issue if they then didn't appreciate the distinction between a ball python, you know, if they're not appreciating that versus a potentially dangerous scent? Right. It's interesting to think about for sure. Kind of crazy. Absolutely. Yeah.

I thought you did a good job of kind of presenting both sides of that. You know, that's the whole show here. We do Reptile Fight Club. We try to get both sides, show the validity of both sides of an argument. You know, and just to have somebody that says, nope, this is the way it is, you know, it doesn't sit well with us usually. Awesome. So the last concept I want to hit on out of the book, give a really good presentation or discussion on mimicry in the context of a pyro's, but really any sort of banded snake. Do you want to talk about some of that?

Of course, yeah, I think mimicry is one of the, from an evolutionary standpoint, probably the most interesting thing about pyros. So for any listeners not aware, so the pyros are, they're red, white, and black banded king snake, and they are regarded as mimics of coral snakes, the idea being that they have these bright colorations to trick predators into thinking they're venomous, that they're dangerous, while in reality they're totally harmless. And so as an evolutionary strategy, what's confusing about this is that pyros range, hundreds of miles north of the furthest north coral snakes. The Sonoran coral snakes only get, I think, about halfway up through Arizona,

whereas the pyros range up into Nevada and Utah, places where there definitely aren't any coral snakes to be mimicking. And so the confusing thing from the evolutionary perspective is if there's no dangerous species around, there should be no incentive for the predators to avoid the brightly colored snakes. And so, in fact, the bright red colors should, in fact, invite more predation, and then the mimicry should evolve away in those areas, which isn't entirely the case.

And so as I detail in the book, one of the studies that I did on pyros with Jacob and Taylor and Dr. Whiting as well was looking at how that memetic accuracy varied with range. And so it was clear from measuring a bunch of museum specimens and some inatural reference that the degree of mimetic resemblance does decrease with distance. And so there is some of that evolutionary pressure to move away from the mimicry. But at the same time, the conundrum still exists of the snakes that are at least partially mimicking the coral snakes very, very far away. And so a few of the potential reasons that I detail in the book.

And in the paper, I guess number one is consideration of predators. A lot of mammals don't have very good color vision. And so it is funny to think of from a human-centric perspective, we're mammals. And so we just kind of assume that all mammals must have the same level of vision as we do, which is not the case. We have much better vision, especially in regards to color vision, than other predators. say like a badger or something. And so it seems that for the mammalian predators who generally tend to be colorblind,

at least red green colorblind. And so it seems that for the mammalian predators, it's probably just not as big of an issue. And then for the avian predators, a lot of big birds like their hawks oftentimes will migrate. And so it would make sense that they're still having some of that evolutionary pressure

to avoid the brightly colored banded snakes from their experience in more southern areas. But there's also some other interesting hypotheses. Things like Flickr Fusion is an idea that hasn't been explored very well in the scientific literature, but essentially the idea that a banded snake, when it moves, the bands will kind of create a visual effect either through kind of blurring together

that can be either startling to a predator or make it hard for the predator to lock in on the animal if it moves all of a sudden and then stops and it moves again those can be visually confusing and so that's something that is potentially an explanation for why a lot of snakes tend to have banded patterns although that's an idea that

there's still not a ton of robust research it's been done. It'd be interesting, too, to, like, see if... If they'd rather a hole very, very deep, but that's probably enough for them. Oh, shoot. Sorry. I would be curious to see if maybe, like, a predator could discriminate between, you know, the different banding patterns. It's always confused me why they couldn't do the black touches yellow.

you know, scheme, why it's, you know, different than the, and if, if it's, if the predators can actually work that out,

you know, in the, or if it's just too quick or, or they don't have time to think about it or whatever, but, and it seems like a lot of, you know, um,

raptors may take out pretty decent, uh, uh, uh, snakes, you know, rattles snakes and things and, and,

and, uh, I can't see the, you know, like, uh, uh, coral snake really doing that much damage or getting in a good bite if they can take down a rattlesnake they

can probably take down a coral snake but i'm speaking ignorantly so i don't have any actual knowledge on that but that's just kind of what kicks around in my mind when i think about the mimicry yeah absolutely one of those big central american ones probably could do a lot more damage than is right right yeah yeah interesting stuff so before we get specifically into herping in china there are a couple sort of general herping concepts curious i think i have a suggestion from the from the book but um in terms of methodologies of doing it you prefer hiking flipping cruising what's sort of your your favorite approach i am generally a hiker i will flip opportunistically And road crews sometimes if I feel like it's a good road and there's not a lot of traffic.

But I think the herping method that I enjoy the most is definitely hiking. Man, you have covered a lot of areas in your herping. Yeah. So you've hiked a lot then. Yes, yeah. That's good. We also ask in that context, particularly in the context of hiking, do you like to go fast? and cover as much ground as you can

with the idea, right, that people find snakes when they're on bikes and things, or even in cars, because they come up before they have an opportunity to respond. Or are you more the type that's going to really investigate, go slowly, try and notice and investigate everything? I think we fall somewhere in between. I try not to walk too fast.

I'm definitely walking slower than I would if I wasn't looking for snakes on a trail. but I'm also not the person that's like investigating every single nook and cranny. So I think it kind of depends on how good the habitat is. So if I'm in an area and I see some micro habitat, maybe the trails near the stream, I will probably slow down and be a little bit more thorough in looking versus if I'm in an area where I feel like,

this stretch here is probably not super good. I'll probably will walk through faster, I guess. Does it depend on your, target or what you're looking for? Like if you're looking for vipers, are you going to move a lot slower scanning, you know, the trees or whatever? Do you just kind of, yeah, if I see it, I see it on the first pass? Yeah, it'll vary a little bit by target species. But I think even if it's something that, I don't know, something that's hard to find, I won't be super thorough all the time. I'd rather keep moving, keep pushing along.

And if I missed the one that was had just a little bit visible outside of the rock or something, then that is what it is. Okay. So we're talking about China a little bit. It does seem like, so I guess we can put it out there. Presumably that's okay to put it out there that your naturalist handle is Kong, but with the O being a zero. Is that correct?

Yes. Okay, great. So people can check it out. It does seem like a preponderance of what you find, and maybe this is associated with your master's project at Nanjing, but is a lot of amphibians. Would you say that that reflects your experience, the habitats that you're focusing on?

Is there genuinely just they're that much easier to find than snakes per se? Generally, yes. Yeah. So in my time here, the research lab I'm a part of has focused on amphibians. And so in terms of field work that I've done for the lab, which was largely in northeastern China, that involved a lot of, that was almost exclusively night field work looking for amphibians. And so there's definitely, in terms of abundance of amphibians compared to the places in the western United States that I've, more used to herping, there's way more amphibians here.

And I think that generally, yes, that it does seem to be easier to find particularly lots of frogs here. There's just a lot of wet areas, and so there's many, many places to find frogs. And it seems that there's, I don't know, especially China is so developed.

And so even in, it's hard, there's not a lot of really, remote areas, there are a lot of places that don't have human disturbances or roads. And so I think that the snake numbers do seem to be lower than other areas typically. And so there are a lot of frogs easier to see. And they live in higher densities than snakes generally, right? That's probably probably. Okay.

What is, what are relative to your own either preconception, or haven't lived the experience, where are the coolest herps you've found in China? Like a top five, I guess. So in terms of, I don't know if I have a top five, but there's some herbs that I've been very glad to see. One species that I got finally a couple weeks ago was the Tyler to Triton, nukes.

I don't know if you're aware, the knobby nukes or the crocodile nukes is what they're called. And that was a genus that I had wanted to see for a long time. I've seen them in two or three areas before, but only the larvae. So I had found they are pretty high fidelity for these breeding pools that are just like this stagnant water, sandy bottom. They really like those conditions. And so I've been able to find the larvae before in a couple different places, a couple species. But it wasn't until a couple weeks ago that I finally saw the adults.

and it was at a spot that I'd been to before, and I saw the larvae, but I was at the right time of year this time, and so the pool was full of adults. And so it was really anticlimactic because I knew exactly where to park my car, exactly where to walk, and exactly where the pool was going to be, and I get there, and there's the dudes. And so that one did feel a little, it was like, finally, I see the adult nukes. Because they're really cool. They're like these kind of like, they look a lot like the dragon and how to train your dragon. toothless, that black, jet black coloration with kind of that the crocodile looking face.

Very cool nooks. And so that was one that was a good experience. Another experience that I'm thinking that was really species I'd wanted to see my first experience with a cobra and really my only good experience with a cobra over these last couple years. I hope I get one later this week because I'm in good. it's territory for it, but I had, I was hiking in a, actually, like a park in a city is actually what it was. And there was kind of some steps of the trail.

And then off the side, there was this rock wall. And I walked up and there was a Chinese cobra that was probably, I don't know, the snake is probably four feet long, if not more, that was sticking out of a hole in the wall. And so at first there's only probably two feet of the snake that's just like half, I mean, half extended out of this wall. And it sees me and it like stops moving because it was clearly climbing out of its hole to go about its day. It was probably three or four in the afternoon then. And it was climbing out and it sees me and it freezes. And then for the next, I don't know, probably it retreats most of the way back into the hole.

But it leaves about probably its head and maybe a few inches of the bodies. sticking out of the hole. And then I just, I think probably for the next hour, I probably just like watched it. I stared at it in this park. And there were other people, like, there were other people that would come along the trail. And then they're like confused why I'm just like staring at this wall and I'm like, oh yeah, there's a cobra right there. They would be surprised to see it. I just, I was very excited to see that, that first, my first Elapid actually, I think was that that was. And so there was another exciting experience. Nice. Yeah, I had a similar, well, it was, it was a little, well, similar, I guess. I was walking around the Singapore Zoo and

saw a black spitting cobra kind of out, just under a rock out a little bit. And it was in the botanical garden section or whatever. And so I'm trying to get a picture of it. It would pull back into the back under the rock, but it was in shed. So it would come back out and kind of sit there. So I got a picture or two of that one. And then I went, was walking around and see if I could get a better view. And there was another one on the other side. But it wasn't in shed. And it just ducked under the rock. And I got maybe a, you know, half second glimpse of it. But yeah. It's nice when they kind of stay, stay out. You can look at them a little bit. That's absolutely. Is there anything that you hope to find when you, you know, when you had come over initially that you haven't found

that you think will probably say that either that you're going to put an effort before you leave or that you think will remain wanting. I don't think I had a specific list when I first moved to China. There's a huge diversity of herps here in the country is about the same size of the United States, and so I didn't really have any super set ones. There are a few species I'm on a trip right now in southern China, hoping to get xenopeltus is probably the number one target for me right now, the sunbeam snakes. Another target was Sino My Purse, the Chinese coral snakes, but I got one of those two days ago.

So I was happy to finally see that. Another species that I am really hoping to see in the wild is the Chinese alligators. and that was a species that I had tried to see last year and just I think I was just in not the right area but I have a pin now from a friend that I will go to and visit before I leave China so I can give my Chinese alligators oh that's cool is that one of those that's introduced because they've done some reintroductions right on those and I don't know if those or within, I suppose, right, the historic range for those was quite large. And then there's been a variety of projects and things that have been involved with

movement, water, and things like that, right? So is that a sort of a remnant population? Is that one supplemented with reintroduced animals? This was on our last show we were talking, alluded to at least, the question of how does it feel different if you go to a place that's either a supplemented population, a reintroduced population, any of those things. The population that I'll

hopefully be checking out later is supposed to be a remnant population but with I think supplemented by some releases. The Chinese alligator they did historically have a very, very big range but it's

declined dramatically to the point where they were almost totally wiped out in the wild and then in the past few decades there have been a lot of captive breeding efforts, and now there's a ton that are in captivity, and they've been solely releasing more and expanding their range a little bit. So it's not like just a few specs on the map like it used to be,

but it's still not a very extensive range. And so there's some populations now that are just totally from reintroduced. Most of the populations now are mostly just reintroduced individuals. But I think that it seems like they're doing okay, the probably the biggest factor in their decline was that people just ate them

they taste like chicken I guess and Chinese definitely don't have a lot of taboos against eating different animals and so that was one that combined with some habitat loss has been responsible for the

very steep declines in the Chinese alligator but they've passed the most difficult point, and so hopefully now reintroductions, they'll be able to expand their range. So this being, you know, at least theoretically a remnant population, maybe with supplementation,

I guess it doesn't quite apply. But theoretically, if you were to see something in sort of one of those novel or totally reintroduced populations, do you think that would change your experience of how you would count it on a life list? Do you, well, we should have asked before, Or do you keep a life list, at least within your mind, if not written out?

I do keep a lifeless, but only for snakes. I don't have it for the other hurts. I do try to document things on eye naturalists, so I guess I could look up things. But in terms of my life list is my written snake list. That being said, I think even though it's not a snake, the Chinese alligator, seeing if it was in a population that I knew was fully reintroduced, I think it would influence my perception of it. I think that it would still be something that would be really cool,

but it would almost have like an asterisk, I feel like still. But having it, being able to see it even with an asterisk is better than not seeing it, not seeing it at all. And I have seen them in like a captive, but like a very, there's a breeding facility that's really, really huge, and they have some of the alligators that are in pretty natural environments. It's just a very big fence around the whole area. And so I have seen them there, but I feel like that doesn't count for me as seeing them in the wild,

versus if it was an introduced population, but still living totally wild, no fences, no things like that, then I think it would still count, even if it does have a small asterisk of being introduced. I think that's fair. Justin didn't really weigh in last week when I brought this up. I'm curious of his take. In which regard? Sorry. And the idea, the context of seeing something and either finding something and how it would

be on a lifeless if it was in a, um, like playing a berm in Florida or something. Not way. No. Or just reintroduced. Yeah, either reintroduced into historic range, um, an area that had remnant population, but you knew is being supplemented, right? They were doing it.

Or even 10 years ago. they did annual releases or whatever, or into like theoretical habitat, but there's no evidence they were actually in that specific area. Right. It's suitable habitat, but maybe you're five miles east of the furthest known extent or population from the 1920s or whatever. Right, right. How would you feel about that?

I mean, I have counted stuff like that. And in my life list, I've found California condors that have been. reintroduced into the deserts of, you know, the southwest. And we saw some flying over Zion. My wife and I were doing a hike there and saw some flying over kind of high up. And then there's a bridge close to the release site where they release a lot of the ones that they raise up and this bridge. And I don't know if we were there together.

Did you see those? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I counted those. And, you know, I think that's really cool to be able to see them. repatriated and in their natural environment, I guess. Yeah, I think so. But I think in the context of in the wrong place, like a Berman, Florida,

I think I'd still want to see a Berman, you know, Southeast Asia rather than count it. Oh, I saw one in Florida. That counts, you know. Yeah. No, I tend to agree. I think there's less of a dispute to that one. I assume, hope, I don't know. And if you find a Louisiana, you know, Pine Snake, then it doesn't count.

because it was probably a reintroduction. How, Dallan, how has your experience in China been? Going to school there, you know, kind of that cultural aspect. How has that been? Certainly,

it seems likely to have been a little different than central or northern Utah. Do you speak Chinese? I do, yeah. I don't know how, I have friends and people in the lab that live in China without speaking Chinese, and I don't know how to survive.

It's something that's very helpful. If I had to describe it in one word, I would say that living in China is an adventure, especially for like school and for doing a lot of field work and a lot of recreational herping. It's definitely an adventure here very different than life in the U.S. People for the most part are very friendly in China, but it's not necessarily like a super outwardly friendly.

But it's like you very, like I almost never have people that are rude to me because I'm a foreigner. But at the same time that there is definitely a sense of, given that China is a very homogenous country, like 99.9. I don't know if that's right. But the vast majority of people here are Chinese and there's very few people. that are not Chinese and people that are like me that are white, not Asian, I stand out a lot. And so even in a city where I live in Nanjing, the city with a population of 10 million people, when I walk down the street, I'll still get people that stare at me like I'm an alien because I seem out of place.

And so people do, and even speaking Chinese, I still feel like I get treated as though I'm always an outsider, which I think is one thing that I don't know, I wish it wasn't the case. But overall, it's an adventure here, I guess. It is a weird feeling to be, feel like you're just, you know, like in a zoo almost where everybody just stares at you. Yeah. It comes running. Hey, look, it's a white guy.

We had that in Ghana where you didn't see very many white people and they, yeah, really had babies cry when I got too close to them or something. You know, like, what is this weird pale thing coming at me? But, yeah, it was pretty crazy. And then, I don't know, I visited Japan for a conference. And it was before, you know, we could navigate on our phone. So I had a paper map and trying to line up the characters, you know, on this little map with the ones on the street signs.

It was not enjoyable. I agree. It's very difficult to get by if you don't speak the language. or, you know, recognize the characters and things. It makes it much more difficult. And the dining experiences can be much more adventurous if you can't read a menu and just kind of, you know, I thought, you know, arrogantly, I guess, that more people would speak English. And we were up in kind of the northern parts of Japan and very few people, like, you'd go into the restaurant and English.

And they're like, oh, no, like, okay, fair enough, you know. I don't speak Japanese either, so I can't complain. But, you know, yeah, we'd have to go to places with pitchers on the menu to see if we, and it was still kind of like, oh, that's interesting. I never knew that the cocktail shrimp were actually cooked. I thought they were raw shrimp, but no, they're cooked. And raw shrimp is not very great. Yeah.

That's fun. You spoke to it a little bit with your experience with the cobra and the fork, but I'm curious, what do people make of knowing that you're out herping or interact, how do they, the average person, you know, not that it's great here in the U.S., I would say, but it varies by locale. How do people take it when either they are interacting with Herp Wildlife or that they know that that's what you're trying to do? Generally in China there's different attitudes towards wildlife and nature than you see in the U.S.

There's not much of a herping culture here at all. There's a few people that are into it and I think it's growing. But generally, if I'm running into people in the field, I'm just, I don't know, if I'm hiking, I'll generally just say that I'm hiking, or sometimes I'll say if I'm, especially if I'm looking at a snake or something, I'll explain that like, oh, I like to look for snakes and they see it as, it's kind of a strange thing, but it's, I guess they see me as a foreigner as a strange thing anyway, so I guess it balances it out. What is interesting, though, is that in China, it is very acceptable culturally to catch frogs. People eat frogs in China. And so,

So when I, especially when I was doing my field work in northeastern China, a lot of a fair amount of this sampling I did in rice paddies. And so areas that are semi-urban, not really urban, but rural areas that have people living close by. And so sometimes I would run into people and I'd just be out catching frogs and they wouldn't think it would be strange at all to have somebody out in the night with a headlamp and boots out in the paddy catching frogs. and so it is kind of interesting that from a very different purposes, but at the same time, it's somehow the catching frogs at night is acceptable. That's cool. How are you getting around out there?

Do you have a vehicle or are you taking trains and just kind of, yeah, how are you getting? Yeah, so right now I have a rental car. So if I'm in an area that's, yeah, that if I'm trying to get to somewhere that's, relatively wild. I usually need to end up renting a car. I do have a Chinese driver's license, a temporary driver's license. It's just switched over from my US one. But generally for when I go on a herping trip, I'll take either the train. They have an amazing network of high speed rail that goes pretty much across the whole country. And so I'll take the train a lot. Sometimes I'll fly, I'll fly like into a major city and then take a train for a couple hours out to another spot.

I've also done a fair amount of herping in like city parks in places where I'll just take take the subway to a to a mountain that's kind of on the edge of the city and then hike up in the mountain and come back with a subway or a taxi at night. So there's a lot of flexible transportation options here, which is one nice thing. That's very cool. Yeah. Wow. It'd be really cool to explore. Do you ever meet up with folks like Kevin Messenger, anybody like that? I know you mentioned.

Yeah, I haven't been herping in China with Kevin, actually. So Kevin is at the same university that I met. He's not my advisor, but he's at the same school. And so we cross paths sometimes. He was on the committee for my thesis defense a couple weeks ago. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Yeah, I'm excited to see his book and get into that a little bit. Yeah, it's pretty big undertaking. Seems like it's quite the tone. Yeah, the venomous takes of China book is probably about four or five inches, at least. It's a big. That's awesome. It's into the home defense category of her books. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, very cool stuff. We really appreciate you coming on here and kind of sharing your experience. And we'll encourage everybody out there to check out the book, Pyrot, by Dallon Kohler. And yeah, I got mine on Amazon. I don't know if that's the preferred way, but it seems like where can people find it? Is that the best way to get it or is there a better way to get it? It is available on Amazon.

I think in Amazon, it's listed at a cheaper price than buying it directly through the publisher. You can buy it however you want. I'm not going to say either way. It is available on Amazon or through the publisher directly at Torreyhousepress.org slash pyro. And so it's available there, either one. Yeah, sounds like they've got some other good books as well for natural history. So maybe check out the publisher as well. we like to support those publishers to keep such books in you know coming out and and having those

options um but yeah and probably a lot less likely to put it in an oversized box so it comes to you half smashed up right yeah mine mine was bent when i got it as well yeah um all right well well where can people uh follow you or find you know uh see photos or herping adventures or anything like that. Do you post on social media? I do post on Instagram occasionally. I'm not a photographer by any means. Everything there is just cell phone shots. I'm not going to pretend that anything is really that high quality of pictures. But I am on Instagram. The handle is k0NG.nature. Or you can just look up my name and I think it pulls it up too. I am on Instagram.

Cool. And then I naturalist, obviously, like it was said earlier, I think. I definitely post there much more frequently. Yeah, I mean, you've got an impressive list of observations. That's pretty amazing. Yeah. Very cool. I was a little distracted during the interview looking at your posts on INAT. So I apologize for that.

Really great having you on. Thanks so much for coming. Yeah, thank you so much for having me, guys. Yeah. Well, we'll thank Eric and Oden, the MP team. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time.