Reptile Fight Club - Grilling the Expert w/ Dr. Andrew Holycross

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

In this episode, Justin and Rob have another installment of Grilling the Expert. We are joined by Dr. Andrew Holycross. Who 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

Hi, welcome to Reptile Fight Club. Tonight we've got a great guest lined up, Dr. Andrew Holy Cross. We're going to be talking about some of his work with rattlesnakes and grab some other wildlife. And I'm really happy to have him here. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. It's good to be here.

Yeah, thanks for making the time for us. We're really, really excited to chat with you. Sorry, I missed it last time. Yeah. Oh, good. It's the way it goes. Yeah. And then ran out of gas, right?

So no worries. Yeah. Yeah. I guess, you know, just as sort of a natural starting point, you want to give us some of the audience, some of your background, talk about your books, what you're doing now? Oh, how far back do you want to go? It's been 60 years. Yeah. Whatever's worth telling, right?

Yeah. I think my first interest in herpetology, you know, like so many of us, I was a kid. And I lived in Shaiyam, Wyoming, and there were tiger salamanders that would fall into our window wells. And so my dad helped me build a giant terrarium. And we had, you know, like 20 tiger salamanders in there. I traded a horned lizard for a garter snake with a neighborhood kid. And that garter snake, his name was Sir Hiss. And he was my pet for like, I don't know, six years, made it through a military move and finally died one day.

And yeah, I was a young fellow. So that was pretty sad occasion. But those were the early days. You know, I was just always interested in amphibians and reptiles in biology. My mom sent me about 10 years ago, sent me a box of books from my childhood. And it was like, everything in there was a field guy to, you know, animals this, animals that, you know, in a running brook. all these books about critters and how to find them and things like that. So it started young, went to college and thought I'd be a war correspondent or something like that.

I don't know. And then I took a biology course my second semester. I was like, oh, yeah, I remember. And that was it. I was in. And then proceeded, got a master studying prairie rattlesnakes in the Sandhills in Nebraska, which was really fun. Oh, cool. And in a prairie dog town.

You know, so growing up, long-billed curlews or my neighbors, prairie dogs kind of got used to me, not quite entirely. And, uh, goodish little things. Yeah, they are. Yeah, they don't like neighbors. They don't like big neighbors. Right. Yeah.

So, uh, so then I went down to ASU and, uh, and worked on a PhD for 11 years. Okay. Finally, they asked me to leave and graduate. Yeah. It's interesting how the, I mean, I got a PhD in virology, and, you know, it was like kind of the five years in and out and, you know, maybe five and a half years. Some of my projects didn't start out very well. But, and then, you know, I'd see my friends in the biology department and there are six, seven, eight years, you know, and you're just like, oh, man.

I guess you're limited to maybe your field, field time. and that might impact how long it takes. Well, yeah, all that's true. And then ignoring other people's advice is happy where I was. They're like, you're going to study not just a snake, but an endangered rattlesnake, right? You know, it's like, you must really want to stay here a long time. You know, I had buddies that came in in a Drosophila lab, and they were out in two and a half years. Right.

I have no regrets, none. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's cool. So what was kind of the focus of your Ph.D. work? So the Ph.D. was just doing comparative conservation biology of two rattlesnakes. And one was the Desert Massa Saga, which I studied down south of portal in the San Bernardino, San Simone Valley interface right there. And then I studied Obscuris for the dissertation as well. Okay. New Mexico Ridge Nose Rattlesnake. And mainly in the animus, but also in the Pelonsios and a little bit in the San Luis, a little bit of fieldwork in the San Luis, mostly down there just to get genetic samples for the genetic chapter of the dissertation.

Okay. Very cool. Yeah, that's, that was kind of my thinking. Like, I really wanted to be a herpetologist my whole life. That's what I'd tell everybody I was going to do. And then when it came time, my wife's like, how many jobs are out there for, you know, what kind of? salary is it herpetology and I'm like oh I never thought about that you know and I had an uncle that was a virologist and he's like oh you had to come check out the lab I'm like hey I can do

herpetology in my spare time you know I'm just kind of enjoy it rather than how it be a job so like Lawrence Robertson right yeah sometimes I wonder if that was the best choice because I sure spend a lot of time thinking about herps yeah but that's cool so yeah I'll live vicariously through you, I guess. Yeah, as long as you don't have to have my bank account from 20 years. Academia, right? That's not my big. My wife is wise.

Yes, he is wise. Yeah. Not that, not that, you know, any research professors make all that much. So, you know. Yeah. But it is kind of a labor of love, I guess. And, you know, the biological sciences are fascinating and, you know, all sorts of interesting things.

So, yeah. I don't regret my decision. Yeah. I don't either. Yeah. I'm glad I transitioned out when I did, but, you know. Right. Right.

Yeah, it was an amazing run. 11 years working on a PhD, I have no regrets about that. It was, I was bringing in plenty of funding and, you know, more than probably a third of the faculty at that time. Oh, wow. So there was a big push to kick me out, but eventually they want you to fledge. Right. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's like they want to be promoted and they need grad students who have finished to help them out there. So they're like, come on, let's get you out of here. Yeah, that's the way it goes in academia sometimes. Yeah. But yeah, that's really fascinating research for sure. And, you know, that's the kind of stuff I'm really jealous of, you know, I would have loved to have done, you know, field, field work and things like that. That was another question my wife had is like, how long, you know, how much will you be gone if you're a biologist? You know, like, oh, yeah, that's a good question.

Yeah, a lot, you know, depending on the nature of your question, you know, I was, I was lucky that, you know, I had a pretty good balance of field work and and lab work, you know, so it, you know, a rare rattlesnake, you're spending a lot of time on logistics, getting teams together because, you know, you're not going to do it on your own. and putting the time in in the field to get to get the animals. But, you know, then you get your samples and wintertime comes in your home and you're doing genetic analyses or you're, you know, picking through snake poop, trying to identify remains. You know, what I focused on in that dissertation was diet reproduction and conservation genetics for those two species. Yeah. Oh, that's cool. Cool work. The natural history is the fun stuff.

That's the stuff I love. Yeah. Natural history, life history, that's where it's at from. Exactly. That's the stuff. The papers I like to read are the natural history stuff. It ain't a what? Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So learning about some of these small montane rattlesnakes and their dietary preference for centipedes and things. And then seeing some of those centipedes, you're like, oh, man, that is a crazy. Oh, yeah. You know, the centipede thing, you know, we documented that we did a paper on rock. rattles six. We encountered a lot of snakes in our studies. We didn't just look at obscures. I mean, if we caught a lepidus, we brought it in, we weighed it, we measured it, we tried to squeeze a fecal from it, got a blood sample, et cetera. So we ended up doing diet studies on

lepidus and Willardye and Massasaga, all three. And centipedes were present in all of them. And that's the first time that anybody had documented, you know, a large proportion of centipedes, you know, by item analysis, not by mass or anything. In rattlesnakes, certainly, you know, there had been previous observations of them eating them, but the importance of the centipedes in their diet just really, that was the first time that that came to life. So it was surprising. You know, you're going through museum specimens and opening them. So, oh my God, look at the size of that.

It's longer than the snake. You know. Once we found that, you know, even before the papers were published, we had to, you know, some captive mass of sagas, and we ended up throwing some centipedes in with them and and just watching the behavior. And it was, it was interesting. You know, they'd kind of get up and away from that prey item, like they'd raise the front third of their body up and they were focused on it. And then they'd strike it and back up really quick. And then after it was dead, they'd come in and eat it. And we also found a lepidus dead on Anamis Mountain that had

tear in its neck and brought it back to the tent, which was our lab, and it was Army GP small. And we tried that little tear open and inside was the, I forget the word chlissro from that. Yeah, from the, from a centipede. So there's one that, and we've seen a couple observations. It's in the book, Snakes of Arizona and the Lefayas. There's a couple observations now. they don't always win that battle. Right. Yeah. Could go either way with some of those things.

It's a big of spray item, you know. For sure. A little snake. Yeah. And is it primarily the juveniles or the adults taking these as well? Is it kind of a shift away from those as they mature? Yeah, it depends on the species. But with Willardye and this is across both Willardy, Willardye and Obscures, it's the

juveniles. The juveniles are eating mostly centipedes. and lizards up until about 400 millimeters snow vent length, which is the length at which they approximately attain reproductive maturity. So, you know, I think it's just a, you know, gait limited predator, right? What's available, what they can forge on where they are in the habitat. It may be just, you know, they're gap limited and that's what they encounter most. I don't know.

Right. It would be interesting. Maybe there's some mechanism tied to, you know, reproductive biology that we don't know about yet. Once they pass that, they're eating mostly mammals and occasionally birds. You know, there's the, Harry Greens talked about the famous Wilson's warbler, you know, that Joe Marshall found down in the Sierra San Luis and then he ate the snake. And then there's, I'm trying to think we had a couple other birds in there.

I can't remember what they were right now in our samples, but not many. And yeah. So there's a pretty good shift in diet right around 400. Yep. Yeah. That's, that's really, I kind of got into birding a little bit over the last few years. My, my cousin kind of, yeah, kind of challenged me and my dad into some birding competitions with him and his son-in-law and stuff. So, you know, I always have an eye out for birds, which is nice when you're looking for a hard-to-find rattlesnake.

You'll probably see a bird or two. Oh, yeah. snake, you know, so it gives me something. Yeah. And so I, and that was one of the, one of the birds that we saw down there in the, and in the palencio's was Wilson's War. Oh, really nice. Yeah, yeah.

So it kind of brings it together, you know. I tease about burning, but I do a little bit of them, good at it. You know, I get excited over like painted red starts nesting and it came in next one of my snakes. You know, that's, that's, that's a trogon or something. the chirocala's, you know, it's pretty cool. Yeah, I'm headed down tomorrow morning to go look at some long-tailed ducks that are in, in an area of Salt Lake City that are easy to view and photograph, and I haven't documented those in Utah yet, so I need to take a little trip. But so, yeah, I wouldn't know a long-tailed duck if it bit me on the toe. Yeah, they're beautiful.

Have a lot of white and black. Yeah, they're neat looking. So I'm, I, you know, look for them, obviously, and they usually stay far away, but there's a pair that's in this canal. And so, you know, they, they're pretty approachable and they've been there for a week or two. So hopefully they'll be there tomorrow morning. Yeah. Kind of fun. It's hard, you know, the more you do it, the, the harder it is to get new species added to your list. And so, yeah, I got to take a little hour and a half drive to make that happen tomorrow. Cool. Yeah. So, yeah, anyway, back to, back to snakes. Okay. Rob, yeah.

Yeah, perfect. Well, I think just as this has been great, I had to move some stuff around in the outliner, that's all right. I'm happy to do it. So as it naturally comes up, that's right. But can we start with kind of the natural history of what we're talking about? So principally, the conversation here, right, is on the New Mexico Origino's Rattlesnake, which maybe is actually more accurately called a Mexican snake that barely comes into the U.S.

in New Mexico principally and a little bit in Arizona. But kind of both from the natural history, what is that snake that we're talking about? And then from the perspective of, you know, it was described what in the late 70s, sort of ambiguously or questionably, you know, in terms of the context, relatively descriptions and yeah,

kind of what that looks like. Just kind of give us that context. That would be awesome. Sure. So Willard I Obscurious small montane rattlesnake principally found above about 7,000 feet elevation. You know, they get down lower. We found them as low as 5,000 something in the Pelonsios.

But in the animus, I don't think we've ever caught one below 7,000 feet, ever. And that habitat is disappearing for them. Again, they eat mostly centipedes and lizards. At our site, it was mostly sclopras-Jaravai, Mountain Spiny Lizard, that they ate. Kirk Setzer did some diet work with I can't remember her name Mosina Estrea

Estrea Mosina and they found the same general pattern that they were eating lizards and centipedes as juveniles and switched to mammals as adult but they found some evidence that there's some site specific variation in the composition

of those groups in terms of the species composition. So like they got some nemodophorus and some other things that we got in less abundance. But that pattern seems to hold throughout their range of the three mountain ranges. I suppose I should back up. They're found in the Sierra San Luis in Mexico, which is on the border of Sonora and Chihuahua, which is a large mountain range and gets pretty darn high.

A lot of habitat over 7,000 feet down there. How high do they go? So you see them above 7,000, but. Yeah. You know, well, I mean, the highest peak in the San Luis is 8,000 something. Okay. So it's a fairly. Same thing in the animus.

So it's a pretty narrow band, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, with climate change and, you know, these habitats shifting upward and elevation, you know, they're on sinking ships, basically. Right. Yeah. And so the animus population is in New Mexico. It's a privately owned property. And folks, you know, are not allowed in there.

without permission. I heard a story from the landowners recently of a fellow that had to get arrested at the gate going into the north end of Anamis Mountain by the sheriff because he was being kind of belligerent about going to look for snakes. And yeah, and it's on the continental divide. It's the south end of the continental divide there. There's good habitat there. It gets 7,000 up to 8,000 and change. And, you know, good ponderosa pine forest and places, lots of Mexican white pine at the very top, a couple aspen groves. Okay. And not quite as wet and music as the San Luis and not nearly as big in terms of overall area.

And then the third population or occupied mountain range is the Pelanseo Mountains, which, you know, is Coronado National Forest in open access. Lots of folks have gone down there to look for them off of Geronimo Trail, where it crosses. And that's the lowest, you know, I mean, there's, the Pelancio's don't get up to 7,000 feet, nowhere near. I mean, we get up to six and change.

And the snakes generally, we find most of them have been found at the higher elevation of the Pelonsios. You know, reproductive biology, you know, they have like about five babies on average in a litter. They can coil up. on a on a on a quarter and they weigh like four grams they're tiny and um extremely susceptible to desiccation um i imagine juvenile survivorship's pretty darn low we don't have a lot of hard data on that um the mating season of big birth in the monsoon season as you would predict you know you

got a little tiny tiny baby snake like that that dries up like you know, in a hot breeze. And so they wait for those monsoons to come along before they give birth. So, you know, early mid-July until end of August, that's when most of the litters appear. And interestingly, that's also when the mating season is. So they're also mating dirt in that window as well. Moms, we've documented skipping and reproducing, skipping two years before they reproduced again. Reproduce.

Is that particular to a certain population? I mean, do the Sierra San Luis reproduce more frequently, or is it kind of overall? Yeah, we don't have much data on reproduction from the Cirassan-Louise and frequency, well, frequency of reproduction anyway. Right. Because we've only been doing Mark Recapture down there for a couple of years now, associated with this Recovery Challenge Award. But, you know, most of that data came from John Porter's study of Willard.

Will or die in the Wachukas, which is, that guy's amazing. I don't know if you guys know John, but he's a really dedicated guy. He's got 40 years of data working. Yeah. And his approach is totally different to ours. I mean, he's, you know, he doesn't, you know, weigh and measure snakes, pit tag them, and those kind of things. He stops, sits down, photographs them, draws their patterns, comes up with ways to identify them from their pattern, keeps track of individuals over years, knows where they, hang out so he can just go there. No telemetry. It's really cool. You know, Jane Good on kind of stuff. Yeah.

It's it's really different. You know, you can't get a dissertation even in 11 years doing that. But it's a really neat alternative strategy to understanding the animals, you know. And so he was generous enough to share a bunch of his data from his animals. And so that's included in our reproduction paper on Willowry. And then we got a ton from the animus too. And so it's, a combined data set looking at those two subspecies. And, you know, every once in a while, they'll reproduce in consecutive years. But most of the time, they're skipping a year. Sometimes they're skipping two. Where it seems like the populations are a little heavier in Mexico, do you think they might reproduce more frequently? Do you think if the conditions were better, they would? Or is it? I think, yeah, I imagine this mostly has to do with energy reserves, prey availability, and those kind of things. And if mom's got enough body fat, she's going to go. And if she doesn't, she's not. And so it just depends on what they can get done after they, you know, they give birth in July 15th.

And they manage to eat a bunch of big meals before they go down and, you know, get one in in the early spring. They might go again the next year. we didn't see a lot of evidence of that but we have really small sample sizes too so um hard to say and not knowing as they say to be determined right yeah yeah cool okay yeah would you mind walking through a little bit sort of what you found in terms of the um differences in allele frequencies amongst the uh the different populations So the genetic work that I did was, you know, in the late 90s, and I used microsatellites, which are small sections of DNA that have a repetitive element in them. Like it might be, you know, you've got AT, C, and G, right, in DNA.

And so it might be AT, AT, AT, AT, A T, repeat. And the very, it doesn't code for anything, right? So this isn't a piece of DNA that's coding for a protein or something. other, it, it's so presumably neutral, right? And, but the variation there is in the number of times that that repeats. And the great thing about microsatellites is that they're hypervariable. They're not just variable. They're hypervariable. So at most genetic loci, you know, they're either invariant or there's, you know, a couple alleles, but that's it. At microsatellite loci, you could have 22, 30 plus alleles, right?

And so that that makes them an ideal thing for looking at questions at the level of population structure and below, down to relatedness and paternity and maternity, right? And so they're really good for that. At least if you have enough of them, not as great for like doing phylogeny and stuff like that. So I use microsatellites. I think if I remember a minute, but I had some of the time, which was pretty important for the time. People are using larger data sets these days, new analytical techniques, just, you know, for the record. But using the microsatellites, and we got decent samples. I mean, the amazing thing is, you know, we had, I don't know, more than enough from the animus.

and we had a nice sample of like, I think, 20 or so animals from this San Luis, all from one location, kind of centrally located, a place called El Panito. And then we got 18 animals, samples from 18 animals in the Pelonsios, which, you know, that took years and it took crews of people. And at that time, you know, our catch per unit effort was a little over 30. person days per obscuras. You can get that there. We looked a lot to get those samples, which was a pretty decent sample size for us to make some, you know, inferences on, you know, from what we found from the analyses,

the genetic analyses. So basically what we found is that, you know, those populations have been separated for quite some time. They're on independent evolutionary trajectories. There's no migration between mountain ranges. the not surprisingly the sierra san Luis were the most diverse highest heterogacity every measure you can think of genetically they were they were elevated animus were second and and not in bad shape at all and the pelonsios were just genetically depopurate and in fact we used a i don't know if people are even using this anymore but a measure of um of um of um bottlenecks that was developed by I think Moni Slack can a measure called M, and it was developed specifically for microsatellites. And I can't remember offhand what that M value was, but I remember at the time noticing that it was lower than that value for elephant seals that went through this tremendous bottleneck, right?

And that was documented demographically. So I don't think there's any question that the Pelencio is the population that's in the greatest peril. it shows up in their genes. You can tell it by looking at the habitat. You know, our catch per unit effort, I mean, 30 person days of snake back in the 90s, two independent measures were up at 100 person days per snake. One of the students whose committee I'm on Saunders spent just summer after summer down there and calculated all his days.

and he finally found one, but, you know, he was well over 100-person days. Now, is that counting like maybe times that would be off-peak, you know, where you're probably not going to find one or not the best time to look? Or is this like concentrated on best time to look, you know? For Saunders, it was because, you know, he had a dissertation to do. So he was down there and off-peak times as well. Right. But there's also some folks that, you know, are just enthusiasts and went down there.

and spent, you know, obviously they were driving long distances to get to the Pelons. So they were targeting the best times to go. Right. And they were over 100 person days. Okay. So, yeah. And when we went to, in 2017, we went and looked for them in Skeleton Canyon, and that was over 100 person days. So there's three independent measures that, you know, I think they've become, I think there's been

a decline in the last, you know, 35 years, 25 years. Yeah, definitely looks like that population is kind of on its way out or, you know, maybe not viable anymore. What, I mean, I guess is, is it, is it a multiple factor thing? Is it mostly due to climate change or, I mean, we've understood that maybe fires play a role in that and maybe dry years would contribute? But, yeah, what are your thoughts on on that? Oh, I think it's, I think it's multifactorial. I think there's a lot of things. I think mostly it's climate change and not just the anthropogenic climate change that, that we've induced, but the climate change that's happened over the Holocene, right? Probably in some way tied to that bottleneck. I have no evidence for that, but I would guess that's the case that, you know, as the, that they, you know, as these lower

elevation mountains dried and dried, it became, they became less and less able to support Willardye populations. And so that probably had something to do with the historical bottleneck. And then certainly this anthropogenic climate change isn't helping things. Fires playing a non-natural role there. And, you know, at least currently, there's good news on the horizon for that. But I think it's low-quality habitat to begin with. And, you know, you've got these snakes that sure you find them out in grasslands. But I'll tell you what, there's good news. going to be a oak and pine canyon somewhere nearby within their crawl radius, right? So I think that's kind of the core of their habitat in the Pelancio. And it's disappearing. And, you know,

when you let fuels build up for 100 years and then you get a fire, it takes that habitat out and starts converting everything to grassland. So. So I guess a question I would have then is, is it, Is that population, is it possible to save it? Is it worth, you know, the effort to try to save it? Or do we just say, hey, we've got animus and Sierra San Luis? I think it's given the number of unknowns at this point, I think it's worth a try, you know, especially if those efforts aren't enormous investments of conservation resources, et cetera. So, for example, the one thing I didn't mention is, you know, there's a problem genetically there as well.

How much of the decline is because there's not much genetic variation left in the population? And so they're, you know, are they on the brink of what we call the extinction vortex, right? And so in conservation genetics. And so I think that's a good question. That's why, you know, we wrote this Recovery Challenge Award and brought some of those much more genetically diverse individuals from the CERC on the WESA and release them into the Pelancio's. The idea there is maybe if we can restore some genetic diversity, that will help the situation. The other thing that's going on is the habitat thing.

There's not a lot we can do about climate change. Right. Individually or as a state or, you know, I think, you know, that's a, that's a, that's a, humanity is a whole problem that I don't know that we're going to, that we even, are trying. No easy answers, right? Yeah. I don't think we're even trying to solve that way.

Not very hard anyway. And so, you know, but what can we do? We can manage that landscape to try and retain the habitat features that we think are most closely associated with Willardy. And right now, the Coronado National Force is doing just that. They've got a giant, you know, long-term kind of fuels abatement and, fire plan that they're looking at for the Pelhamseos and front and center of that plan is this small rattlesnake.

And so they're consulting with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. I'm encouraging Saunders, whose dissertation is primarily about fire and snakes and the Pelhamseos, to engage with them. And I'm hoping, you know, they're looking at the whole toolbox. They're looking at, you know, going in there and grubbing out, you know, shrubs where they need to mesquite. They're looking at herbicides. They're looking at using prescribed fire where appropriate.

And I think that's good. I think they can do a lot. Right. You know, fire out of control down there is a bad thing. But no fire down there is a worse thing. It's a worse thing because you're just waiting for the inferno. Building up, yeah. That mountain range would experience, you know, you look at from the Swettonham and Basin Lab,

at U of A, the, you know, you look at the tree ring data and all of those mountain ranges down there, you know, big sweeping fires would come out of those grasslands and go up into those mountains and burn about once a decade, you know, and that kept, you know, fuel levels down. It kept more open stands of trees and maintaining influence. And that's obviously not the way it's behaving in the sky islands today. Right. Yeah. That's, yeah, multi-factorial problems.

require a multifactorial answer, right? Yeah, sorry. I also had a question about, you know, the bottlenecking, you know, genetic-wise. I wonder, too, if, along with that, if there are any adaptations to, you know, surviving in a warmer, you know, lower elevation. Oh, yeah.

And, you know, how, I guess how in the grand scheme of things, if you're looking at diversifying, if, you know, adding other populations that may not have those adaptations, it would play a part. Could you swamp the local genetic variation? Right. Yeah. And the answer is you probably could, but everything, and I'm not, you know, a conservation geneticist by any speech. Right.

I haven't done conservation genetic since my dissertation. But I follow some articles here and there and read up when I start thinking about movie. animals between mountain ranges. And it turns out that, you know, that was a big fear back when I was in grad school. If you move these animals around, in fact, I remember being in a graduate student reading group and Phil Hedrick, an eminent conservation geneticist, had us, he had gotten a request from, I think, the Fish and Wildlife Service, I'm not sure, to try and model at what rate they should move Texas cougars into the Florida panther population and preserve the uniqueness of that Florida panther population

and any, you know, local adaptive variation that might be there because those things had they were getting born with King's Tales and testes with descent and all that. And so it was like, you know, so we all played as a group and modeled this. And they ended up executing that. And it turns out that study after study after study, it's pretty hard to swamp local genetic variation.

You know, that, you know, people were very conservative about that at first. And then as time went by, you know, populations are about to blink out and they'd bring animals in. But natural selection is a pretty powerful force. Right, right. And I imagine if the offspring got those, you know, selective or beneficial genes, then they'd be the ones that would survive and reproduce.

And so they would get maybe the benefit of outcrossing, you know, however you want to term that. But, and then I also have those inherent. you know, benefits of their local genetic structure. Right. And I suspect, you know, it's been 10,000 years. And I mean, these guys are not Drosophila. They are not breeding once a month.

And, you know, population size is small. And so, you know, how much meaningful genetic change can happen over 10,000 years. I mean, even in a long-lived organism that's, you know, with the generation links that Willardye has, there still could be some local adaptation there. And so, um, so. That's something we really thought about. You know, we moved 12 animals from the San Luis into the Pelencio's. And I don't know what summer that was.

And, you know, my advice has consistently been since then that, you know, before we do a whole lot more of that, that we need to bring in conservation geneticists and evaluate, you know, use modern molecular techniques to evaluate the amount of variation there and and make some recommendations at what level we should be doing that. Right, right. Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Rob.

No, just on that context, since we're coming naturally to it, we'll play the game. I didn't want to ask you some questions sort of, you know, and I know a partner, right, in the project, Obscurious has been the Rattlesnake Solutions folks. And I understand that you guys took some hints from them around sort of what that release process even looks like. So I did have some kind of specific question. So when Justin and I were down there last year, and, you know, from talking to someone, I don't think this was indicative or actually what it was.

But certainly there was a certain site that struck me in a certain way. did you guys in terms of releasing them presumably you didn't just yatsy them onto the landscape so did you find uh you know utilized natural refugia that existed did you build up structures you know something to give that the functionality so we did and you know you brought up a really important point yes um we brought in rattlesnick solutions specifically because of their expertise with you know um really translocating and releasing animals and, you know, solicited their advice because we hadn't done a lot of that, you know, we catch rattlesnakes, we take them back where we found them, right? And we're kind of careful about what time of day and all that sort of thing. But that's why we brought Brian Hughes and

rattlesnake solutions in. And they had great advice for us. We'd also were fortunate that a paper came out just immediately before this that was, you know, sort of this meta-analysis of all these snake translocation studies. And from that, what we got is that in general, releasing them young and, I'm not going to say this works with every species, but releasing youngsters and releasing them in groups and in the appropriate habitat and at the appropriate time of day, that was what was leading to the most success in animals being around long term. Brian specifically said, you know, look for the microhabitats that you're used to finding them in where there's a retreat where they can go in, try and do it late in the day so that there's not, you know, thermal stress or do it first thing in the morning so that they go down and they're in a hole and they stay there for the day and then, you know, they get a little use to that particular site.

So we followed those recommendations. And interestingly enough, what we ended up doing, we had a permit. And by the way, that entire project, like, you know, international, right? And there's, there's, you know, recovery permits. There's import permits. There's export permits from Mexico. There's fieldwork permits from Mexico. There's state permits.

There's, I mean, you know, veterinary review, it's insane. You run the gauntlet. Yeah. So we had permits to bring 12 in and release them. And when we were down in the San Luis for this collecting trip, So we needed 42 snakes to import to the United States because 30 of those we're going to go to our zoo partners where we're going to start trying some captive breeding and messing around with them. And so that's 42 snakes. We've got to catch them.

We're down there for like three days. It's dry, dry, dry, you know, we're not catching snakes. We're catching a snake here and there. And it's like we are not going to catch 42 snakes by the time we leave. And then it rained. and then it rained and we ended up with plenty of snakes and a lot of them were pregnant females and so we ended up sending a pregnant female back you know among their 10 they each got they got a pregnant female too so which is totally legal right you know but you're sweating it on the way

to the border let me tell you because you don't want to have to turn around and go back right and so we had one of those females was in captivity and she did pop while we were holding her before we transported her back. She had nine babies, which is the record litter size. Wow. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So we had her, we had a juvenile, probably young of the year male from the previous year. And we had another female that was pregnant.

I probably had about, I think, I think she had, I palped five babies in her, but I could be off. And so we ended up bringing those 12 snakes in, the nine neonates and mom, the pregnant female and that young of the year male. And we released mom and her babies in what Saunders and myself and everyone who's been working with them for 30 years felt that that looks like the kind of place of mom has babies, right? You know, there's a retreat. There's a little sunny spot. You know, and so we released them. They all retreated in there. They stayed there for seven days after until the baby shed and dispersed.

So they treated it like a natal site, which was awesome. Wow. And mom hung out there for 14 months. And we went back and retrieved her and took her transmitter out in a temperature data logger that was in her as well. The only one where you recovered from that study, which is amazing. And so the other mom. And that Young of the Year male, where you released at a different site nearby,

but different site, never saw her again, but we didn't have a transmitter in her because she was, you know, grab it. And so I think it went well. You know,

juvenile survivorship's low. You know, all nine of those babies didn't make it, but it's really not nine. It's, you know, 14 probably, 15 having that little male.

So that's quite a bit of babies. I imagine, a couple of them might make it. Yeah. And to adulthood. And, you know, did you, sorry,

did you aim to release them in an area where, area, areas, um, where you knew that, uh, animals had been found or was it in the context of saying, hey, we,

we know that they're kind of adjacent to this. We're not getting in a resource issue, you know, resource conflict position. What was the idea with that? The idea with that was if it's, genetic rescue, there better be some animals here.

Sure. Yeah. Okay. So that's kind of somebody needs to meet with those ladies. Right. Absolutely. And that's one thing as I was kind of considering the putting together notes for the conversation today

is that's a little bit of a different approach to the Louisiana Pine Snake Reintroduction program where they're putting them into an area that has suitable habitat but for which there are no known records in that area, right? Obviously, that's different because those aren't, it's not translocating snakes. That's releasing captive progeny, so a little bit different. But, yeah,

that's why I was curious about that. But as you say, knowing that the attempt was to get integration, right, with those animals, that I assumed that there would have been known snakes in that area. Yeah, there were. And, you know, honestly, and they were places where we had captured snakes in the past. And, but honestly, I don't know that we really even have the option that they had with the Louisiana pine snake because you said suitable habitat. And most of the places that there's suitable habitat in the Pelotios, there's snakes there or pretty darn nearby.

And so, and, you know, the other thing is, is that I think, you know, the pop, I don't know, population densities, I think, very tremendously across. that palenceal landscape. I think in some canyons, you know, some little localized canyons that there might be some nice little deems of snakes in there. But there's other canyons that are exceptionally long. We've spent tremendous amounts of time in them. And we caught three snakes. And over four years. And one of them was a female. She gave birth to a litter. And we took genes from all the babies and from mom and went back and did paternity testing. And the only other two snakes we caught in that canyon were males, and one of them was daddy.

So what does that tell you about population density in that canyon? And they were ways away from each other at the time they were captured. Well, that was another thing I wanted to talk about, yeah, is what is what is your impression, I guess, in all three populations, but particularly the Palencios of, or the Animas, maybe, because it's sample size bigger, of their movement within that space, right? I think, are they moving across canyons within the animus? Are they, what does that look like? No, in the animus, so we worked in two canyons. We worked primarily in Inding Creek Canyon and also in West Fork Canyon. I should say that the other way around, primarily Westport Canyon and also Indian Canyon.

And they're adjacent to one another with a high grassy ridge in between them. And Mark Recapture for 30 years, you know, hundreds of snakes marked. We have never recaptured a snake from one canyon and the other. And yet, when you look at the genetic data from those two canyons, they move between those canyons. At least their genes do, right? That doesn't mean individuals have to, but genes are moving. So low-density intervening populations, genes can move through those. It could be, you know, a migrant once a generation would do that.

it doesn't take many migrants to get gene flow, right? So, you know, there are contiguous population from a genetic perspective, but in terms of individual movements, we've just never documented it. Our telemetry data tells us, you know, that these guys have really small home ranges, you know, on the order of a couple hectares. They're not, you know, movers and shakers. And, you know, all the animals that we had transmitters in in West Fork Canyon, I think one time we had a snake go up over a ridge and come right back.

All of them stayed in that little bowl on the north face of Anonymous Mountain. And, you know, obviously, you know, the pregnant females are, you know, sitting in these teeny little home ranges. So, yeah, Navajo 6, very different from the one female blacktail that I put a transmitter in just for giggles because we couldn't watch any Will or die. And she went up almost to the peak from the plateau where our camp was at 7,200 feet. She went almost to the peak, turned around, came back down past the plateau, down to about 6,400 feet in one summer. Those guys get around.

Yeah. So that was sort of surprising. Yeah, absolutely. I guess as a natural question, relative to the work that David done in the compendium that Gordy amongst others had put together, do you does your lived experience corroborate that there is sort of phenotypic variation maybe particularly in the facial characteristics amongst the three ranges the three ranges um i would say that any feature i could find in one of those ranges with the exception of palencios because our sample size is so low so i i don't know but between the animus and the son louise you know i haven't seen a snake in one of those ranges that didn't look like a snake in the other range. Now, some of those phenotypes are pretty rare, a little bit of yellow showing up

or a little bit of faint facial markings. The hues on the background, I mean, we get pretty brown-looking critters in the animus sometimes. The proportions of those characters vary between the mountain ranges, in my experience. There tend to be more of the brownish individuals and, you know, you encounter the ones

with the facial markings more often down in the sun, East than you do up in the animus. I think they change a bit on it genetically too. A lot of the little ones, you know, I've seen slight gray little ones too. But some of the little ones, you know, are kind of

I don't know, I wonder about that, I guess I should say. You know, is there a change where those little guys are a little bit browner and they get grayer as they get older? I haven't seen a whole lot of great big snakes that were super brown in any of those ranges. Absolutely.

You had a really neat story from the animus, I think, about you had an endangered food chain predation story. If you touch on that, that'd be great. So we had a radio-tagged snake that went missing one day, and then finally one day they got the signal. And there were a pair of, no, what are they? Those spotted owls that were up there in the animal. And there's a reason spotted dolls are endangered. You could walk up to within 10 feet of those things, man. And they just sit around the branch.

You're like, all right, this is why. You need to recognize predators. So anyway, we knew where their roost was. And so the signal from that snake was coming from that roost. And underneath them, there was also a red tail near that roost, I believe. And so we're not sure, you know, it was right in that area. but half the snake, the back half of the snake was laying there with the transmitter in it, and a state endangered pocket gopher, and it's got it.

So there you have it. You've got this heavily endangered rattlesnake, you know, that ate this state endangered gopher getting eaten by own federally threatened bird. Oh, man. It's a beautiful thing. Yeah. A full of life stuff right there. Right, right.

Absolutely. And I do want to note for any folks who are listening here, right, that it's illegal to pursue, threatened or endangered, federally threatened or endangered species. And pursue can be taken to include looking for. So, you know, something to bear in mind, both in terms of driving people's activity and how they talk about their activity, for sure. Absolutely. But that being said, when you have your survey team, out there. So we have a lot of conversation on here about field herping techniques and sometimes different things work different ways. And we talk about going fast versus going slow. And sometimes that,

you know, are we going slow and methodically looking at each different thing? Are we just kind of bursting through that habitat, hoping that's, you know, there's a reason people on bicycles or in cars come upon snakes that maybe move away as soon as they're kind of perceiving that stuff versus looking under every rock or clump of grass or something like that. You know, those are kind of two different things. When your teams are surveying stuff, are they doing every, yet often in our groups, we're doing a mix of those things, right? Some people are, you know, they're more comfortable going kind of slow with their own pace and walking through. Other people want to get, you know, get where they have in their own mind, whether that actually effectuates a snake or not.

Do you have any thoughts on that relative to the palencio, recognizing, I will say that, and the pelonsios are brutal in terms of atypical steps, undergrowth, all those things. And so, you know, what fast looks like certainly looks different in a canyon bottom in the palencios than it does on a trail anywhere. I will answer unequivocally. Slow. Slow and mindful. Yeah. And not because I'm the guy that does that because I don't have that great success.

But, you know, I don't, yeah, I get distracted, you know, squirrel, you know, paint the bridge, whatever. And, but watching the field crews that I've worked with for 30 years, the people who come back with the most snakes are the people who are pretty slow and methodical. And, you know, there was a gal that was down there, found one of the palencios that I stepped over. I stepped over the snake. But she's kind of a head down, looking around absorbing the environment kind of person. and, you know, are strapping Texan and New Mexico guys that find the most snakes. They're also, you know, tend to pay, they tend to move slower through the environment. I mean, they go long.

They go long and they go hard, but they are not thrashing through the environment. They are paying attention. They are poking. They are looking under things. And they're the most successful year after year after year. you know i think you know there are you know we get the young bucks that come in and they just go hard and fast and and they'll come back usually with mostly lepidus okay so and kind of in the same vein is really good in the same vein are folks looking at the same areas that they feel really good about

repetitively or they kind of one day they're jumping from place to play I was amazed when we were down there at the we were getting early and often storms which is good for the palencios but not good for us maybe seeing stuff but I was amazed at the difference in impact that we were seeing even one canyon over like so we were you know the storms coming in below us and then seeing the impact on canyon one versus canyon two all the dramatic differences in those things um yeah So, yeah, people, people tend to have their favorite, you know, 30 years. A lot of us have been going down to the animus. And so people have their favorite places they like to go where they had success last time.

We've all got our biases, right? But we find them in unique places as well. I mean, sometimes you just want to go see something else. And, you know, or you're tired of, you know, I'm going to say something that will offend you deeply, but you're tired of finding obscures and you want to go find a lepitist. rubbing the salt in the wound. I'll give you a mea-culpah later on.

But yeah, so one thing we found is that, you know, you get up above the tree line and Toby Hibbitts found this. He got up above tree line in Indian Creek and started working the, you know, the nolina patches and the bunch grasses up there. in this kind of steep oak savanna with a lot of rocks, but not quite talus. And boy, he found lots of big Willardye up there. Not a lot of little ones, not a lot of females, but he was finding a bunch of males up there. And, you know, we get weird things last year.

You know, Jill and hippie and the whole Rattel Snick Solution Squad had like, I don't know, 18 Willardy Day. You know, it was two days, actually. You know, they found just snake after snake after snake in this one canyon bottom in like 200 yards of canyon bottom. And then they went back to release those the next day. And boom, they got hit again with a smaller batch, but still another batch, which, you know, and other people are out crawling hillsides and do whatever. And they got none those two days. So it's variable.

I think it's very weather dependent. I think there is something to the, there's absolutely something to precipitation. But I think that, you know, everybody says, oh, you know, it's the day after the rain and the steam is rising off the rocks. And, you know, I think there's some truth in that. There's some truth in that. Post rain, not in the rain, you know, you're probably not going to have as much luck you can't hear. And you can't, you certainly wouldn't be able to hear an obscures rattle in the rain. Yeah. And that's how we find many of them, right?

Yeah, speaking of that, so, I mean, Willard I tend to maybe buzz and then go, you know, try to get down under, you know, plants or rocks or whatever. And then they kind of stop, stop rattling, it seems. But we got buzzed by something that sounded like it was a small, you know, rattlesnake, rattle. and then it kind of went down in this bunch of grass and stopped and we couldn't locate what it was. And I'm wondering if there are any insects that would mimic or sound very similar to that that you've encountered or do you think we just didn't get to see it? No, nothing that's sustained like a rattle. There's some little z-d-z-d-z-d-things out there. I don't know what you are, but they're easy to discern from a rattlesnick.

I will say that, you know, after decades of catching those two species together, You can tell the part by the sound of the rattle. Not all the time. But, you know, at the ends of that spectrum of, there's a little middle part where, you know, it's hard to tell. You got a small lepidus or a big Willard eye or something, you know, that can sound kind of similar. But, boy, you know, even an adult willard eye doesn't sound like a lepidus, you know. Yeah. And there's a whole difference to it.

Right. So we, yeah, we sat there and kind of waited around and watched and tried to see if we could see anything. But, yeah, nothing. So I didn't know if it was some bug messing with this or what, but it sure sounded like a rattlesnake, you know. Was it very long? Yeah, I mean, it was sustained for quite a while until we, you know, move around or something that would kind of stop. But, you know, we'd hear it. And it was mostly when we were getting closer to it.

that would, you know, sustain. And then it sounded like it went down or under something and then it stopped. Yeah, that dive, they'll often stop. They'll dive for a while and they're rattle while diving and then stop once they feel they're in a safe spot. Or they're gone down there. Right. Depending on what you're finding them in. You know, some of those talus slides, you know, you can dig to the cord.

Right, right. Which is we don't tend to disturb habitat, you know, in pursuit. So we were just hoping to, you know, get a glimpse in the in the grass or something. But and then the next day we came back to the same spot and a little further up the canyon got buzzed with the same sound, you know, the same nature of it where it was kind of prolonged for a bit, went down, got muffled, and then it stopped. And we're just like, come on. You know, I don't know if we, yeah, we're just very unlucky and not seeing it or. Or that's when you wonder like, okay, we're just maybe misinterpre, you know, that, you know, that. Yeah.

Is that either likely where we're just misinterpreting what's happening. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that makes it worse. You're supposed to say, yeah, there's a bug that sounds just like them, and then I'll feel better about it. Yeah, not seeing it. So we highlighted, right, that the palencio seems like low densities of everything, right? Not only I'm curious, but everything.

at least my lived, you know, even tenepedes, right? So, getting on what we've talked about. There was one spot in particular, though, where it was not a low density of whip snakes. And I was curious if you had any thoughts on interactions between whip snakes and obscures, because that seems like it could potentially have a very, it seemed like maybe, you know, a non-correlated fat, you know, so that in that area, it didn't feel super likely that we'd find a small montane rattlesnake in an area that had plenty of whip snakes. Yeah. And those guys get big, too.

Toby, who I mentioned earlier, caught the record length. Mastikovus Bionidus in the Anamis a couple of years back. Giant. I mean, that snake was, you know, there's like four guys lined up holding it and scars all up and down his body. He was a king cobra. And so we have no evidence of them eating Willard I. having said that, I don't doubt that they do. And we had, I think, five radio-tracked male snakes in the San Luis that we also had these temperature data loggers in.

And we're going to take body temperatures every year. I think it was 10 or 15 minutes for a year. So we'd have a full year's body temperature data on these snakes. We recovered none of those snakes. And the first one we went after, Saunders got the signal and it was under a rock and they flipped the rock to get this snake because, you know, we don't flip when we're hunting snakes, but when we're trying to recover a radio tag snake that's got a year data, there's an exception to policy there. And so, yeah, there it was. You know, they had to sift through the dirt, but no snake at all, just both the radio tag and the temperature data logger were there.

We think, and this is a rock that, you know, nothing but another snake or something like that's going to get underneath it. And so the most popular hypothesis in camp was that it was eaten by a bilineatus. And when we looked at the data on the temperature data logger, it was clear that that snake lived for about a week after we released it. It got eaten and then worked out under a rock. Oh, man. Kind of a bummer. Oh, my goodness. That's unfortunate.

That was the only one of the five we recovered. The others we just took her. So, except for that female, we translocated. We got 14 months of temperature data from her, which that was an high opener. I'll tell you. Yeah. Well, and just the fact that it was alive and well in that new landscape, 14 months later is interesting as well. Yeah.

And so it's even better. So we track that female intermittently because nobody was living down there, right? So somebody go down and we'd go down and we'd go. him a receiver and an antenna and they'd look around for the snake and it was mostly Saunders. And he found her a few times and we just left her alone, took a location. But she didn't, you know, she never went more 100 yards from where we released her, which is pretty typical for a female Willardye, but she's in a new mountain range, right? And so, and then we couldn't get signal and we couldn't get signal.

You know, we came back the next, so we released her in July. We tracked her up until just a little, I think October or so. And then we couldn't get her, I think, in November, and then we couldn't get her the next year at all. And we were, Saunders was back there recovering these O-TMs, these operative temperature models that we spread all over the landscape and the Pelosios and the CERS-N-Lau-East. And he was on the team recovering those,

and he just thought, well, what the heck, I'll go by that old release location. And he said he's standing there, and all of a sudden he's like, it smells like snake musk you know and he had just given up looking for her and all of a sudden this bilineated shoots up the hillside and he's like holy crap and he you know and he looks back where that snake came from and there she was sitting right there and so yeah so we went over there and he went over there and captured her and it was like oh my gosh we got a data logger back and how magical this is you know the one day he's there, he rescues her from being eaten. So although we have no evidence of them being consumed,

we do have the evidence of that attack. Because when he got it back to the car, the bite marks, the teeth marks from that, that by Linnaeus were all up and down her body. Whoa. Really evident on the ventral scutes, you know. Yeah.

So Saunders saved her life. Wow. That's very fortunate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so we had our vet take the tags out, and we took her back up there. And Saunders and I had a little ceremony releasing her and said, may you never see a human being again in your life. Or a bilineatus.

Yeah, more a bit of a human being. It's at the same time as a bilineatus. Yeah. I think a human might be less of a concern than. Yeah. Well, we put her through the ringer, you know, I mean. Right, right. Yeah.

Yeah. One, I guess the other possible small exception, not to the same degree as the whip snakes and probably nowhere near is concerning relative to Montane rattlesnakes was one canyon. It was amazing. So as I say, we could kind of come on the front end. There maybe had been a little bit of rain, but not much. And we had explored a particular canyon. And then we started getting day after day of consecutive rain, including stuff that washed out even the paved road on the way down there in New Mexico.

And the Sonoran mud turtles in that canyon, it's amazing that they're able to survive in that environment. And then just the change within a week of us being there was amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those populations have been studied by Paul Stone for, I think, 40 years. He's been down there doing Mark Recapture with those kind of sternum. So, yeah, it's a really interesting system because most of those drinking just dry up completely are, you know,

they'll have the intermittent puddles for part of the year. But flowing, that's, you know, maybe a couple weeks. And yet, there they are. It's incredible. Yeah. We saw one that added. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Just missing a chunk of its shell. You know, something had chewed on it. Yeah. Raccoon or something. I don't know. Yeah. What are some of the other predators down there that would potentially take an obscures?

Jaguars. You know. That would be cool. There's mountain lions. One of the guys working our study was, there. And I don't know, later in the year, October or something like that, early October, and an early snowfall came in. And he was camped somewhere off Geronimo Trail. And he woke up in the morning, there was an inch of snow. It was gone by the end of the day. And there was a big cat

print next to his tent. And so he took a picture of it with a quarter. We gave it to Dave Brown, the guy who did biotic communities in the Southwest. And he had a buddy that was doing this giant analysis on being able to discern mountain line from Jaguars. And that guy said, unequivocally jaguar. Really? Wow. That's so cool. So,

yeah. Talk about hard to find, you know, I think that's an order of magnitude above an obscureus. Yeah. There were feral pigs there for a while. You know, obviously I think,

you know, the smaller Willardye, they're at risk from king snakes. You know, Kuadis, I bet you it would take. And there's some quadi So I think they've got a, you know, birds of prey, obviously.

And spotted alice me, I think, take them. Seems like they're kind of towards the bottom of the food chain, at least at a smaller size. Yeah, yeah, they aren't way up there. Yeah. It's not a big old, you know. Sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, it's not a big old, you know, five and a half foot diamond back or anything, right? Right.

Right. Yeah. It seemed like maybe we're seeing bear scat. Does that sound? Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's bears there. Yeah. Yeah, I wonder about bears.

You know, yeah, you know, we find bears do a lot of digging in Talas, and nobody knows why they do that down here. You know, you get up north in Alaska, and grizzlies will dig into Talas for these hibernating moth balls that are down. You know, these moths will eat. because they're just really nutrient rich or something. And, you know, bears will eat just about freaking anything. And so, yeah, very possible. We see flipped rocks on our hillsides. Yeah.

You know, when we got to the animus in 93, there were already holes in the virgin talus up there. I mean, you know, nobody had been in there since the 70s, right? Since after Keeper and the kept came out and there was an onslaught at that time. And these looked more recent. They didn't look, you know, old. So I think the bears aren't digging in the talus. I don't know what for. If they're digging in there for snakes or what they're digging in there for.

Yeah, we saw something similar in the Chiricahas where this hillside was just trashed from, I assume bears because, I mean, it was just indiscriminate rolling of logs and rocks and either that or pigs. I don't know. It was up kind of high. So I was thinking bear would be the most likely. But, yeah, kind of crazy. They kind of have a reputation for being unethical herpers. Right. Eating the snake after they find it.

They don't put the rock back. They eat. I mean, you know. Yeah. Yeah, we had seen that in the Chiracawas as well at high elevation in the Chiricajalas where it was like, I'm looking at these flipped rocks and I'm going like, who seriously would have come here and done this? And then someone else in our carlos. group was like, that's obviously a bear, dude.

No one, that's not a herper that was doing this, choosing now to start doing this. Right. Relative to where we're on. Right. Yeah. A heavily monitored area that would have got them a hefty fine if they would have been flipping rocks like that.

Yeah, we've got 10-foot bear encounter stories from the animus. I mean, just story after story, you imagine with 30 years, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right. Just really fun times. Got to keep you on your toes, right? They do.

They do. We keep on your touch. Yeah, that's fantastic. I have a relatively niche question about the palencio's. It seems like it's probably interesting geologically. So kind of the western, what I would call the western side is this red rock that's a little bit softer, a little bit more pliable. The eastern stuff is a little bit more of a, you know, it's a chertie sort of tan into purple, interesting color. Have you noticed any interesting correlations?

It's also very sharp, very difficult to walk on, gets very slippery. If you had any thoughts as to any of that? I don't. Saunders does. He has some very specific ideas about the rocks. I probably should let him talk about it, so I don't misrepresent his thoughts, but there's day site down there. And he has these ideas about not just where he thinks that's fairly predictive

for lepidus and also, I can't remember which way it went, but also with fire behavior down there. So maybe you should, that guy spent fascinating years walking around them. You guys should bring him on the show and just, him and his dog.

I don't see it's a long for ever. That may be a question as well, as have you used any dogs in searches. He, his dog did find snakes for him. Really? Oh, that's cool. I always thought about that. My dog's too dumb to, well, French, but he's not going to be a very good sniffer.

He's got a scrappy little terrier kind of dog. I don't know what kind of dog it is, a royo, and that dog is clever. Yeah, that's cool. I've heard of, I've heard of them being used for, you know, tortoise surveys and finding tortoises and things. But never, I mean, I guess you run a risk. if you're having your dog sent out rattlesnakes that could be a little dangerous for the dog. Unless they're really well trained. Right, right.

There's guys out there that are due training for rattlesnake avoidance with dogs, of course, and Chip Cochran and others. And, you know, so I imagine if you can train the avoidance, you can also train them to, you know, point from safe distances. Dr. Clever. Right, right. That's true. Some dogs, yeah.

Some dogs. Not my dog. He's just a bowling ball. Is there a plan to either continue collecting genetic data or samples from either animus poncios or assurance population animals associated with any of this project from either of those places? Yes, on both counts. So we want our captive breeding to be guided by, conservation genetics so that we can maximize the diversity. 30 is a pretty small, you know, it's more than 30.

It's like somewhere between 30 and 50, depending on how many of those babies, you know, that were born made it. We had a little bit of juvenile mortality initially. And not a ton. Most, I'd say the vast majority of those 50 or so animals are still alive. And so, but we want that. That's a small, small population, you know, the 5,500 rule. and genetics.

And so, you know, there we are. We're right at 50 or so. And so we really want to maintain that genetic variation without having to go back out to the wild and bring wild animals in constantly into this assurance population. And so we've been talking to Dustin Wood at USGS about coming up with those recommendations for what crosses would maximize diversity in our captive colony.

And he's also going to. to, you know, evaluate the diversity in what's going on into three mountain ranges and make some specific recommendations there, specifically with regard to at what rate we should be re, should be translocating animals into the Pelancio Mountains. Are there any other mountain ranges in, you know, New Mexico or that are close by that you would expect them to be in and they just aren't? that might be a site to, you know. Louisiana pine model, shall we call it.

Yeah. Or even the future, right, based on predictive climate modeling going forward, that sort of thing. Right. So Cherkowas has always been a mystery, why there's no Willard Eye there. They're not in the Mule Mountains either, but slower, smaller range, so it's not quite as surprising. The Pinolinos, Mount Graham. There's twin spots at the top of that thing. but, you know, the other montanes are missing there.

There's Garavai there. There's green rat snakes there. There's a bunch of that Modrian element that make it up into the Penelinos. I don't know if Willard-Elepidus never made it up there. They made it and didn't make it, you know? So I guess one of the more controversial things that kind of was in our minds when we wrote the recovery plan. In fact, I would say it actually spurred that. the entire project was the idea of taking them someplace else where they can survive climate

change and assisted migration, right? Right. And, you know, it's controversial because people say, oh, you're playing God and, you know, ecological God and this, that, and the other thing. And they never would have made it there. And it's like, well, we already played ecological God, right? It's called anthropogenic climate change. So we're wiping them.

out or hastening their demise for sure in the palencios and maybe with enough time in the animus as well. So that element of our fauna could be lost to the United States. I think they'll hold on in the San Luis. But if that's the case, if you're doing this bad stuff over here that's making populations blink out, but you have the opportunity to, in an informed way, right, put them someplace where they can persist and not negatively affect the system they're going into, shouldn't we talk about that at the very least, right? There's a lot of people that just have this knee-jerk reaction, no, you know, to assisted migration.

And I think that is folly. You know, I think it's something we should talk about and we should evaluate. And that decision gets made not by, you know, agencies and scientists like me. It gets made by the public. Those kind of things don't happen without public input. And a lot of buy-in from a lot of agencies. So one of the things we're doing is Rich Enman at USGS up in Colorado is modeling habitat and the effects of climate change on this snake.

We've given him all of our data. Every capture location for every obscure us ever. Dave Barker's stuff, Matt Good stuff, Kirk Setzer stuff, my stuff from the animus and the San Luis, our group stuff. stuff, all of it. And so he's working on that right now. In fact, I'll meet with him next week. And we're going to start going over some of the data.

But yeah, I think we need to look at where the habitat is right now, especially in the Pelancio, in trying to use that to guide the fire plan down there and the fuels abatement plan. But I think we also need to be open to the possibility that, you know, that habitat's probably going to be. to be in the Penelinos or in the Gila wilderness for a lot longer than it's going to be in the Pelencio's. And in the case of, well, actually, both of those, it's an appropriate ecological context.

You know, their prey are there. There's, you know, all three of those snakes occur. I'm not worried about competition. You know, you got to watch you because all three of them are there. They're doing fine. So I kind of lean towards, I think it's a good idea. I think we need to do a lot more thinking. about it.

That's always the challenge, right? I mean, you don't know what you don't know. And so we don't have a great track record of introducing, you know, cane toads in Australia and things like that where we're like, hey, this will solve the problem. And then it's like, nope, nope. Oops. Yeah, exactly. You know.

I'm sure there's plenty of things to consider. But yeah, that's a tall order to. It is. And, you know, I mean, it's not, you know, we can bring a pathogen in that wipes out the twin spots on that mountain. Right. Right. So obviously, you know, you want to have due caution.

And but you also have to, as you said, you have to realize that, you know, when I was a kid growing up, it was like, oh, if this species goes extinct, the whole ecosystem will collapse. And, you know, what we've learned is that's just not true. Right. It's more like if we put this species in, the whole ecosystem will collapse, right? crayfish in the streams of Arizona. Right.

You know, it's like it goes on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's just so complex that it's very difficult to predict what the outcome will be. And, you know, that's why I ask is there is. And, you know, are there places that would support them that don't have either clobber eye or price eye or, you know, things like that could be. potentially impacted in a negative way here. Well, you know, Mark Davis and Douglas, and I think I was on the paper too, did a paper that modeled habitat for Willard Eye and called it a bellwether for change in the sky islands.

And so one of the things that was found in that paper, based on a much smaller data set, and, you know, it's an older study now that analytical techniques have changed quite a bit. but it found that the San Francisco mountains above flexed were going to be optimal habitat in about 80 years. And so, which is like now, that's about 70 years. But so, you know, I think about that. And I think, yeah, you know, that's a climate model that looks at, you know, aspect and, you know, reflected light and, you know, vegetative cover and all of these physical aspects of the environment. but it doesn't look at ecology. It doesn't, you know, there's no sclopper's Yarrae up there.

I don't know if there's Skolapindra up there or not. You know, but there's, you know, how much are those snakes dialed into hunting for brush mice and chewed in on, you know, brush mouse scent and setting up a coil next to the little logs that those guys run on like squirrel. Right. You know, you just, I think to ignore the ecological context would be a mistake. Yeah. You know, someplace might physically be ideal, but it might not be ecologically ideal.

Right. And also, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, you know, these disappearances or extinction events are very common in our Earth's history, you know, like how many animals have lived on Earth and have gone out of existence. And, you know, and I mean, obviously we all love these animals and don't want them to go extinct. but sometimes if it's just the environment's not going to support them anymore, what do you do? I guess, yes, you can say, hey, let's put them somewhere else. But at the same token, it's like, well, if they're disappearing there, there's probably a reason for it. And maybe they're on their way out anyway, regardless of what we do. And if there's a chance to do worse, you know, by putting them somewhere else, you know, that's a tricky, a slippery slope, I guess. I hear you. I hear you.

And so just a couple thoughts on that. I mean, one thing I used to tell my students is, you know, from a scientific, from the point of view of science, right, extinction events are nothing but fascinating, right? I mean, you remove having to live through one from the equation and just, you know, I mean, terminal Cretaceous event, it's like, wow, angiosperms and mammals and like the changes. And it's fascinating and it creates opportunities, you know, into the future. You know, and so, yeah, things go extinct, right? And that's part of the whole evolutionary process of life on Earth. But I think what's different this time is we're causing it. Right.

We're causing it. And it's the rate at which we're causing it. I think, you know, background levels of extinction. you know, between extinction events during geologic periods are pretty low. They're background levels. And then you get these spikes, but they're due to cataclysmic things. Like, you know, giant objects smashing into the earth. Right.

And so, you know, and so it's, I think there's a philosophical, the philosophical problem I have with, well, things go extinct is, A, it's not a background rate. B, it's at this accelerated rate, and C, I'm causing it. I'm causing it. And so should I try to do something about that? Right? Yeah. No, I, yeah, I totally understand that.

Yeah. Right. Right. So it's a difficult, difficult thing to consider, for sure. And I guess sometimes we get kind of in a gridlock with that. you know, kind of thinking where, hey, we don't want to do anything that we can't predict the outcome to, but it's very difficult to predict outcomes. You know, we've seen that time and time again. So it could be just fine. It could be catastrophic for something else or it could be beneficial for

everybody involved, who can say, you know? Yeah, it is. It's hard to say. And I guess, you know, my point is I don't, I'm not advocating for it right now. I'm advocating for the conversation and people being open to the conversation about it. And, you know, I've encountered folks that are just like, you know, indignant that we're even talking about talking about it, you know? And it's like, come on, man. You know? Right, right. I mean, there's always going to be somebody like that, you know, they just have no, under no circumstances.

Should we ever even think about this? Yeah. Yeah. That's a tricky situation for sure. It's an impure thought. Yeah. You know, I mean, there's folks out there, you know, Placysicine rewilding, you know, and it's in the same, you know,

niche of discussion, right? Right, right, yeah. Absolutely. Well, this has been fantastic. My final question, and I suppose this applies to everyone, Justin and I specifically are certainly interested. So, again, recognizing. the limitation of pursuit.

Everyone has the ability to go try their hand in the palencios and see if they can turn one up. I take a picture and walk away. My understanding is that you used to do regular surveys in the animus and that the scheduling around that has changed. And if that's true, how do we get, we were just had a conversation what two weeks ago, right, Justin, with Dr. Zach Lofman at West Liberty. and, you know, his message was basically, hey, you guys, you know, should be expressing your interest to scientific professionals and essentially giving your credentials, volunteering your time, whatever that takes, whatever that looks like. How does anyone try and become involved to the extent that stuff's still going in the animus at some point in time to help on a crew and maybe fulfill their dreams? your request is in back it up with an email i'll add you to the to the list of of dreamers and

you know here's what i say you know there every year around monsoon season i become the least popular guy around because we can't go down there with 50 people right and um and we've gone down there for 30 years with you know crews of 20 and 30 people for a week in early October, late September. And, you know, I, I, you know, there's just all this discussion about this, you know, that we have internally. But there's a core crew of folks who have participated for most of that 30 years. And I feel obliged to give them first shot at going every year. You know, when we started with the Recovery Challenge Award, we brought in the rattlesnake conservancy. We brought in zoo partners. They had to have people on the ground, too, you know, and so there

was these institutional obligations for participation. And so it gets tough. The last time what I did is I sent out an email at like 10 o'clock at night, and I said, here's the sign-up list. It's a freaking, you know, Excel spread on an Excel spreadsheet, a Google sheet, you know, first come for serve. Oh, that pissed everybody off too. What?

You know, it's like, I didn't see the email until. Yeah. It was one o'clock in the morning. on the East Coast, man. And so, you know, it's like, oh, I can't win. I can't win. And so, you know, and everybody's like, well, you know, we have to come. We have to come.

Those guys have to come. You know, this is the right, you know. And it's agencies and it's all this stuff. And so it's a really tough call to make because, you know, you want your partners there. So they're vested in the project. And, you know, participating in conservation, you know, and, you know, some of us are getting older. I'm not catching snakes like I did when I was 30. So, you know, and I'm, you know, there's a bunch of us. And so we, we just balance it as best we can. New folks come along and

express interest and I add them to the list. And, you know, sometimes people, a bunch of people have to bow out for personal reasons, weddings and whatever else. And so we end up with spots and you get in. So send me that email and you're on the list. All right. That's all I can promise is you're on the list. We're within driving distance. so it should be. Yeah, and Anamis, yeah, Anamis decided to go back to, we had, you know, amazing access. They've been very generous with us over the 30 years.

There's some of the very few people that are allowed to repeatedly go there year after year. We went almost every year for 30 years, you know, maybe about five years in there intermittently where we didn't, COVID, et cetera. But I think about two or three years ago, they decided that they wanted to back, you know, they deal with requests all the time, you know, for access. And they've got to deal with people. And we've always tried to make that very easy for them. You know, we go in as a group, we come out as a group. People aren't leaving gates open. We got rules about behavior and, you know, treatment of the habitat and garbage and all that kind of stuff.

So we've been very good stewards of that access. But I think they just got to a point where it was just too many people coming too often. And they said, yeah, you know, in our easement, we're required to give, you know, every five-year access for monitoring. And so ask us in 27, you can come back in 28. Oh, shoot. So we're looking forward to going back. Okay. And, yeah.

And, you know, it's not like the door is shut permanently or anything like that. So we're thankful for. for that. And yeah, and, you know, the pelonsios, yeah, you're right. People can go down there and look for snakes. I would advise folks that, you know, expressly going there to look for obscurists in the eyes of the Fish and Wildlife Service is illegal, whether you see one or not. You know, now there's proving pursuit in a court and are they going to cite you for looking because you got a snake sticking you in pelonsil, probably not. And the last of the only two, two prosecutions I know of for illegal collection of obscures.

The last one was a bunch of guys from El Paso who went down there and had one in a bucket in their camp, I think at Miller Spring. And the feds came in posing as burders. They're been the other way around, right? And a clever guy was posing the murder. And they showed him the snake. And boom, that was it. They were in court. And the judge threw the case out.

She said, yeah, I'm, you know, it's a rattlesnake. You guys can't be here. Oh, go. I know. I testified as an expert witness in that case. I almost cried. Yeah. Because, you know, I'm not like one of these, you know, completely against collection.

I mean, I don't have captive animals at home. And I'm, you know, it just doesn't do it for me. And I understand it does for people. And I'm all for hunting licenses and bag limits and people can take animals. I'm going to have pets. That's how I got into herpetology, right? But man, there is one place that cannot, if there is a population of snakes that can't take it, it's the pelisios. The pelisios cannot take it. I mean, I'm all, you know, go down there and take a picture and leave. I have no problem with personally with that. The feds will.

I don't have a problem with that, but you take an animal out of there and you're just the most selfish person in the world because that is a place where one animal could make a difference. Right. And what do you do with it? I mean, you know, like, what a joke. Like, why would you even think about that? And my goodness, what's probably. Yeah. I would think it's probably less likely just in the context of, I mean, shoot, if someone's going to do that, they're already willing to break the law. You might as well go to the San Luis and have an easier time of finding a snake. And then, okay, you've added a violation of crossing an international border. But, like, that's probably the sphere where you're talking about. I mean, I have to imagine that people. looking at the pelonsios, for the most part, you know, notable exception that you highlight there, are people who genuinely just, maybe they're just weirdos like us who have our own weird rules about lifeless and things, you know? Yep, yep. Leave the pelonsios alone.

Yeah, leave the snakes alone. Yeah, right. And, yeah, I promise you a confession, you know, he brought up lifeless again. And so you haven't gotten an obscurest yet, but just, think about how much more embarrassing it would be if you'd never found a Willardye, Willard Eye, Willard Eye in your own state. Right. That's me.

Yeah. Oh, no. I've been on collecting, you know, on herping trips where, not collecting, but herping trips where people, other people have found them, but I haven't found one. And I don't know what it is. I haven't gone that much, but, you know, I've gone enough. And I just feel cursed at this point. But I think I'm in pretty good company.

Howard Lloyd never found one. So I've found two myself. So not to bring me. Yep. And I'm right there with you, Andrew. So, I don't know. I've seen what, three or four,

but yeah, all Justin's found a couple of them. And, you know, yeah. Just get lucky or unlucky. Yeah. Right. Our little rules.

Right. Yeah. I mean, the common goal, you know, if you're with friends. Yeah. That's kind of the way that I.

Kind of count. If we're in a common pursuit, then it counts for me. That's why I'm personally. Yeah. We were in Western Pennsylvania looking for eastern Massasagas. And there was a school group that was there, a university. University. And the Ranger was kind of telling them, okay, this is what we're going to do.

And I was kind of lingering by. He said we could join the group if we wanted to. and I just thought he was going to walk along the trails. And all of a sudden he said, okay, everybody's spread out and we're going to start walking through this grass. And, you know, we'll see if we can find him that way. And I'm like, oh, hey, can I join in? You know, and I got lucky again and found an eastern Massa Saga. Awesome.

The class might have been a little bug that this weird old guy comes and field their thunder, you know. Somehow I think it's lucky. you a lot, which is really helpful in this comment. Yeah. There's something to that, man. Some people, you just want to rub their head and, you know, get some of their mojo. Well, it's funny. You know, these lifeless, you know, things, it's like, you know, you get into herpetology

professionally and everything and that, you know, your own personal life list is still like this really important thing to you, right? You know, it's kind of silly, but it's true. Right. And I mean, it is a little bit selfish to some extent. You know, like a lot of people have kind of said, hey, you know, why not do something more productive like a research project or something like that? I envision like maybe my retirement has been, you know, chasing Great Basin rattlesnakes around my neighborhood or something, you know, like tracking individuals seeing if I can find anything cool out about them or something. But, you know, I do love citizen science. And I, you know, I think in some ways, if we're, if we're, if we're. properly, you know, sharing those observations, it may help science in the, you know, large-scale type thing, you know, some of these databases and things. So, you know. Look at snakes of Arizona and the number of first moms in there on parade records and, you know, all of the stuff in there,

you know, in the speckled rattlesnake account, you know, in terms of prey items and reproduction. And then in Willardive, you know, it's like there's a lot. of information that citizen science provides that's super valuable. And that, you know, that's the other thing I love about this recovery challenge award that it sort of changed the face of our work with Willardy because for a long time, it was a pretty cloistered group of folks that were going into the animus on a regular basis. And we all knew each other. And, you know, there were no outsiders or maybe one or two every once in a while. And then with the Recovery Challenge Award, you know, because we had less restrictions, I think, on group size and part, and we're going to the San Luis.

You know, it's just like the diversity of folks involved just went through the roof, you know. We've got people that are involved in husbandry at these animal care, you know, places, zoos, and we've got TRC involved. And we've got folks that are just enthusiasts that found, you know, obscure us in the palenzoos and took photos and contacted agencies to say, What do you want to do? You know, people that care. Right. Right. This amazing, you know, just group of individuals, which was nice. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess that may negatively impact that if it's illegal to even look for, you know, obscure us or go to, yeah, if they, if they suspect you're in the area looking for them.

I mean, I guess if they're not going to prosecute somebody with one in a bucket, maybe, you know, you'd be okay. Yeah, yeah. But still, you know, the fact that you can't even really technically go look for them is, you know, a little contraindicated for, you know, if you want to help out, you know, hey, we found one. Here's where it was. You know, provide the information to you or, you know, somebody that's doing research, that kind of thing could be helpful. And if you don't get that opportunity, you know. Yeah. Yeah.

It's the flip side. I think that from an agency perspective, and I can't speak for them, it's just this. of, you know, intent. You know, everybody that you encounter down there is just wanting to take a picture, right? Right. But is that true? That's the hard thing. It's like, yeah, how do you determine?

I guess you pretend you're a murder. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, shoot. Well, this has been a fantastic conversation. We really appreciate you coming on. Let us really a little bit.

Have you reached the Pneedium rare? Yeah, I don't feel very medium rare. Rare. Okay. I'll have to bring you on again, grill you a little more. Thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. Oh, you guys are most welcome.

Yeah, thanks for giving obscure some time. And they certainly, over the years, they've been obscure with regard to, you know, conservation focus. You know, they haven't gotten much attention in the media and everything. And so we're also happy about that. That's also one of our goals is to kind of heighten awareness about their plight. Yeah, yeah, that's important. Yeah, we, how can people follow your research or kind of?

I just disengaged from social media. So, you know, I think the zoos, we're going to be putting some, we put out a couple videos, TRC put out a really nice video on the recovery challenge award work that we're doing. And Arizona Game and Fish, too. So they could watch those. Yeah. Is that the Project Obsciras video? Yeah.

And then, yeah, I like that one. I often show that when I give talks. So it gives people a much better feel that have never been there. You know, they see the snakes in the habitat. They see snakes crawling and doing snake stuff, right? Yeah. And so, you know, and they see the people involved. And so it's better than me gabbing and showing graphs, right?

That's interesting, too. Yeah, yeah. And did enjoy your talk to the Tucson Herpetological Society, too. Okay. Very interesting and cool research. I mean, just any project that spans, you know, such a period of time is just you can find out such amazing information from projects. So, yeah, I'm definitely indebted to you and your time that you've spent, you know, doing your research because that's how we learn cool things about the animals we love and are excited for. Well, there's a, you know, we've got, like I said earlier, I'm 60, and we've been there over 30 years, so over half my life has been spent spending state snakes and being in these places. And, you know, I know I speak for everybody in our group. And it is a group of people doing this, not just me. You know, there's a bond to not just the snake, but to the places and to the people that you've shared experiences there with. It's just indescribable.

Yeah. That's a good sentiment to end on, I think. Yeah. Just what a great thought. All right. Well, we appreciate you and appreciate Eric and Owen for housing our podcast. And thanks for listening. And we'll catch you next week for Reptah Fight Club.