Reptile Fight Club - Grilling the Expert w/ Ethan Royal

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

In this episode, Justin and Rob are joined by Ethan Royal for another episode of Grilling the ExpertWho 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

Welcome to Reptile Fight Club. And with me here is my co-host Rob Stone. How you doing? I'm doing great. All righty then. I look like I have pink eye. I've played water polo today and it's all inflamed and red for some reason. I don't know.

I went out and replaced some lights in the herb room. So maybe I got something in my eye as well. But it's not feeling great. Yeah, I look a little sketchy there. But rest assured, it's just either chlorine or. something in my eye. But yeah, how's, how's everything going? Everything's great. I'm super excited for it tonight, which I know I've said for, you know, three, four, five weeks in a row, but nonetheless, so. We've had a good string of guests. Thanks to Rob.

I'm excited for hearing about areas, both that we've been and novel area. It's kind of southeast stuff that we haven't been exposed to, but we're considering and things. So, yeah, really excited for that. Yeah. So I guess without further ado, we'll bring on Ethan Royal. How you doing, Ethan? Not bad. Thanks for having me on guys. Appreciate it. Yeah. So you're more on the herpetology side versus the herpeticulture side. So yeah. Yeah, I didn't really know people kept snakes except, you know, people on TV until it was probably 20 or so. Really? That's interesting. So, yeah. My first real exposure to anything herp-related was. You know, my mom killed what she said was Coral Snake in the house when I was probably four or five and she was terrified of them.

So she made me take it outside. Yeah. That's one of my first memories and definitely my first hurt memory. Right. But yeah, so I had no idea herpetology was a thing people did until I was in undergrad and I started working on pygmies with Terry Farrell. Okay. So I guess that, yeah, that brings up the obvious question. What drew you to it or what got you into it?

I had no idea what I wanted to do other than something outdoors and I was interested in science, a very vague interest. And I had a class with Terry and I started talking to him. And, you know, he's like, yeah, my research is, you know, we go out and we find rattlesnakes and we do stuff with them. And I thought that sounded pretty wild. So I started going out with him and I got really into it and came up with a little undergrad project that he let me do. and kind of went from there. Yeah, did a few tech jobs after during and after undergrad

and then into grad school with J.D. Wilson at Arkansas just doing straight hurt stuff there. Nice. That's kind of how it goes in research. I think a lot of times is you hear a lecture or a class or something and you're just like, wow, that's cool. I didn't know that existed, you know. Same kind of thing. because I was always on the, you know, herpetology track, you know, for my little kid, I was like, oh, I'm being a herpetologist.

I'm being a herpetologist. And then I met my wife and she's like, well, what kind of jobs are out there? Are you going to be out in the field and you're not going to be with your family? And I'm like, oh, yeah, I guess I would be. And she's like, are there any other jobs in science that you can take that aren't going to take you away from me too much? And so I went into virology instead, you know, but I've just kind of kept herpetology and and herpetology and herpetical kind of as a side project and hobby and passion. Sometimes I wonder if I should have just gone into herpetology because I think about it so much. But yeah, that's interesting that, you know,

you got in just kind of without really any big drive for or a passion for reptiles and amphibians back in the day. Yeah, I mean, growing up in rural central Florida, like right on the southern edge of the Ocala National Forest, they're around all the time. Right. I really knew that it was a job in any kind of way to go out and mess with snakes. And then once I found out it was, I got pretty deep into it.

Yeah. But I mean, your wife wasn't wrong. You know, there's a lot of field time. Right. You know, a lot of months living out in the middle of nowhere, out in the field, 12 hours a day. It's a lot. But it's fun in the moment. Yeah.

Well, and I kind of come by that legitimately. Like my grandfather was a field researcher and he studied mule deer on the north room of the Grand Canyon and other areas throughout Utah. And also he was back east for a bit as well. And so, you know, I kind of, I love that thought of, you know, being out in the field and studying stuff. And that's what I would have would have liked to have done. But, you know, you got to make some compromises, I guess, with the, I sure like my wife. So I'm glad I made that choice. There's tradeoffs, you know.

And it doesn't last anyways. I'm chained to the computer now most of the time. Right, right, yeah. I think that's what science boils down to in the end is, you know, chained to a computer. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. So, yeah, I guess kind of tell us where your progress.

So are you still in grad school or have you finished? Are you on to a? No, finished my PhD in 22 in the summer of 22. Nice. And I had a postdoc in the meantime doing, I primarily have specialized in a couple of different types of statistical modeling. And so I had a postdoc where it was a strict modeling job. It was for the University of Maine. It was a really nice job doing some integrated population modeling for a golden wing work.

Okay. To prep for their endangered species listing hearings and all that kind of stuff. And JD, we put in a grant to do some solar. wildlife research and that was kind of waiting around, waiting around, he got it while I was at this other job. And he kept saying he was going to hire a postdoc and hire a postdoc and he never did. And so I finished that and he was open to having somebody work remote for him. My girlfriend works at NC State here in Raleigh. So we were here. But he was open to somebody being remote. So I joined back for that project. Right on. So that's where you're at currently then.

Yeah, so working for University of Arkansas in the Wilson Lab, J.D. Wilson. And at this point, I do a mix of, I mean, it's a lot of, you know, middle management logistics and analyses and all that kind of thing. But I also do mammal, mammal work, terrestrial mammals, bats. I dabble a little bit in birds still. And I'm heavily involved in the herd stuff too. So it's a nice to make. Right. I guess would you classify yourself as an ecologist?

or or I mean you're not yeah yeah I like to think of myself as a herpetologist but yeah you know things have broadened out at this point so right it seems like it's not it's it's more difficult to make a go of a straight you know herpetologist ichthyologist you know that kind of thing where it's you almost need to be an ecologist and branch out and where where where the funding is from time to time Yeah, I think so, but I think a lot of that is just finding the right collaborators to answer your questions. You can stay, J.D. is still primarily focused on herbs. He's branched out a little bit, but most of that comes through working with other collaborators, either at the university or other organizations where we can answer HIRP-focused questions,

but we work with botanists or landscape ecologists to do that because they have the expertise to, you know, whole remote sensing data or vegetation data that is useful for informing our hurt questions, but we don't have the expertise to necessarily come at that hurt question from every angle. So it broadens out, but mostly by just working with other people who know what they're doing where we don't. Okay. No, that's good. That's good to hear. And yeah, I don't know. I guess I have to live vicariously through folks like you. That's really cool. I enjoyed. looking through some of your papers and, you know, kind of some of the cool things you've been doing. But I do think that's fertile ground for research is finding those collaborators that have

different areas of expertise and merging the two so you can answer more broad questions. You know, that's really cool. Yeah, yeah. It's been, it's been a lot of fun. I've learned way more about plants and birds and bats than I ever thought I would. Yeah. Even, you know, two years ago, I kind of still figured I'd just stick in herbs. for the most part.

Right. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah. Well, that's cool that you have that, the primary spot for Herps. I like that. Yeah. I think I might have mentioned this last time, but I was watching a herpetology lecture, and they were talking about how reptiles are more closely related to humans than

they are to amphibians. I like to have that in the, you know, have those group together is kind of interesting, but it's kind of funny. All right. Well, I think we're just going to thoroughly grill you here and get to go, get in, dive in deep to some of your research projects. And so I think Rob maybe has a little bit more structured. So I'll let him kind of guide the topics. And then, yeah, I'll jump in with some questions here and there.

Yeah, perfect. Well, the thing that it caught my attention is you have a lot of interesting records that you post on I Naturalist under your name. Ethan Royal, one word. And, yeah, so as I said, I was kind of looking at Snake Records in northwest Louisiana, and I noticed your records, and then that prompted me to look at your profile, and that directed me to the Wilson Lab and checked out your paper that I think was probably where a lot of those Louisiana records were associated with or your time down there. And it's a really cool paper, right?

Well, it sounds like a cool opportunity. So you want to dive into that, but part of it that I thought was so fascinating was just the idea, of the way in which landscapes really drive the herb diversity in the communities that can be supported there. Yeah, and the INAT stuff, that was primarily, J.D. told us that we had to start logging our observations on INAT in like 2019 or something for a different project, a Prairie Herps project. And he said it so we keep track of all of our records and, you know, have them organized and have the locations and all of that. I think it was really just a way to humiliate the rest of us. He started the lab INAP project where he posted everything he's ever caught. And his species numbers are like 200 species beyond what any of the other lab members have found.

So that was, I think, the real impetus for that. But I just posted whatever. That was after the Louisiana project, it wrapped. So I just posted whatever I happened to have pictures of on my phone, I think. But yeah, that project, that was the first chapter of my disson. dissertation. It was looking at upland herb communities in northwestern Loziana in that kind of section of sandhill landscape right there in the center of the state that extends up mostly the way to the northern border and then over west over to the Texas border. Mostly in the

Cassachi National Forest and then a little bit of or quite a bit of private property around there. It was in partnership with Warehouser Company, the big timber company that owns a lot of private land around there. And so like I said, we were looking at upland herb population or upland herb communities there. Sampling for anything we could find. We had, I think, 81 sites. We did seven rounds of surveys at each site, just visual encounter surveys. So me and a friend kicking around just looking for anything, grabbing whatever we could. And that was over a three year two two and a half field seasons roughly. So we ended up doing something like 560 surveys down there. But it was really interesting. It was an interesting mix of high quality, you know, what you would

typically think of is high quality sandhill habitat managed for conservation and that was both in the national forest and in some of the private properties. Some of those were also managed for conservation as you know trying to get to reference sandhill conditions you know those beautiful big long-leaf pines spread spread out pretty well really sparse canopy a lot of open bare sandy soul and a lot of herbaceous ground cover so it's a it's a really striking landscape i love i love the long-leaf system that's what a lot of o'cala national forest is where i grew up that in scrub and so I spend as much time in sandhill systems as I can. But it was a really fun project, and we were just trying to figure out what kind of management conditions and underlying landscape condition to dictate the composition of the herb communities in that.

Is it strictly management? Is it strictly the underlying landscape that you can't really change? Which of those factors dictates what species make up a community in a given area? And we had timber managed working forest sites that were a mix of recently clear cut and replanted, some mid-aged working forest sites that are really densely planted and closed canopy, big, you know, thick layers of pine straw substrate with essentially no herbaceous undergrowth or very little mid-story too. Now, are these, sorry, are these areas, the replanted areas, are they replanted with the typical native? It's lob-lally for the working forest.

Those are typically planted with lob-lily. They grow at a much higher rate than long-leaf typically does. And are less dependent on the kind of fire management and the system to really maximize growth like long-leaf generally needs. And so we did have a difference in overstory composition in some of those sites, although we can talk about this later, but I don't think the over-story composition necessarily matters so much as the actual structural conditions. Gotcha.

So we had those working forest sites. And then we also had some conservation managed sites that were also those those were a mix of lob lolly and long leaf. There was some lot quite a bit of lob lollie in the national forest. And you know, as you see in any kind of publicly owned property there, a lot of the time the management resources are stretched a little thin. And so some of those sites have been burned recently and were really nice and open. Some of them were a little overgrown.

So we had a big mix of kind of site conditions, a decent mix of underlying soul conditions and things like that. And like I said, we just kind of kicked around and found whatever we could for two and a half years or whatever it was. I think it goes down there for a total of six months probably from in the spring and summer in 2017, 2018, 2019. And what we found. we found was, you know, it's really a mix of things that dictates what the community is made up of.

We split our community up into a couple of different groups, right? You know, you're looking for everything and some of those species are not going to fit into that kind of upland pine associated group. For our analyses, we split it up into some upland associates and some music, you know, hardwood forest associates and then just a big model with everybody included just to see how that looked. But for our upland associates, we found mostly what you'd expect. And this is a group, let me actually pull that up and make sure I don't forget anybody. But it's the, you mean when you say what you'd expect, what you'd expect historically in that type of habitat? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So open canopy, relatively open on open midstory, herbaceous under story, bare sandy soul, ground cover mixed with that herbaceous understory. And these species were things like Eastern Narrowmouth Toad, Race Runners, Scloporos, let's see, Eastern Hognose, Prairie King Snake. Sloansky's Corn Snake was still a species back then, so we included that. And pygmies. That rounded out our kind of upland associate groups for the species we actually found. There were a couple that are in the region, but that we didn't turn up during our surveys. So Louisiana Pinesnake is the big one that I haven't mentioned.

We were on some sites that have tracked snakes, known tracked snakes, never caught a whiffle on. You know, I spent a ton of time kicking around those sites, you know, my free time looking. But it's tough. It's tough trying to get to get one. And would that be, would have that have been the key time to be looking for them as well? Like that's when they're active and out? It would have. So the first year.

we were out there, we were out there May, June, July. And that would have been the time. They're, you know, their pitch office, they love it hot. Yeah. So that would have been, you know, out there during the day, like that kind of mid-afternoon window in the summer would have been the time for them, I think. Yeah. Unfortunately, I was doing, you know, my formal surveys most of the time. So I had to spend a lot of those peak hours kind of just off in sites where I knew they weren't to be, but that's what it is. So never turned up one of those, and there are a couple other things. Like, that's Western Milk Snake, which, you know, probably should.

I was expecting to get a few of those that didn't turn up. Glass lizards didn't turn up. But we got decent coverage of our Upland Associated community. Oh, CoachWips are the obvious one that we got the time. I think I forgot to mention. is when you're searching are you is it just kind of a walking you know are you looking under stuff are you flipping logs yeah rocks things like that yeah it's it's it's just walking looking for the best micro habitat we can find flipping um you know sandhill there there's there's there like

no rocks it's and since it's relatively sparse canopy there's not a whole lot of logs to roll a lot of the time um but flipping whatever you can find yeah we did put out cover I put out cover boards in, I think, March 2017. And so they didn't have a whole lot of time to age before before we had to go survey that summer. But they did pretty well in 2018. And there were a couple that were out there. There are some primo coverboards that are still at one of the sites that if I ever get back out there, I'm going to go flip those and see.

But yeah. So let me ask you real quick on that, right? because it's been our experience in New Jersey and in Florida. I've been surprised, right, even boards that look awesome, so not boards that we laid out, you know, but have never pretty, certainly in the fine barons, all of the boards that I've seen, including very beautiful boards, have never once produced anything for me, which is, I know not, you know,

that's limited to my experience. I see plenty of YouTube content, Instagram and things, where folks are flipping pines and things like that, but I never saw anything yet. So I was wondering if there's something with the interactivity of the moisture in the soil and kind of cover versus just sort of the, you may mention previously, is just the idea of soil structure, right? And sort of the different interactions of different plants, right? We talk about Loblolly versus Longleaf, and, you know, so they're growing at different rates, different speed, different inputs, different management required. Is it anything, well, yeah, maybe it's a good time.

I hate to derail. So either go ahead or make sure we come back on just the idea of the management versus interactivity. For coverboards specifically? Maybe coverboards now and then, yeah, maybe the summation. Well, I mean, our cover board, it's kind of a boring answer, but our cover boards were good at our best sites and bad in our worst sites. So like the really closed canopy, really dense pine straw layer, like if we were going to get something, the boards would often be where it was,

unless it was a rat snake that happened to be out on the crawl. But it was, they just generally were not very productive. Our nice sandhill sites, we did get pretty good action under a lot of those boards. And it's, you know, hitting it the right time of day.

And even in really sandy sites where I don't think they held a lot of moisture, they still produced pretty well. And it's who you would expect for the most part. It's, you know, racers and coach whips. some pantherophists. Somebody who's trying to get really hot because it's Louisiana and June. It's hot no matter where you're, you know, where you're sitting. So it's somebody who's trying

to get extra hot. But they were fairly productive, but not nearly as productive as boards that I've had in somewhere like Northwest Arkansas on the prairie. I feel like those prairie boards that I've I've dealt with are way more productive than those sandhill boards. And that holds up for, I think, like the sandhilly areas where I hurt a lot in central Florida. But that might just be a density thing. I think those areas just have fewer animals in some cases. So it's maybe not a board efficiency thing.

It's probably more of a density question. Is that just typically true of sandhill areas? They just don't have a lot of. places to hide and so they don't support a large community or stuff is just underground for the most part. I think a lot of stuff is underground. I don't, I'm trying to think of if I've seen a real good quantitative comparison of abundance estimates for, you know, a snake that, that covers both, you know, prairie and sandhill. And I can't think of a good abundance comparison. Harrison. But my my gut would be, yeah, that they're just kind of sparser. The, the, the abundance

are probably a little bit lower in the, because it's a relatively sparse landscape, right? Right, right. It's a lot of open bare sandy souls. It's dry. Yeah. Not a whole lot of midstories. So I would guess densities are just lower, but, you know, I could very well be wrong. Right. I was just watching a video on, uh, It was somebody herping out in Louisiana somewhere, but it looked more like, you know, not not necessarily Sandhill, but they found a lot of snakes. And it seemed like the tin stacks worked really well. Oh, yeah. There was one, one, I think it was Will Robertson, but I think that's what it was.

But they were flipping through these tin stacks. And there was like a milk snake just like coiled up there and he missed it. He just flipped it up. flipped it up and then there was a giant timber rattlesnake underneath. But yeah, they had real, it seemed like the tin stacks were like the way to go out there. But I don't know if you've compared that at all or, you know, with. No, we've, JD and I are always thrown out methodological ideas and we've talked about. And I'm pretty sure somebody and I'm blanking on who.

So I'm sorry to whoever it was. But I've seen a couple of tin versus plywood versus maybe shingle. comparisons in the literature. And I think it's largely Texas specific. I think it also probably varies regionally. Yeah. You're not going to have much luck with tin stacks out in Utah. Yeah.

I think anywhere with a relatively open canopy, where it's going to heat up fast, you better hit it at exactly the right time before everybody catches on fire. Maybe at a certain time of year, but very brief window of time, yeah. Yeah. I mean, if it's in the right spot, yeah, if you've got a layer of, you know, you've got a stack of like six sheets.

You can get somebody under every single one. It's unbelievable. Right. Right. It's, yeah, that's always exciting. Yeah, it's kind of cool. But at the same time, it's like artificial, you know, it's just it stands out in a natural environment. I mean, it serves its purpose to find herbs, but at the same time, it's kind of an eyesore, you know.

Yeah. It's always nice to get, you know, a little coral snake. You see them peeking out from under a piece of loose bark or something like that. That's a lot. Yeah. Preferable more. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. No, I did, I did really think that coverboards would be a little more productive in that northern Louisiana landscape. And that's, that is the part of Louisiana that, like, nobody herps a whole lot. Some guys do. But it's not particularly popular. And I, having herp there a lot, I understand why. Are the ticks bad?

they're not they're not terrible no okay that's you know and the new jersey oh yeah it's not it's not bad compared to you know a tall grass prairie or anything like that okay or yeah the pine barons up in new jersey are miserable for ticks it's horrible yeah or even okala if you get into it wrong for sure right yeah we had come across uh hyped up aspen our last year hyped up um Eastern Diamondback he found just it was had a food bowl list and was seated looking for the next one to run along and taking pictures of that over the course of eight or ten minutes I got 130 150 seed ticks on just all over so that you know even crouching just crouching you know no two points of contact with the ground within two or three minutes I had them on my hands and I was like

oh this is bad yeah you found the right spot yeah yeah All right. Well. Awesome. So, yeah, if you want to hit into kind of the, well, two different aspects. I guess one is a fundamental because we talk about it. I see it in the literature and conversation so much as Longleaf versus Lob Lally. And you hit on it a little bit, but just in terms of, do you think there's actually a fundamental difference? It sounds like maybe Lob Lally is more resilient and grows more easily with less manipulation so it can kind of overtake land, even if it, or is remnant. If it's planted at all, then it can overtake or out-compete long-leaf, especially if that long-leaf isn't managed properly?

I don't know how much direct competition there is, and I'm not a tree expert, but in terms of the structure they create, so long-leaf is more fire-dependent and grows much slower typically than Lobali, and that's why Lobali is what's used in those working forests. because you're going to get better production out of the system than if you were waiting around for longleaf to grow up. So in terms of like the structure that they create and the habitat quality that's produced and the Hurt communities that persist and how Lobloly versus Longleaf shakes out, it's really tough to say because I think if you have a system with law, if you have a site with Longleaf in it, it's probably Longleaf because it's being managed for conservation. It's being managed as a natural area rather than a working forest. And you can have, like I said,

you can have lob lolley stands that are managed for conservation and they look really nice. So you know, they obviously look a little different. They're, in my opinion, a little less majestic than a nice big long leaf. But if you manage it the same, then the structure will essentially look the same. And I think it probably creates very similar conditions

for herbs and other members of the wildlife community. But I think a lot of the time you don't necessarily have that really clean comparison. You're going to have lob-wolly stands that are managed for production, that are going to have tighter planting and a very dense canopy and different understory and mid-story conditions. And so you don't have a ton of replication of lob-lali that is essentially managed to be a kind of sandhill reference site. So my gut feeling is that there's probably no real, if there's, the structure and the management and all of that is the same that I don't think Loblolly is necessarily, you know, any kind of detriment to a herb community. I think it's the surrounding, it's the management

and the surrounding conditions that are created. But, you know, if you're trying to restore santo, you might as well plant the long leaf because, you know, it's what it would have been and it it looks really nice. But, I mean, I think as long as you've got stuff like the nice big stump holes and some big down logs and you got the, you got the, you got the, you got the little bit down logs. the herbaceous vegetation and the open, open sandy soils and you got pocket gophers in there, creating some nice burrows, then I think you can replicate the herb community, but that's all stuff that is difficult to create unless you're managing specifically for conservation purposes. But broadly what we found was even in, even in lob lolly sites that are managed as working

forest for timber production at different points in the kind of life cycle of that production, they can support significant herb communities. They can support upland associated species, especially when you have a young stand that's recently planted that has that open canopy that'll have a lot herbaceous growth. You'll have, you know, race runners and coachwips and Sloanski's corn snakes and that kind of thing move in. As it grows up and the canopy closes in, I think, you'll lose them but if you've got that kind of mosaic of stands at different ages in the landscape that can be colonized and abandoned over time then i think the population can persist they'll just be popping around to these different spots you know the kind of classic meta population

idea with blinking on and off as conditions change so the short answer is that those working for us i don't think are you know necessarily you know a complete note for a lot of these upland-associated species. I think it just depends on having somewhere to colonize as conditions become unsuitable or, you know, less favorable over time. Very cool. And a question we perpetually ask anyone who's with expertise or at least time in the habitat, you know, we certainly notice the difference between the abundance of bull snakes and gopher snakes out in the West and pine snakes. in the east that, you know, here, you know, they're ubiquitous in the West, basically probably the second, third, fourth, most common snakes one would encounter,

whereas on the east coast, pine snakes are invariably the ghosts of their environment. Do you have any thoughts around them? Yeah, and, you know, even within the, you know, even within pine snakes, it's obviously a good bit different because, you know, Louisiana pine snakes are obviously doing so much worse than everybody else. Why exactly? I mean, maybe that landscape where they formerly were has changed more than other landscapes, you know, like in Florida or South Georgia or New Jersey.

I kind of doubt that, though. Like, has northern Louisiana changed more than New Jersey? No way. You know, so I don't think that's, so even within that group, that smaller group, there are some weird differences. My gut feeling is that it has something to do with pine snakes. maybe exhibiting a little bit more diet specialization that results in more micro habitat specialization. And when that disappears, then they don't have a great path to replacing it. Whereas bull snakes kind of just act more like a big racer, a big coach whip or something, run around,

really surface active, eating anybody they can find, essentially. Whereas Lizzie and a pine snakes are spending most of their lives underground in either stump holes or pocket gopher burrows, a large portion of their diet is presumably made up of pocket gophers. If you have any kind of sole compaction or management that precludes pocket gophers, then you're probably precluding pine snakes as well. Or they're correlated correlated declines in pocket gophers as well? I mean, are they? I don't know that anybody has a great, I haven't, I haven't checked on the pocket gopher literature a whole lot since I finished up that Louisiana project. But they are sensitive to, they're relatively sensitive to

management. They, I mean, they're limited to those really sandy soils a lot in some place at least. I mean, they're a pocket gopher species all over the southeast and, you know, they're in the west, too. Now I'm getting out of my depth. I talk about models. But my, my understanding is that they are relatively sensitive to management action and probably to vegetation conditions. I would assume that they probably have a much tougher time in a really tightly planted stand of working forest where there's a lot of root structure closed canopy. They're probably a lot of their forage when you don't have that herbaceous veg around. So I would guess they're probably sensitive management action and anything that causes

sole compaction is probably an issue for them. So my gut is that pine snake declines are probably a result of a smaller niche than you see for both snakes and go for snakes. Right. Do lobollies and longleaf, do they differ in their root structures? That's a great question. And I'm saying all of this as a guy who was out there doing surveys every single day and never all Louisiana pine snake. So this should all take it over the grain of salt.

Well, not many people have seen Louisiana pine snakes. So yeah, you're, you're in good company here. But, you know, I guess you just, I guess that's where all those things, you know, where you're meeting up with people who are experts in pine trees and they can answer those questions and formulate hypotheses around those kind of ideas, especially in a, you know, a case where you're looking at restoring a species or protecting a species or trying to enhance the environment for them. Yeah, those are important questions. Yeah. And there's still a lot of great work being done on living in a pine snakes and, you know,

restoration efforts and conservation efforts and conservation reintroduction efforts, that kind of thing. But we fully recognize you're not, you know, that's not your area, I guess, of you're not a pine snake restoration folk or person, but, you know, what do you do? Yeah, very cool, though. I've probably spent more time standing above one that I had no idea was there than most people. Right. Well, great. I don't know if we want to transition Justin's the next paper.

Do you want to, I know you found particular interest in a paper that Ethan was author on associated with translocation of Box. Yeah. Yeah. You've got translocation ideas anyway. Yeah. Feel free to jump into that. No, yeah. I mean, you always hear that translocation just doesn't work with reptiles very well.

And, you know, I've heard kind of mixed things. But I got to go out with a snake, what do they call them out there in Australia? Snake relocator. You know, people call them and, hey, there's a snake in my yard. They go out. Brown snakes. Snake catchers, I guess, you know. Yeah.

And so they'll take them. And, you know, he had a spot where we release some of the snakes that he'd gotten from a few different yards or whatever. And so we got to release a diamond python, a red belly black snake and some other cool like Domancia and stuff, you know, some of their eraser type snakes out there. And so it was kind of cool, but it was not too far from where the houses were in kind of a more protected environment. But I always thought, you know, it seems like it'd be really easy to overload a system. You know, you're putting everything in one area. And, you know, you just wonder how that impacts them. And if they do well in the new area or if they just, you know, dying, not a short

time later or something or just heading back to, you know, the yard that they were in not long ago. Yeah. Yeah. So just curiosity about that kind of thing. But yeah, you were studying relocations of, and translocation of box turtles. And I got on kind of a box turtle kick this year. We found a, I found my first wild box turtles, you know, after being in the area and, you know, having the potential to see them, but never seeing them until this past year. We got some of the desert box turtles in Arizona, in New Mexico. And those are really fun. I really got excited about those despite Dustin's, he was a little upset. I was spending so much time with the box turtles instead of going out looking for other stuff.

I think it was only on the dozen one that we were a little bit like, okay. Yeah, true. Yeah, no, yeah. Juvenile. Right. We found a couple out in Pennsylvania and, you know, that area. So out in the East Coast, it was, I was very excited because I don't know. I've always had a soft spot for Boxter.

Oh, they've got great personalities. And especially the ornates, the three toads, I think they're a little nastier. and just in personality. They're not as, yeah, they're not as cute. They're not as friendly.

The ornates are just perfect a little. Yeah. But yeah, that was a nice little study that Elizabeth Hayes did. She's currently a P. I think she,

I think she's finished her master. She's going to be starting her PhD in, at the University of Arkansas here. Cool. That already happened or she's doing it now. I don't remember. But great little study.

She's working on chicken turtles now, doing some really cool stuff that she did a great job with. And it came about pretty haphazardly. There was a development going in that was getting some public pushback from people in the area, about a quarter mile from the University of Arkansas campus. Right. And they had a ton of box turtles and people love box turtles. You know, people love seeing them walk through their yard and, you know, going to eat a little mushroom or something. And so they thought it would be good PR to essentially, you know, throw some money at us and say, hey,

do you want to come track these box turtles that are on this development that we have? And, you know, kind of make sure they're doing okay and all that. Yeah. And we found a ton of them. Like, they're just so thick on the ground in that kind of close camera, you know, that hardwood hammock habitat, that hardwood, hardwood forest habitat. And so we found a ton of them in a very small,

area. And this is in, you know, they were putting in a development, but there is already a developed area. It's already residential neighborhoods, a quarter mile from campus. And so we were tracking some of them for a while. And then they started construction in a couple of areas that covered some of their home ranges. And so we stuck a bunch of them in a enclosure in J.D.'s backyard. and we kind of did that for a while and kept getting more turtles to put there. And eventually I said, well, we were kind of like, what are we going to do with these turtles? He didn't, you know, he didn't want to have 20 box turtles in a little enclosure in his backyard for forever. And so I said, well, do we want to just put them back and see what they do?

They've been sitting here for a year. They'll probably do something weird. It'll probably be surprising. I'd be surprised if they went right back home if they remembered exactly where it was. And I'd also kind of be surprised if they didn't try to because that's what you expect. You just expect them to immediately bolt back to where you got them, right? That's what happens. And so we put a bunch of transmitters on them.

Elizabeth did a nice job of kind of systematically releasing and put in a lot of tracking effort. And it turns out we also got some turtles. that we hadn't held that we just picked up from areas that were gonna be developed. We kept getting new turtles, so we picked them up and then immediately translocated them. And it turned out that that, you know, holding on to them for a year,

I don't know if it wiped their memories or what the gear was, they just kind of got disoriented. But they typically did not really try to rehome. We saw some re-homing attempts, but not nearly at the rate that we saw from those immediate translocations. Right. And so as a translocation strategy, you know, in a kind of situation where you don't really expect any success, it gave us some success, which is, you know, a pretty decent improvement.

Even for males, which I expected those males to immediately just kind of, if not go back home, immediately just kind of bolt somewhere, just go nuts and start moving around all over the place. But a lot of them just kind of established new home ranges where we left them. And it's not the most, you know, it's not the most practical strategy to grab a bunch of animals that just keep them in your backyard for a year. But in this particular situation, it worked out pretty well. And I think it was a relatively interesting finding. And Elizabeth did a really nice job with that. Yeah, it was really fun to kind of have a study that just came up. We just kind of pulled it out of, I don't know if you're allowed to curse on here, but.

We just got to pull it out of nowhere as a way to solve a problem that we'd created for ourselves. Right. And it worked out surprisingly well. That's interesting. I mean, you think about, you know, some of the, just in, you know, mind-blowing tracking or finding back, you know, sea turtles coming back to the beach they hatched from after swimming thousands of miles out into the ocean, you know, and they can find their way back. and, you know, maybe that's to do with more with water and, you know, those kind of clues, but it's, it's impressive. Like, you know, you just makes you scratch your head when you think about those things. It just blows your mind.

But, but yeah, so that's interesting that they kind of had a reset, you know, and they accepted their new areas. Yeah. You know, I, like, I'm assuming they don't have the same kind of mechanism that animals that make those big long distance move. have. I'm assuming they don't have the need for that. I'm guessing they don't have the capability for it, but they clearly have the capability for short-term re-homing attempts because we see it all the time in translocation studies. Even if they're taking a way off, they tend to just kind of scramble and maybe go in the direction of a rehoming attempt. If there's no way they could possibly make it back, you know, they've moved and moved to 40 miles or whatever. And we just moved

them a couple hundred meters essentially out of the development long. into the forest next door essentially, you know, a couple walks over. So I don't know if they could have, if they had still had the location and could have gone and just keeping them somewhere and keeping them fed for a while, kind of dulled the instinct to go back to where you knew you could live happily. Right, right. Yeah, I mean, I guess if in their new area, they're succeeding, then what's the point of trying to make it back to the year old area?

So I don't really have a good feel for what the mechanism is that the kind of difference in behavior, but it happened and it kind of worked. You know, who knows if it works like, you know, the big, you know, who knows if it works for a timber rattlesnake or something like that where, you know, snakes, we see translocation efforts fail constantly. You know, for animals that have established home ranges, it essentially, it just hardly ever works. So who knows if it works for any other tax? So who knows if it works for other turtles? I have no idea. But in this one particular case where, you know, we see relocations constantly fill for box turtles. We got it to kind of work, which was really fun.

Yeah. And I think that's, you know, good to kind of start the ball rolling and getting those questions answered in other species as well when there's a good example of something that could work, you know. I think the thing that I like best about this particular. example that again isn't isn't really you know feasible in a lot of cases we were able to essentially maintain the same population right they were moved in a lot of cases that's not possible because the whole area is getting developed you know the population has to go somewhere else in our case some of these turtles you know some some turtles not the ones we relocated generally but some turtles had part of their home range in the forest where we released

these old turtles and part of their home range in the part that was developed So we were able to maintain the same population. They're still walking around the same neighborhood, doing the same stuff, hanging out with all the other same turtles. But just keeping them for a while, provided that reset while construction happened. And, you know, I'm very pleased that we were able to maintain that population and not just have to dump them somewhere else and try to start something new. Yeah.

And I imagine, like, if they were released and they're trying to, to go back to their range and then they see, oh, there's no cover here. You know, they're building something here. There's just, there's people walking around. They're probably going to avoid that area anyway, you know. So, but it sounds like they, they do pretty well in an urban environment. Oh, yeah. Over.

Yeah, in the East Coast, those three-toed box turtles and the, you know, the Carolina, the eastern box turtles. You see them in your yard all the time. They're all over the place. They're pretty. they're pretty urban adapted in a lot of areas. They're really cute, too. I think that's part of why they're so well-adapted.

People like them when they see them walking around. Yeah. It's hard to find a more beautiful animal, too. I mean, some with the red eyes and the yellow, you know, streaked shells, they're beautiful. Yeah, those, the three toads, though, like some of the Arkansas three toads, they're just like that, you know, baby poop brown.

Yeah. They're not pretty much. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Some of the, some of the desert ones we saw. Oh, the ornates are beautiful. Yeah, they can also be kind of dull, too, once they're older, you know, their shells kind of brown out or something.

But yeah, there were some really nice ones. Yeah. Yeah, they actually overlap quite a bit with, with three toads and, well, I say quite a bit, but in the historic tall grass prairie areas of Arkansas, they overlap with hornades and three toads overlap at D.C. bit. We see some interesting patterns with where you get, you know, canopy intrusion. You see three toads start to move into these areas that were historically just ornates. You even get a little bit of hybridization occasionally. Okay. That's cool. Yeah. Well, that's, that's exciting work. Yeah,

it's fun. Hopefully, yeah, it can be the, the starting point for other projects in that same regard. But yeah, it's always a problem. You know, I, I, I'm really fresh. in Utah because you can you know they're building and paving over heel monster habitat but yeah don't don't try to touch one or you know look at one too close or you're going to be you know find or you definitely don't try to take one home because yeah you're in huge trouble so yeah it's kind of frustrating a little bit where you see their habitat just you know getting getting taken away and and yeah so um speaking of box turtles there's an another paper that you were involved with on prairie degradation,

mean packed, unbox turtles. Would you mind touching on that? Yeah, that was, that kind of relates to what I, what I mentioned a second ago about, you know, that kind of canopy intrusion into historic prairie. And this was another paper that an undergrad did in the lab. This was Gabriel Yarden, who was an RU student in the Wilson lab. This was way back in, gosh, when was he actually?

He was there in like 2019. And then we published it a few years later, but he did a really nice job with this. And so it was essentially looking at how prairie management or lack thereof, you know, management that you see either for his, you know, for conservation managed prairie versus the pasture lands that have primarily or, you know, pasture lands hayfield that have primarily taken over what used to be tall grass prairie in northwest Arkansas. And that's kind of the, that kind of north-south area, that's kind of the eastern range limit of tallgrass prairie is right in that kind of northwest corner of the state. There's a disjunct portion down in southeastern Arkansas. It's actually really interesting where there's still cornet box turtles. It's really cool. But yeah, so you see like kind of the range limits of a lot of those prairie associated species.

They start to peter out as you get into northwest Arkansas. on, so you get some interesting patterns. And so we were trying to figure out what potentially limits the persistence of ornates in whatever prairie is left and in the land use types that have replaced a lot of that prairie. And so we had a nice restored prairie managed with fire every two or three years, I believe, that has a remnant ornate box turtle population. It also has a creek running through the middle of it that's pretty heavily canopied that has a little three-toed box turtle population.

So we've got both of those guys in that same site. And it's surrounded primarily. There are some chicken houses nearby, but it's primarily pasture right around there. And obviously would have historically been tall grass prairie that's managed with fire or that, you know, was that experienced fire, I should say. And so we were kind of trying to figure out, one, what limits or nays. in these kind of different habitat types and to what potentially limits the, what limits the spread of three toads

into those remaining prairie habitats because we typically don't see them, at least at that site, we didn't see a lot of three toads coming into the prairie habitat itself. They mostly stuck to that little forested area. And so we looked at, one, we used operative temperature models

to look at the evasive, range of temperatures that box turtles could experience in the different micro habitat types in those sites. And those models are just essentially little physical models. In this case, we used aluminum cans that we spray painted to match the reflectivity, you know, absorbance of I should say reflectivity, the reflectivity of a box turtle. And then you put in a little temperature logger in there. And so it has no thermal inertia. It's just taking constant in the moment measurements. You calibrate it with a box turtle in a lab setting, and that way you can kind of understand, you can calibrate the rate of change that a box turtle experiences versus your operative temperature model. And then that allows you to kind of understand, you know, with the input of insulation and wind and all that kind of thing, what temperatures

that an animal would experience in that specific location at that specific time. You just take a bunch of temperature measurements over time. We left them out for, I think, a week. And that just allows you to say, okay, a box turtle in this open microhabitat in a prairie setting experiences this range of temperatures over time. A box turtle in this canopy area, partially in a borough, would experience this range of temperatures. A box turtle in a hay field underneath a mat of fescue grass would experience this range of temperatures and that kind of thing. Right.

And so we found that, one, the, again, a lot of this is kind of what you would expect, but, you know, quantifying it is helpful. So the forested habitat of smaller range of temperatures, so less variable, less heterogeneity in the temperatures available across a few different microhabitat types. The degraded prairie often got much, much hotter than either the restored prairie or the forested area, which, again, you would kind of explain. expect. It's a hayfield, mostly fescue grass and exotic turf grass. So there's very little structural diversity. You don't have, you know, a blackberry and then some grasses and then a little

herbaceous and then there's a burrow over here. You don't have lost in those, in those, I'm not going to get in prayer nouns right now, but you lose some topographical structure too. But you lose you lose the kind of multi-layered vegetation structure. It becomes homogenous across the site. Okay. So we saw relatively homogenous temperatures across those hay fields that graded prairie. Well, the restored prairie had a nice, a lot of heterogeneity depending on the micro habitat types that the model placed in. So you could be in a burrow and remain relatively stable and cool. You could be underneath this vegetation structure and at different times of day, that would be, you know, that would experience a very wide range of temperatures. You could be out in the open getting as hot as you want, right?

And so that heterogeneity seems very likely to play a role in, you know, what habitat is suitable for these, for these turtles, right? Don't just want to be really, really hot all the time. You need some sort of refugia. It's, you know, Arkansas, you know, it's right on the great plains. It gets up into, you know, 105 during the day and the summer and it gets relatively chilly at night. You want a burrow to get into. So that homogenous thermal environment that we saw in the degraded prairie, I think is probably a big limiting factor in where these turtles can live. And then the forest of the canopy area, I'm assuming probably just doesn't get quite hot enough for those ornates in a lot of cases. And so we found that a lot of interesting differences, both among our larger kind of land use types and among my habitat types within those different land use types. Okay. And then we also looked at a total evaporative water loss rates for both three-toed box turtles and ornate box turtles.

And this essentially just taking a bunch of box turtles, putting in them in an environmental chamber in the lab with set temperature and humidity conditions and monitoring evaporative water loss. So monitoring the change in mass over time, how much water, how much water mass, how much water mass are they losing? And if they poop, you've got to throw that trial out and start over. Right. And so it's quitely managed. But that allows you to kind of look at how water loss might differ between the two species. And you would expect that to go into what limits those three toads from moving out of the forested section. Or is it too hot primarily in the in the prairie sections for them to really regulate and to persist? We did find the evaporative water loss rates were considerably higher in those three-toed box turtles.

They lost water at a faster rate than Ornates did. So Orn-Ats better able to conserve water under adverse temperature conditions, so probably better able to persist out in those open canopy habitats. And yeah, it was interesting. And like I said, you do see some hybridization between them. you see quite a bit of overlap. And we have a couple of prairie sites, not this one in particular, but we have another prairie site where three toads have actually moved in quite a bit.

But that site is much wetter. I think having a lot of ephemeral wetlands and probably deeper burrows are in there. And there is a little bit of like willow canopy cover associated with some of those wetlands. I think that being, that site being wetter allows those three toads to move in. and persist in that particular prairie habitat. So I think there are all these little kind of mitigating features that can allow them to move in, but in that particular site where this dryer is probably a decent bit hotter, a little less canopy cover out in the prairie, they weren't able to move out.

Cool. That was pretty interesting. Yeah, yeah. That's neat to piece that together and figure, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's fun. Ben Stratton is the, we have a graduate student right now who's tracking a ton of those three-toed box turtles in that prairie that I, that wetter prairie that I just mentioned.

There are some solar, a couple of small solar installations that neighbor that prairie and turtles will move in and out of the solar installations in and out into the prairie, into the solar installations. A couple of years ago, I got a female nesting on the fence line of one of the solar installations. So he's looking at how those turtles are using both that wet prairie and the solar sites, which should be pretty interesting. He's in the process of tracking him now. Now, are these solar sites? How large are they? Are they just kind of solar panels, rows of solar panels? Is that what, that's what I'm picturing when you're? These two are

relatively small. These are, oh, they're probably less combined. So this prairie is is relatively small, too. This is kind of our like pet site for the Wilson Lab. J.D.'s been monitoring the snake populations there for over 10 years now. Okay. With Mark Recapture. Like, yeah, I've caught thousands and thousands of snakes there. I love that spot. But it's only like a 40 acre little prairie.

It was just a mitigation project that the city did after they put in a wastewater treatment facility. Okay. So these solar sites are probably only, I don't know, 20 acres total, something like that. They're relatively small. They're not the big utility scale sites. Right. You'll see where it's, you know, a 300, 400 megawatt installation. Right.

Just, you know, a couple thousand acres going out for forever. Yeah. But, like, you see those in Vegas area and they're having issues with like desert tortoises and other wildlife. It kind of gets fried when they get too close to there. It just gets way too hot. The tortoises are the kind of problem species that everybody's locked in on them and kind of pronghorn movement out west. How the fencing can cause problems for angular movement is, yeah.

But we've actually gotten quite a bit into solar wildlife work in the last three years now. It's been really interesting. And we've found that depending on the management, a lot of species, particularly, HIRPS, a lot of species seem to do just fine and seem to use those sites readily. We found tons of, if there's water in there, then you get amphibian breeding within the, within the solar sites and, you know, all the other aquatics that come with that. In that Grand Prairie region down in southeast Arkansas, we have a large utility scale solar site. I forget exactly how big that one is, but it's a bigger site.

and we got a prairie king snake down there which was one of the i think there was one found in 2020 but other than that that's the i guess the second prairie king snake found in that section of the state in the last 30 years wow they can they can support some species it's been really interesting that's cool yeah it's i mean are they i guess are they kind of more clear-cut so it's just the the solar panels that are creating the you know know, habit that, I guess, for lack of a better word. So there's been a lot of development in the management of them over the last, even within the last 10 years.

Historically, you saw a lot of gravel sites. Just they'd jump a bunch of gravel. That's expensive. It's annoying for maintenance. Yeah. It's just when you remove panels and want to redo something or restore it to whatever after your lease ends, it's just a pain in the butt. So there's been a big move towards veg substrate.

And that's why now you're seeing a lot of sites that are grazed or where people are looking into agrovoltaics, where they're looking for agricultural production in the working kind of installations. But you also see what people are calling ecovoltaics, where you'll see some native seeding for kind of lower level like prairie grasses and our vicious vegetation. And you'll see, you know, pollinator patches planted kind of around the perimeter or an open field. within the installations. So there's a move towards management that encourages biodiversity. We don't actually work in many of those eco-voltaic sites. We primarily work in sites that are mowed, that often have turf grasses. You can occasionally see some heavy herbicide use.

And even in those, like I said, if there's water, then a lot of stuff will still use them. or if the mowing is relatively infrequent. So if you've got some disturbance but not a whole lot, then you'll still see a lot of herbs using them. We see a lot of mammal activity. There, you know, anything can, unless it's, you know, unless it's hog exclusion fencing, then anything can dig in there other than, you know,

other than a deer. Yeah. Possums, armadillas, foxes, coyotes. We see all kinds of turkeys. We see all kinds of bobcats. tons of them. So it's been really interesting. I think, and I think there's a lot of potential to make slight adjustments to management that could have huge biodiversity benefits. I don't think you have to make big changes in the management style to see big improvements in the diversity.

Right. That's able to persist in there. So I think, I think we're working on a lot of different, we have a lot of papers in progress right now. that should be coming out relatively soon, but I think there's a lot of potential for sites to support real, real kind of real biodiversity that you would see in, in conservation managed properties nearby. I don't see any reason why a lot of species can't persist in there, which has been very exciting to kind of come to that realization.

Yeah. Oh, that's really exciting to hear. I mean, I'm very glad that it's not like a big problem. that's going to give a black eye to solar because, I mean, what a renewable energy is great. And they are continuing to improve and, you know, make sure that that's not damaging to wildlife. And that's great. Yeah. And for sharing that.

It seems like in a lot of cases, the cheaper option is to go for the kind of, you know, low impact management than actually is also beneficial for biodiversity. So it's really in a lot of cases. Yeah. We have some kind of scrubland sites out west that they hardly ever get moan because it's arid scrubland. And we see tons of diversity in there. Relative to the local kind of species pool, we see great diversity. And they put the panels in and they essentially leave it alone. Yeah.

So it's been really cool to see. That's great. Great news. Very cool. Right, I suppose, you know, it's more the generalist species, or I'd imagine it's kind of the generalist species, right, that'll do well in that environment. The thing that jumps to mind or the part that was kind of the trauma of North Florida, North Central Florida was a particular spot that, I guess, used to be beautiful and used to readily, you know, readily, whatever that means, produce indigo snakes and things. The whole western side of the road just really hit really hard, associated with, I think, the clearing end to then install that stuff.

Although I do wonder, especially with something like an Indigo, and certainly open for the feedback, once that's installed, once that's in place, so other than the mechanical sort of destruction on the front end, what would that look like relative to sort of that open canopy, or is there enough open access airspace to... This is something I think about a lot, and I might have to... Yeah, you might have to cut the next 20 seconds, but we have a South Texas site and we get some absolutely massive Texas Indigo's cruising through that installation. There, it's so we have a camera set up right here. I don't have a bucket up here.

We have these game cameras that set them in a bucket facing down along a drift fence and stuff runs through. And we just get some absolute hogs of Texas Indigo's cruising through those. It's awesome. And huge bull snakes, too. It's really fun. But Florida, you know, the southeastern end it goes, I think are certainly probably a little more sensitive for whatever reason. For whatever reason. I don't know what it is about these big southeastern open canopy associated snakes, but they seem particularly sensitive relative to their western counterparts.

But I think a lot about this because, you know, to an extent, depending on the on the habitat type, if you can recreate the understory vegetation and lower midstory, then you're recreating the most important parts of the habitat to an extent. You're still going to have some canopy cover, you know, with the panels. That's obviously not natural canopy cover. But you can have, you can have wetland features in there. You can have ephemeral wetlands that support amphibian breeding and, you know, permanent aquatic associates. You can have some topographical features in there.

They don't necessarily, they don't, they typically don't grade to install everything. So you can have some topography in there. So I think in a lot of cases now, this certainly doesn't apply to everything. There are going to be some species that just do not fit in a solar landscape. and obviously need to be accounted for. And you don't need to be putting in an installation in the area where, you know, it's a species of conservation concern and you'd be, you know, kind of displacing them. That obviously shouldn't be something that happens.

But I think in a lot of cases, these sites can provide the necessary structure and conditions to support a lot of species. And I personally don't think there's a particular reason why, Indigo's couldn't be cruising around, eating racers and coach whips in a solar installation in central Florida. So I don't think there's a particular reason why you couldn't have some of these species of conservation concern using these sites. And we've seen a handful of them in sites that we already have, and we're just adding more sites now. But we'll see. I'd love to get into more of those central Florida sites and see what's going. on. Right. Yeah. Seems like it'd be, you know, definitely a negative impact on the front end,

but once it's established, it may not be so dramatic in the long run. And, you know, I'm, I don't want to, yeah, I certainly don't want to say that solar should just go in wherever anytime. But I think typically you do see, you see it going into already disturbed landscapes. Sure. You see it going into, you know, in South Georgia. Georgia, you see it going into an old peanut field that somebody doesn't want to work anymore, so they lease it out to the power company, and it's going to revert to them in 30 years or whatever. Right. You're typically not seeing it go in in pristine habitat where it'd be a huge concern.

Now, could that peanut farm have been converted into, you know, a restoration project? Sure, yeah. You know, that's the, it's the financial reality of it, I guess. that balance. Yeah. That's tricky. Yeah. When it's private land and, you know, yeah.

Yeah. Sometimes that's the best you can expect is if solar is good for them and, you know, yeah. And I certainly, I certainly do see, you know, that I, in, I don't see any reason why a solar installation going in over an old, you know, an old soybean row crop field. couldn't be higher quality habitat as a solar installation than a pro crop. Right, right, yeah. The lesser of two evils or, you know, but yeah, better than it was before. Yeah, in terms of habitat quality for wildlife, I think so.

I think it can be a step in a more productive direction for biodiversity. Right. That's the way to say that without sounding mean to agriculture. Right. Yeah. I mean, yeah, we see there's some species that, that just do okay, you know, with certain types of agriculture and others that definitely don't, you know, and just disappear from the area. So, you know, I guess it's got to be a kind of give and take.

We've got to feed people and that, you know, that's important too. Yeah, I can't say too much bad about aga. My whole family will get mad of me. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. And there was one more paper I wanted to touch on before we get into a little bit of extra herping specific states and things. There is a paper on sort of differential capture rates associated with trapping. Talk about that a little bit. That'd be great. Yeah.

So this is, I unfortunately did not get to do any of the field work for this project. This was all, this was an old data set that JD and Chris Wennie that they picked up when they were working at SREL as students at UGA. So this data is probably from like, I don't know, maybe like 2009 or something. Was it? Oh, no, 2005. Yeah. So JD sat on this for a while until he threw it at me and said, right, you know, run the

analyses and write this up. Let's see what we got. Yeah. And the idea was, you know, we're always thinking about methodological questions and, you know, we do quite a bit of aquatic snake trapping. mainly using this little commercial minnow traps that, you know, you can find online. So nothing, nothing too fancy. But, you know, you obviously wonder easy, you know, it's easy for snakes to get in.

And it's certainly not impossible for them to get out. You obviously wonder what escape rates are like and how many snakes are losing in between, you know, how many snakes go in after you said it and then get back out before you go check it the next morning. and trying to quantify that. And so what JD and Chris did was go out and catch a bunch of really cool snakes. And then after processing them, you know, taking all their measurements, get sex, size, obviously I'd DM to species. Go catch all those guys and then stick them back in the trap, reset the trap, and then go check the next day to see who it escaped. And so I worked up that data set.

after they got to do all the fun stuff 20 years ago, to look at how escape rates varied among the species, among species, between sexes and by size within species. I've got to actually re-familiarize myself real quick with a couple of these figures. So pardon me real quick. But yeah, so is it still leoditis or did they change it back to seminatrix? I don't remember. The swamp snake, a Bainted water snake, were the two species we used here.

And we had a pretty good size range from juveniles all the way up to large adult females. And looking at escape rates, both between those two species and sorted by size. And what we saw was that swamp snakes escaped at a much higher rate, regardless of size. And I'm assuming that's primarily, the reason we think that's probably happening is primarily foraging mode, where swamp snakes are kind of probing under the water.

They're down below the surface, probing around, probing around, doing a lot of poking, looking for prey, that kind of thing, looking for little holes, looking in crevices, all that kind of thing, where I think water snake, neurodia typically are kind of more one visual and kind of spotting and swimming directly to a to a location something like that they're probably less probing in terms of their movement style and their

forging style and so in the process of that these leodite's i think probing probing probing around the trap happen upon the the entrance exit hole and are able to to poke right out now you also have head morphology differences that are associated with those kind of behavioral differences where The swamp snakes have that sleek relatively small, the smaller head relative to their body size. So easier to fit back out cleanly when you do find the entrance. And they're typically just a little bit, even for the same SVL, they're typically a little bit skinnier than a neurotea of a similar SVL. And so you have this combination of morphological differences and behavioral differences that I think lead to differential. escape rates, which obviously is going to influence your understanding. If you're trying to model

abundance or occupancy, that's obviously going to shift your inference there because there's not a true change in the number of snakes living in that well. And it's just a difference in how many of those snakes you catch escape or never find them. And so, you know, there are so many problems with our understanding or so many gaps in our understanding of especially like juvenile snake life history characteristics what are what's the survival of juvenile snakes we don't have a good grasp on that for so many species and the kind of size relationships that we see here where smaller snakes are escaping at a higher rate adds one tiny piece to that puzzle you know we it shows part of why there's such a gap they're really hard to find and then once you do find them

apparently sometimes they'll just get right back out of your trap. So it was a fun analysis to do. I wish I'd been out there catching these snakes, but it's a fun analysis to do, and it, I think, provided an interesting insight into our understanding, or where we kind of misunderstand some things about abundance estimation of snakes like these. And our understanding of their demographics, given how things vary by sex and size too.

So it was fun. You know, J.D. always talks about how they used to go. You know, they'd be checking traps and there's a rainbow snake and this trap had 15 siminatrix in it and all this cool stuff. Didn't get to do any of that, but on the analysis, so that's fine. That's cool. And did, was there any incidents of snakes leaving the trap and then getting back in the trap?

Or did they kind of figure out and avoid the traps? Do they know? So they definitely exhibit trap responses. But in a lot of cases you see, and we didn't particularly get into this, I don't know if there was one, I don't think there was a case where they, well, how would they know? I guess it was a mark recapture or something, you know, well, so they did have mark recapture data.

So we knew who all these snakes were. But you do see a lot of cases of trap happiness or trap shyness, depending on the species. And you see a trap happiness, with especially with a lot of rodeo where they realized, oh, this trap is going to be full of tadpoles. I can get in there and get a free meal.

And then this guy is going to, you know, stretch me out and measure me and all, whatever. But you're going to go back home. And then you just go back in. Yeah. Yeah.

We had that site I mentioned where we've been doing snake mark recapture for a long time outside of Fayetteville. There were a lot of, There were a handful of specific female neurotea where I knew she was going to be under that coverboard that day. And I knew she was going to be in that trap that night. And like clockwork, there she is. And she's full of tadpoles or a couple of sunfish and fat and happy. And I'm going to see her again in a week.

So there is really interesting trap happiness, trap shyness behavior in there. And, you know, that's something you see a lot in turtles too. Right. these interesting behaviors that kind of skew our understanding of or skew, you know, what's what's happening in our abundance estimation processes. Yeah, I thought that was a funny term, the trap happiness. You know, it's not something you expect initially. And then once you think about it, like they're not as dumb as, you know,

a lot of people assume they are. And you guys know that. Yeah. Dealing with snakes all the time. They know what's going on. And then if they know they can get a free meal, they'll be pretty polite. a lot of the time. Right. That's, I think a lot of the cases of the copper or the cotton mouth that chased people was probably trying to get a free meal, you know, looking for a fish or something.

Oh, I cannot stand the chased by a cotton mouth. Right. Yeah. Especially, you know, you get that all the time in the southeast. Yeah. Everybody wants to tell you all, every time they got chased by a cotton mouth and had to blow its head off. Right. Yeah. I was disappointed when I went to Florida and, you know, they just ran away from me like any normal snake would. You expect to form up into a megatron of cotton mouth. Is it a lonesome dove?

You expect that big breeding ball to come after you. Yeah. Completely concerned. Man, the media has really done snakes a disservice, you know, especially back in the 80s and 90s, you know. I really like Larry McMurtry's writing, but that scene in Lonesome Dove has always pissed me off. Right. That's good stuff.

Absolutely. Well, and it's just, you know, fascinating that much more conjecture. Certainly when we're in the field particularly not finding things, detectability generally is always on our mind. Yeah, for sure. Yep. Yeah. And I mean, it would be, I guess, I guess maybe that's cheating if you're setting traps to Herp. Well, you know, I get it for studies. If I'm doing it professionally, then I feel okay about it.

Yeah, yeah, of course. I'm just saying it's probably illegal for me to go out and set a trap for, you know, snakes or something, at least in some areas. But I don't know. Can we go back to your, I was looking at your INAT and it looks like you've been some really cool places. Oh, yeah, whatever you guys want to talk about. Yeah, so it looks like you've been one of my favorite places, Australia, of course. looks like maybe you had a meeting in Sydney and got out to do a little looking around. We had we had world herb Congress in um octago new zealand um and yeah okay we were there in

was it January we were there for new years in 2020 2019 2020 so it was right after those crazy wildfires and I guess some of them were still going on maybe okay um but we'd rent it we were so jazzed it was me in a lab meet jose i was a Oh, yeah. And we were so excited that we get there and so much is closed off or just fried to a crisp. It was a huge bar. Oh, we still got, we still saw some cool, you know, lace monitors and a couple of weeks. Right.

I saw Cougaburro, so I was really happy about it. Yeah. Looks like he's not some cool stuff in New Zealand, too. That's, yeah, another, another place I love. I got to do a loop around the South Island with a couple of my cousins. And, you know, we just did a trip out there. but oh what a beautiful place yeah yeah i'd really like to get back i'd really like to get back i i keep talking to my grad school buddies about it we got to do a herb trip to australia yeah that's you know

0.001 percent of the good things it has to offer right yeah and i mean i've been going i've i've been what nine times or 10 times somewhere on there and i still have a lot on my list that I need to go find. Yeah, I read that recent Rick Shine book where he's talking about sampling for the, for file snakes. Yeah. Just getting him in there and tossing them up on the shore. Yeah.

That was great. Right. Yeah, that would be neat to do a, you know, sabbatical or something out there, do some different researcher out in Australia. Very cool. Yeah. And then Georgia, the other Georgia. the other Georgia

was a other conference or no that was just a fun a couple of my friends were going and they said hey you want to come along not not herbers not outdoorsy people at all actually yeah so it was kind of me just getting out and running out

to flip a rock anytime I could any time I could away from the group I'd just run away and try and find something real quick yeah so it wasn't super productive from a herb perspective but it was gorgeous I was really hoping for one of the, you know, Montane vipers that they have there. They have a piece of species that just seem absolutely gorgeous.

I didn't have luck with that, but I would definitely recommend going if you have the chance. It was great. You got a ring-headed dwarf snake. I don't think I've got that's beautiful. I got it. I also got a Caucasian rat snake that I didn't get a picture. That was a good one. And, yeah, Greek tortoise, which, I mean, I guess there are a dozen, depending on where you are.

It's still fun to find a tortoise, yeah. Any tortoise. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. That's cool. Nice. And then plenty is... What species is the Caucasian ratsink?

Huh? What species is the Caucasian ratsnick? No. I can look it up real quick. Oh, it is Zemanic. Yeah. Zemanis. Oh, and Akray.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. No, yeah, those are a road. No, it was an A-O-R. Okay. just a lucky one. But she was real cute.

It was relatively small as a juvenile, I assume. And that Egyptian boulcher, that's a cool spot too. I'd love to see one of those. That was so cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that was a really fun trip. I would definitely recommend it if you get the chance.

That was when I was, yeah, I was relatively young when I did that. Drink a ton of wine and then go run around the mountains. Barely able to speak a tiny bit of Russian. nobody can understand what I'm saying. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah, most of my experience, I've barely touched the out west where you guys are. I'm primarily southeast.

Right. Yeah, and I haven't been out to that area. You know, so it's, yeah, it's cool to see, see, hear about stuff. So I don't know what's your favorite thing to go after or see or? Oh, I mean, my, I'm, I'm, Very partial to pygmies because I, you know, that was the first thing I worked on. But in the last, you know, five, six, seven years, I've really become a lamp repelptus guy. Okay.

You know, so many people are because they're just, they're adorable. There's, you know, some species are absolutely gorgeous. They've just got good personalities. They're really interesting ecologically, you know. Right. They've got it all. So. Yeah.

What species kind of tops your list? Oh, I mean, it's just because of where I'm from, I think short tails are hard to beat. I don't know if you count them as a lamp or peltis, but, you know, if they're lumped in right now, I'll count them. Short tails are hard to beat. They're just so weird looking. They're so cool ecologically. You know, anybody who's kind of making their living off of Tantilla and Florida warmline. I got to respect that.

So they're a great one. Pretty hard to find though, right? We saw one dead on the road, unfortunately. But yeah, they were coming up. Do you, any thoughts around? It seems like at least on I now, right, the records are kind of concentrated in the winter. We weren't there, I would say, strictly speaking, in the winter.

So if you're cruising, yeah, cruise in October, November is a really good time. And I mean, you know, it's Florida. So it's going to be productive at that period. Like, you know, one of the easiest times to go get a big diamond back is in December because they'll be hanging outside a gopher tortoiseboro. Just getting some sun. So, yeah, so October, November cruising, kind of mid-morning is, is the way for short tails. And they're very patchy, you know.

Their populations are very patchily distributed. So you just got to kind of find the spot and hit it at the right time. But they're a really cool one. I'm old kings. I'm excited to get more into North Carolina, mole kings this year once things ramp up. It might actually be warm enough this weekend. I'm going to try and go out down to the sandhills around Fayetteville, North Carolina,

right around there probably Saturday morning. So, yeah, any lamp or peltas, I mean, It's tough to beat a big indigo, you know, as a Floridian. A lot of my opinions are kind of, you know, shaped by growing up down there. Right. But it's- Being in North Carolina now and into pygmies, have you gone out east? Oh, yeah, over for the red pigs.

Yeah, I've got a little, I've only been, uh, I've spent a decent amount of time over there. I've gotten a couple of red pigs and they are really fun. you know, personality-wise, they feel about the same as a Florida or Georgia, Louisiana, whatever. But they are, yeah, those coastal red pigs are gorgeous. But North Carolina, so far, I've really enjoyed the Lampropeltus, and I need to, I need to hit Simas hard here this spring. I really would like to hike one up in North Carolina. I haven't gotten a side it's probably been five or six years since I've gotten a simus and I was back in Florida so I need to fill out my my North Carolina list yeah yeah I may have mentioned it when we

were off there but yeah last last year I had hiked up a sinus in Florida and it's such a cool it's a great feel I guess yeah I've also I've also really enjoyed I was itching for some fieldwork last year and volunteered with a graduate student at NC State, you know, right here in Raleigh. She was going to a spotted turtle project in Wake County, which is where Rale is. So it's kind of like urban spotted turtle populations. And it's hard not to fall in love with spotted turtles when you're dealing with. They are just adorable. Yeah. So they've, they've really risen up my list lately. That's cool. Yeah. And then to ask, on the red pygmies in terms of that.

Is that sort of early fall kind of collapse of predatory, September, October? Yeah, I don't, I think, I mean, I've had maybe not necessarily with them. When I've gotten them, it's been late summer. And I don't know what the best time for them over on the coast is. I've just kind of been, I've just kind of gone for them

when we've been over there, you know, go over for the beach and stay for a few days and I'll sneak out to go do a little herpin. But I mean, in my experience, pygmies are, in Florida at least, it's whenever. Even I've gotten them on, you know, middle of summer, hottest day under a log in the middle of some sandhill that that snake's got to be burning up, but she's out there. So I don't, I don't have a great feel for the best time for those coastal, coastal North Carolina and pygmies, but I would guess that late summer, early fall would be pretty productive.

And are those cruising them, flipping them? Is that out like that? Hike them up pretty readily in some spots. I know some people have a lot of good luck cruising. And it depends, I think, where you are. Some of those areas are not great for cruising and you can get out hike pretty well and you'll get them like along some canals or along a little wetland they'll be hanging out waiting for frogs so i i think it depends on the exact spot you're in like some of the areas up north of the pamlico river it's not cruising isn't super accessible but if you get out and hike around a little bit so it's all right but we'll have pretty good luck Very cool.

Well, and you also have been to a place that Justin and I have spent just a little bit of time, but it felt like a lot because it's pretty well. And I understand maybe your experience there was not too dissimilar. The palencio's down in the next town. Yeah, I'm guessing you guys heard plenty about that if you had Andy on already. Yeah. Yeah. So I was just kind of, I was just kind of along as a field hand. which was really fun.

And Larry Camis, who's one of the other PIs on that project, obscurest project, project, project. He was one of the other PIs on that. He's one of my good friends from grad school. And they wanted people and I'm technically people. So I got to go out and help them with that, which was a lot of fun. But it is brutal herpin out there. Brutal hiking, brutal herping.

And when I was there in 2024, it was not productive. So, yeah, I mean, it had gotten wrecked by fires repeatedly, and 20 to 24 was still pretty dang dry. I think there was more rain this year, or this last year. Most of the one we were there. Yeah. Yeah. We got a ton of rain. It is a really cool area.

I'm planning to go back with them this year and hopefully have a little more success. But it is very cool, and they're doing some really interesting work down there. How did it compare with the Sierra San Luis? The Sierra San Luis was so much nicer to walk around. It was unbelievable. Yeah, it was still really dry down there. We did get a few obscures and a few other things, but it was still very dry, so it wasn't super productive. But it hadn't been burnt to a crisp, so it was a little prettier and a little more pleasant to walk around.

It was really cool, and I'm hoping to get to go back there too. Yeah. But yeah, I have not hit. I've done, that was probably my third Sky Islands area trip. So I haven't done a ton down there. It's an incredible, yeah. Yeah. I understand why every single Herper loves it.

Yeah. Do you do much in like the Chirikawa's or any other mountain ranges out there? I did. I've done one trip to the Chirikawa's. when I went to a meeting at the desert museum a few years back, a bunch of years back, and got a few days there. We did a big road trip from where we were working in Louisiana over, big road trip through Texas and up to the Chiracawas and did that.

But not a ton. No, I'm really, really haven't done a whole lot in the Southwest. That's one of my big areas of weakness. Yeah. Or many. Yeah, I'm a desert rat, so that's just one of my favorite spots for sure. Yeah. I try to talk, try to talk girlfriend into it.

She likes the beach. Yeah. Yeah, sky islands are kind of a hard sell most of the time. Right. Yeah. Very cool. Well, I do have, I did steal from our new Haring the Herper's question list, a couple that I think maybe are interesting from sort of a methodological perspective. When you're out hiking,

whether be in Louisiana or the Palencia's or wherever it may be, are you kind of go fast, hike slow, checking every underneath everything, or you kind of busting through the habitat seeing what you can spook out? If it's for a formal survey, then I usually try and move pretty quick and really focus on what seems like the prime microhabitats spots. Just try and be as efficient as possible. At this point, when I'm just out for fun, I move at a much more relaxed pace and I'll just kind of stop and look at a plant or some bugs or something and I'll have a dip net and mess around and look at some fish. So it's, yeah, so it's very different between formal surveys and recreational harpen.

And also I'm going to look at somebody who was really focused and gets annoyed with me for stopping to look at a little beetle. Do you find that you're more successful with one or the other, or it just kind of depends? I think I think the more focused formal surveys are definitely more productive on a like per unit time basis just because I'm covering more ground and I'm more focused on specific. specific habitat features and that kind of thing. And generally just more locked in. So I think it definitely is more productive, but, you know,

I like to relax when I'm out there walking. Right. Right. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. So it varies a lot. And last one. Do you think, have you noticed that lunar cycles impact your catch rate for Herps. Are we talking cruising specifically? Probably mostly, right?

Yeah. I suppose a night hike maybe you get out, but yeah, probably cruising. Yeah, and, you know, species by species is the annoying answer. Because, you know, some things, like, I haven't had the good luck to get one, but, you know, I was talking to a friend the other day. who is locked in on South Florida moleking snakes. And, you know, he's got it dialed into the exact kind of, you know, like weather pattern at the exact time of year and the exact time of the lunar cycle

that you want to hit when you're cruising. And it's like, all right, you've got it. So I think it is species by species to a certain extent. But, yeah, generally I would say so. I've gotten really lazy about cruising at this point and we'll just kind of go out when the mood hits. I guess that's what I'm figuring out while talking to you guys right now. I've gotten really lazy in my record. I'm not maximizing my capture rates and just kind of go out when I feel like it would be nice

to ride around and stop and, you know, check a creek or something like that. Yeah. So I've really fallen down on the job, I guess. I don't know. Well, that's got to be analogous to the, you know, herp keeper that works at a zoo and then comes home and takes care of his collection at home. You know, it's like, yeah, kind of when your job is to go herp, and then, you know, when you do to, you know,

you have time to go herp on your own, it's probably less driven. And yeah. Yeah, the nice thing is that even at the more relaxed pace, it never gets old. It's always enjoyable. It hasn't, I haven't fried out on it or anything. Oh, that's good. It's always still a really, you know, a really nice experience. experience.

Yeah. I enjoy. I mean, obviously my drive is much higher on the front end of a trip versus, you know, after you've been just slogging for a week and you're like, okay, yeah.

Sit on the bed of the truck and have a beer before you go, make one last run. Yeah. Right. Yeah. You're walking a little slower. Yeah. Just kind of enjoying everything.

Yeah. But, yeah, that's true. Yeah. And I, you know, I think that happened.

I guess it just depends on the person because I know a lot of guys who, once they've really seen what there is to see, they start to slow down a lot. And, you know, I have a lot of friends who have, you just start getting into plants and get into really into plant diversity because you kind of never run out of different things to see or get really into inverts. And then some guys like JD, my boss, he's seen everything, but he's still locked in no matter what the situation is. if you're out herping, you better bust and ask as he's going. Yeah, that's cool.

So I guess it varies a lot person to person too. For sure. Yeah. I kind of got into birding, which you know, is nice around here during the cold months where there's, you know, nothing, no herps to see. I might as well see the, you know, feathered

herbs. But, yeah. I get a lot of crap from Rob about that one on our trip. stop, stop, stop. What, what? There's a bird. Oh, come on.

Bird. Yeah. Bird for birds are a different breed, man. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I can't say that I'm one of those. Yeah, but hopefully I'll keep the primary focus on herbs. But I do enjoy a bird here and there for sure. Yeah.

Cool. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much, Ethan. This is great. Yeah. No, it's been a lot of fun. Yeah.

Yeah, that's great to have you on. We kind of like to end of the show, you know, talking about some of the cool things we've seen in herpetology, herpet culture, whatever. I guess I put out a shameless plug for myself. My and Nipper's field guide is coming out soon. So, you know, we're just putting the finishing touches on that, going through the final edits. And very happy to have that out. Our own Rob Stone has a number of photos. in the field guide. So that's exciting, you know, and a lot of friends and, uh, have contributed to that.

So we're very indebted to their, their kindness to allow us to include their wonderful photos in the field guide. But hopefully, uh, another month or so, and we'll, we'll have that done and out, uh, um, you can get it in time to go herb Utah. So, yeah, I'll be, I'll be looking for that. Yeah, should be fun. But, um, I, yeah, I think as far, um, um, I think as far, as other stuff, just the cool species that are being described, the different monitors that are coming out. I mean, there's some good stuff coming out. But add to my list, I got to get out and find more stuff now. That's one of my kind of personal goals is to see all the monitor lizards of Australia and all the pythons. I'm much closer on the pythons than I am with the monitors, especially since they've,

had like four or five new species come out in the last little bit so and more to come yeah it's pretty pretty good yeah how about you guys have anything that you've well got you excited in the literature or whatever um we've had a few really exciting kind of project developments that a couple of new projects get funded that i'm very excited about um yeah a lot of i don't I can't say too much right now, but a lot of stuff in South Georgia that we're going to be adding that I'm super psyched about. That means I get to actually do a little bit of fieldwork. It's mostly setting out cameras and recorders, but it's fieldwork.

I'll be out there camping for a couple of weeks. Nice. It'll be a lot of fun. And I'm really excited about some of the work that's going to be coming out of that DOE project that we mentioned, the solar project that we've essentially finished up. And there are some grad students at you, Arkansas, that have done a lot of great work on that. On pollinators, plants, birds, and herps. They're excellent grad students working on all of those.

And I'm really excited to see what they come up with. And then me and J.D. will be working up the bats and the terrestrial mammal part of that. And that should be hopefully coming out. A lot of that will be coming out relatively soon. Yeah. That would be fun. We'll keep an eye out. Where can people kind of follow your work? You cannot follow me anywhere, essentially.

All right. You can, I am on eye natural, but I just kind of post there whenever I remember to take a picture of something. Right. But you can find me actually at the Wilson. Let me look up the actual. It's WilsonLab.com. Wilson with two elves. That's where everybody hits true.

W-I-L-S-O-N. And that's where our. work shows up when JD remembers to update the website, which usually happens once a year. Right. So we're there. Other than that, I don't have any sort of presence. But when things come out, they show up there. Okay.

When we publish things. Yeah, it looks like you've got links to different articles on there, and that's great. Yeah. Very nice. A lot of people in the lab doing good work. Yeah. Well, yeah, again, thank you so much for coming on and talking about your research. Very fascinating and really cool findings. And yeah, I imagine our listeners will get a lot of this one. So, yeah, thanks for getting on. No, thanks for having me on. It was a lot of fun. Yeah. All right. And as always, we'll thank Eric and Owen and the NPR Network for hosting us. And we'll catch you again next time for Reptile Fight Club.