Reptile Fight Club - Grilling the Expert w/ Neahga Leonard (Cat Ba Langur Conservation)

Episode Date: August 22, 2026

In this episode, RFC - Grilling the Expert w/ Neahga Leonard (Cat Ba Langur Conservation)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/UCtrEaKcyN8KvC3pqaiYc0RQWebsite: https://mprnetwork.transistor.fm/

Welcome to Reptile Fight Club. Rob thinks he's taken over, but I don't know about that. Me and Jordan are just driving through West Texas. Looking for stuff. Found some cool stuff. But yeah. Say hello to the people. Hey people.

Yeah, we thought we'd have a quick fight. Oh, you got something? We're stopping. It's always nice to record these live in. live in the field episodes, even though it won't be a full episode, but we just had a... It'll be an app. Yeah. You just had a...

Anornatus, uh, docking. Oh, it's just... Oh, it's garbage. That does look like a snake, though, doesn't it? Oh, it's, yeah. So, yeah, not a snake, but we just had a eastern blacktail rattlesnake, so that was nice. A nice stop. Always good to see those.

we've seen two so far this trip A couple other goodies I guess we'll talk about that another time So Rob recorded an interview today On his own So I thought we'd throw something in there Just to throw on the front of the podcast So we're gonna debate

Which is better The Eastern, early western Blacktailed rattlesnake What say ye? Well if you've got to separate him I think it's probably got to be the Easterns It's hard to beat a platinum with a little bit of greenish hue, eastern. They're just absolutely amazing.

I like my herping. I really like the West. I don't know. Those mountain, the yellow mountain ones are hard to beat, though. Yeah, you get a lemon yellow one from the Pelancios, and that's really hard. Yeah. Yeah, that's a tough one, though, because I do love that platinum look to them. of the Eastern. They're just really nice looking.

I don't know. Toss up, coin flip, whatever. Okay, how about Eastern or Western blackheaded pythons? In captivity, I'd have to say the Easterns are better, but I certainly cannot wait to find my first Western. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I haven't seen a Western in the wild either, so I've seen a few Easterns, but in captivity, I only have Westerns, and they are beautiful. That was kind of what I was waiting for to give.

Blackheads was to find some Westerns and Ryan Young obliged. So I got Westerns in there, fantastic. Although they are a pain to get feeding. I guess the Easterns aren't walking the park either. Yeah, I don't know that they're very different that way. And there is something about the contrast in a beautiful Western, but there's tangerines and banana yellows and some of the colors that you get in the Easterns are hard to beat.

So the average Eastern compared to the average Western, for sure Western. Right. But if you're talking about some of the stuff that I'm producing, that's true. They are nice looking. Yeah. If you've been to Jason Hood's table, you know that stuff with Eastern blood can be amazing. Now that said, I don't know we have any pure Easterns in captivity, so we're talking about Eastern-ish versus Westerns. Right. And people have out across the Westerns as well, and I think some of those nice Eastern morphs, has Western blood in them. So yeah, that's probably what you're referring to there.

Yeah. Yeah, I'll take them both. But, yeah, I guess based on my purchase, I prefer Westerns, at least in captivity. But it is fun to find them regardless of where. So hopefully I get another chance of Western blood gets to find it. All right. Well, I think we've solved it. Back to you.

Under Reptile Bike Club. Rob Stone, the host for today's affair, Justin for the first time, and Reptile Fight Club history won't be joining us tonight. Maybe we'll put a little addendum from him on the end. Notes from the field. He's out in West Texas prior to the IHS trip that we're going on. I'm joined tonight by Nyaga Leonard, who's with the Cat Ba Langer Conservation Project in Kat-Bah Vietnam.

And this is a show I've been excited about for a long time. I want to hear about one of the places in the native home range of the rhino rat snake, my favorite species. So, yeah, let's get right to it. Niaga, how are you? Pretty good. Thank you. Good to meet you finally. Yeah, absolutely.

I'm planning this for a little while. Yeah, absolutely. I've been very excited about this, and, you know, it's difficult to arrange things halfway around the world, right? Yeah, yeah, it certainly is. Maybe I actually introduce myself a little bit and the work we're doing. My name is Niaga Leonard. I'm originally from California. I grew up out in the West Marin that moved around a lot.

So I grew up in an area, a lot of outdoor activity, and always very curious about what was going around me, what was in the grass, what was in the trees, climbing up things, digging into the mud, just kind of seeing what was happening. I came to Vietnam in 2014 to take over this project. This project was founded in the early 2000s. It's focused on Catba Island,

which is a mature karst limestone island in the northeastern section of Vietnam. A lot of people know this area from Halong Bay, which is one of these things. It kind of looks like it seems to the avatar, just water. You've got this bay stretched out with these vertical limestone pillars sticking up all over

with caps of vegetation and things and lots of black kites, which are like a, not an eagle, but sort of like a bird of prey like that flying all over the place. And quite a bit of wildlife, but usually small wild that's tucked away in a lot of marine life, although a lot of that's being overfished.

It also has a lot of tourism activity, which complicates the picture, and increasingly development to go along with that. Our project started because there's a primate that's endemic to the island called the Cat Malanga, Tachapacincus, Polysaphylus. They're only found on this one particular island, and the genetics suggest they've been in that area for a very, very long time,

possibly evolved there as a split off in the Francoise Lange group because they have a lot of adaptations that are specific to salt water tolerance. When our project started, there were only about 40 animals left, and this was recognized as obviously being a really important situation for the survival of the species. So our project got started after Clinton from Germany, and over the last 26 years, we've gone from 40 animals to the most recent count of 96 animals. So we've more than doubled the population during that time. We've seen the return of our natural behaviors because previously the groups were so small, there wasn't really a lot of the natural behavior still attacked.

and now we're seeing much more ranging, much more activities between the groups, group takeovers and fights and things like that, which sometimes a little bit problematic watching what's happening, but it's also part of the natural behavior and the kinds of behaviors we should be seeing. The work does not involve just the Langers, of course. If you're going to protect these species, you have to protect the habitat, and the environment that's in, and that includes the people as well. So we have anti-coaching team members who are community members

to go out in the forest and look for signs of hunting and trapping and activities, not focused on the primates, but focused on the reptiles, focused on the birds, focused on different kinds of plants, all the other things of it in the area. They also are our liaison into the communities because they have people who grew up in the area. A lot of them have done hunters themselves who have been given up hunting. So they're the people that know their neighbors and can talk the neighbors

in the way that we can't directly so much, or that the rangers themselves and the local police camp because the local police and rangers are really trusted because they're authority-faces. We also have very close work in relationship with the National Park in their rangers there. So we work with them on the more of the enforcement side of things, the monitoring, not just of the land grass, but of the other things as well. We do that with our own team, our community-based teams, and through the rangers as well, and provide materials and training for the rangers on top of that.

We do education programs and all the schools on the island. We've managed to get our environmental education curriculum as part of the core piece of the classes for the 6th and 7th grade and all the schools in the area. So now instead of having it be a separate project, they actually have a special workbook, which is incorporated directly into the main lessons. So this is really important because when you're setting up conservation goals, you're kind of setting a series of tiers of goals and sharing what time frame are we looking at? We're looking at the 1 or 2 year timeframe, or we're looking at the 30-year timeframe. and depending on what side of that you're looking at, you have to take different approaches. And education is one of those ones

is that you can't really show a lot of the facts right away other than metrics like how many students you taught and that sort of other thing. But what you can do is look at the long-term goal out and long-term education is one of the most important things. So we kind of mix and match the different levels of approaches looking at different timescales. So we have a small team, all of the Vietnamese except for myself,

and we work with the communities, we work with other Vietnamese agencies and inter-napped saleges as well. It keeps us pretty busy. And I should explain it with the langaus. Langer is a type of primate, leaf-eating primate. They're called Lutongs sometimes.

They range from India across over to Indonesia and into China. Many people are familiar with the myth of Hanna-Mand, the Indian mythology. Hanamon is a type of langer. He's the great langer. And the Lengers have, there's a bunch of different species at them. They all look very different. Some of them look like your classic monkey with really long arms or long tail.

others have looked very strange like the Red Shank Duke Langer which has a like it looks like a China Adolica when there's 1900s porcelan dolls of this very smooth face

and it's really really bright vibrant colors over its body doesn't even look real or the Tonkin Stebdoz monkey which is another type of Langer which has its really really big lips that looks like something out of a cartoon almost and these crazy colors are in the eyes

it looked like someone just smeared makeup all over of very odd-looking animals so Langer's cover a wide range of pretty normal-looking monkey these two these really, really strange-looking ways. So that's a brief overview for ourselves in our work. Yeah, absolutely. So a ton of jumping off points here.

I guess I would start by saying, did you come to this and motivated by wanting to work with primates? Or did you want to come to Vietnam, whatever the conservation will look like? I was actually looking for work in general, conservation work outside the U.S. My background's really mixed. I have an anthropology background with a geology minor in Glacier, work on that. I've worked in South America doing variety conservation projects with theirs, with overall kind of area assessments of things. I worked in Vermont on wildlife connectivity for passages that can fork in Clementine's adaptation, all that. A lot of my focus has really been

a larger landscaping community interaction. So when I was looking for work, two positions popped up. This one, and one in Cambodia that was working more to kind of more center, rescue center. And this one looked more interesting because it involved more of the things that I like, which is this large-scale landscape approach that takes into account not just the one particular species, but everything on the landscape. It's a more holistic approach and a lot of the people and politics side. And the truth of the matter of conservation is that when it comes to doing the actual work of conservation, it's a lot of politics. And everyone thinks, oh, it's about the plants and the animals, but it's really not. It's about people. It's about people's behaviors and how people behave and they act.

and the reasons why they make the decisions they do. And if you want to affect the conservation side, you have to have an understanding of that and have a way of, if not influencing that, then being involved in that process and getting people to rethink a little bit how they behave and what they do. And that takes place at the local levels up to political levels.

So this was interesting. It involved all these different things altogether. And I had background. I lived in China for a while, so this was not an untraming area to me. Okay, fair enough. So you've mentioned it several, So Catbaugh, a portion of it, right, is the National Park.

Yeah. How many people roughly live on the island? That's changed a lot since I've been there. So when I arrived on the island, there were about 14,000 people on Catbaugh and also on the adjacent island, which is kind of a stepstown of, I think, at here. And now that's up to 26,000 probably, something like that. The most of the island is National Park, the two-thirds of the island. probably the western side and the southern side is not national part. It's all within the virus of reserve there except for one of those sections that kept

about town. So there's supposed to be restrictions and what activities are able to be done, but in practice, it doesn't really play out that way. That has all changed around now because it was approved as a world heritage site, an extension of the Haland Bay World Heritage State, which has had a whole bunch of other complications, so don't want to get into too much to that's kind of a sensitive political topic. But the upshot of that was a huge amount more people come into the island as tourists,

That was part of the whole goal of that, which then, of course, led to more development to have infrastructure for the tourists, which would make more people come into work in an infrastructure for the tourist industry. So the number of people in the island has absolutely jumped enormously. When I got to this area, there were about 1.4 million tourists going per year, and now there's over 5 million tourists in the year. So it's heavily impacted. Wow. Okay. And the growth in the population, that's principally sort of infrastructure relative to the tourism and the park? Yes.

Yeah. And it complicates things because the people who lived in the island for a long time, of the island. And yes, they're hunting and poaching and doing things. But because they have this long-term relationship with the island, there were ways to talk to the people and everyone kind of knew who each other were. Now there's larger groups of people coming in. There's less of that.

And that complication is quite a bit. And also local people are selling off the land because the property of my country. of the ground up. So the people themselves often have less reason to be involved in what's happening around too. Are the people that are moving in principally from mainland Vietnam, like North Vietnam? They're from all over Vietnam. The tourism industry is huge. Vietnam is really focusing itself very heavily as a tourism forward country. That's one of the most popular tourism countries in the world right now. So people are coming from all over the country to where the current tourism hotspot is to work. Interesting. Okay.

What, at least in terms of the folks that were kind of the local population when you'd first come, what is the general attitude towards animals, reptiles, snakes? So for the most part, animals are considered to be something to be used. They're just going to a resource like anything else. There are people that have a greater appreciation for them, usually people who are much younger or older, who either have had a lot of experience and have seen changes. that they are part of the process of having those changes take place and have stopped and looked back at the difference between they were younger and the world's like now and currently have a greater appreciation for what they've lost and younger people who are still very, very interested.

But there's a big kind of age gap between, which doesn't really care. This is changing, fortunately. There's a lot of education about these issues. The younger people are growing up with more awareness of these things and they're seeing more of the loss around them, so they're being more involved and more curious about what the world's supposed to be like and how they can be part of making things better.

But it's a slow process, and it's going to take a long time. When it comes to Herpidol and Herbs particularly, and especially snakes, this standard response to a lot of South Asia is just pure. It doesn't matter what it is. If it's a snake, it's potentially dangerous, so be careful of it.

Which means that a lot of harmless animals get killed. There was a case a while back where there was a harmless little, Guernsey Bligga Guantianis the the gonsi cat snake

really long slender body it looks a little bit like a viper if you're not looking too closely but the heads much more rounded

and eat slugs and small insects and stuff like that but it looks like a viper so even the rangers like we have to kill it right now

remove it take it away but no they consider it poisonous so venomous so they get rid of it even though it's not venomous at all

and there's a lot of lack of education in these things so one of the things you've done a lot of with our approaching teams is one of the reasons we give them the cameras and things.

It is not only for the recording what's out there, but so we can discuss what they've seen and trying to get some education about what's actually, what the animal actually is, and what its behavior is actually like and what to look for, and which things be careful of, which things that you need to be less wary of,

that sort of the thing. We have the Tauan Sabu here, which is a little small viper. It looks a little bit like a battle snake without the battle. Very small viper, usually only in high area about 30, 40 centimeters long. brown with a

instead of having the a single black circle in the back it's kind of an offset brown circle like this or the spine relatively venomous people get bitten a lot by it because it is really taller to humans so it's one of the things that kind of furthers that fear of sex

sure right and I mean it's rare in the United States and Australia to have people mortality or morbidity associated with snake by it but it is in other parts of the world red it is a neglected tropical disease in the sense that it causes a significant substantial impact.

And is that kind of true within the context of people are killed effects from these bites? They're either in terms of mortality or losing fingers, things like that. Yeah. And our area, not so much, just because there's not as much interaction with the snakes. A lot of the snake interaction within Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia happens when the agricultural areas. And the island really has riddenal agriculture. So it's not really much of an issue for us that way. but yes, it is so a thing.

We know a few people who have the dog spit and things like that, but it's a relatively minor thing in our area. And there's always a funny thing to me about in the U.S. versus also in the world, who gets bitten and where they get bitten. Because in the U.S. it tends to be these younger people in their teens, the 20s are usually in the hand. And most of us in the world, it's people in the middle ages on their feet because they're outworking in their fields.

They're known not to go messing with the animals. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you hit on it a little bit there. I was curious to ask about the land use on Kappa or non-native plants, a part of subsistence. Is there subsistence agriculture? What does that look like? So there's, the agricultural system has been changing quite a bit. It's our karst landscape.

So there's really very little space for agriculture. So on the western side is a bit more flat. And in some of the valleys there where it's more filled in right along the coast, there some rice agriculture, but a very small amount. And as you go inland, there are some tree orchards, leachies, mandarin, mongans, things like that,

and a lot of banana orchards are seeds. Banana stuff tends to be more small-scale, like, at your house, type of thing. But there are some actual proper orchards of leachies and long-gams, and that sort of a thing. That's been shifted out now. There's some of the orchards are left, but they're not really active anymore, and some are now being changed over into

potentially resort areas and other types of activities. A big section of agriculture got bought up recently, not recently, but a few years ago, recently my standards, got up a few years ago by one of the local politicians and his friends, and who knows what the redact bombed plant was. So the agricultural system has been changing. Most of what's left is really small scale, like garden level, sometimes a bit more than garden level to sell the local market, that sort of a thing,

but it's not subsistence because people can buy the food with the 18-law, but it's shipped into the island. But it's not really for-profit, because it's not a big enough to be for profit. It's sort of in that intermediate stage, and it's only a few people doing it. Okay, interesting. It's a big reliance on seafood, obviously,

so a huge amount of seafood collection, both from mullus and things like that and actual fishing and net in if that sort of a thing. Is that sort of the traditional life way, sort of a seafood-based diet supplemented by? Yeah. And it's an island with very little space agriculture, so you kind of have to go that route.

And there's been people on the island for at least 6,000 years, probably longer. In the past, of course, what they were doing was living off whatever they could get from the forest and from the ocean. But the ocean is much, much easier to access on the island in the forest. So the forest, you go in the forest, and we did a survey that was only one and a half kilometers in length. It took us five hours because of just the up and down and up and down and up and down. It's relentless, constant fighting through the jungle, climbing up over jagged spires of rocks and have knife edges that are wobbling in your hands with pits underneath

in the spikes sticking out of them and binds all over stuff. Everything's getting tangled and vines and stairs and the trail already existed. It wasn't like foraging a new trail.

This is the existing trail that was known. So yeah, it gets really tangled if you go off in any area that's not maintained to the level of easy walkability. And even on the areas that are easy walkability, you're still doing a huge amount

in a very steep up and down. And in the summer especially, there's the temperature difference between the ground and the air, it means the condensation over all the rocks, and of course, that bridge algae. So you have this very, very slippery surface covering all the rocks on the steep slopes as well.

Yeah, absolutely. That sounds pretty treacherous. I mean, it has to limit some potential development, right, in terms of land preservation, unless they just leveled, you know, if you did some serious infrastructural changes. Yeah, it's really difficult to build in the area. There is an ongoing cable car project.

And one of the issues have had is finding stable footing to put the bilons of the cable course because the island is Swiss cheese. And you've got caves all over the place and you don't know where the caves are going to be. There's no really what to test for them first. I went to school at Santa Cruz, my undergrad is at Santa Cruz. And Santa Cruz is also a Lambson area. And one of the places they were building a foundation for the new buildings, they were porous cemented and they were cemented and they were porous cemented and they were poor of cemented. And they were poor and they realized they drilled through into some cave structure. and there is filling up the cave structure full of cement

to stop and redesign the land. Catba is a bit like that, where this area is this ancient limestone seafloor that's been heavily, heavily eroded. It's sort of like if you had a big wedding cake and after the party, there were just these kind of crumb sticking out all over the place. That's kind of what's left of the original

two or three kilometer deep of limestone that was in the area. But that means that during those three and a half, or 350 million years, that that has been limestone. Over this time there's been groundwater flowing back and forth through in different directions and tectonic forces bending it and folding it

and twisting it. So there's this huge network of open spaces all through it, which means that some things are perfectly solid looking, but what you may have is a 300-meter long cleft inside of it sealed off on the ends, and if you break through, maybe the whole sliver comes off and kills

off the rock and falls off. You don't know until you get into it. So people have been really careful in what they're getting into, because you just don't know what's underneath the limestone. limestone hydrology is crazy if you look at a hydrology map of limestone normally you're at least looking at the surface of the land

and go okay well here's the watershed the water's going to come over here is going to flow down this way it's going to go into the stream not with limestone rain over here mountain the rain goes under the mountain comes out this side and it flows over here and then goes into that tunnel and comes down and goes underneath another mountain comes out somewhere else it's totally nuts

in central Vietnam the rain and lao on the other side of the mountains and the rivers on the Vietnamese side rise there's a mountain range in the way yeah that's wild okay yeah it sounds like a very foreign place is that kind of maybe it's come to be home but that's got to be well and you mentioned Santa Cruz you know having that same

similar structure but that seems very foreign to me yeah not to the same degree at all it's a whole different kind of thing I mean Santa Cruz is basically rolling hills and all that redwoods on it and there's lives underneath with caves, but it's kind of like what you'd expect. It's not anything unusual. Here, and basically all through a lot of separate stations, you get the same level of kind of weirdness with the land zone landscape from the southern China all the way down to Indonesia, certain areas to a much greater degree

the other areas. But here is one of the extreme examples of it. And yeah, sometimes you look at it and go, this is, this is nuts. It looks like it's a landscape for a lot of the places. And you've got these giant boulders sitting on top of the cliffs. that are balancing on these little narrow crowns, little spines of rock, where if you're up on top of which you shouldn't be, but sometimes you have to be, sometimes they're so lightly balanced

that this 5-10 boulder will twist as you touch it to go by it. Because everything underneath is eroded away. Wow. That's wild. When we were chatting a little bit beforehand, and in the description you provided here, it sounds like there's an incredible number of,

amount of capacity for niche partitioning. Yes, very much so. So, karst landscapes, the matter where they are, whether the tropical or temperate, are concerned to be sort of like biodiversity of laboratories

because there's so much a difference in this little small microclimates that there is not just space for niche partitioning, but there's space for completely for kind of a long-term evolution and splitting off the species. So you can have within a very, very confined area a really, really high biodiversity

because you have so many different little potential places that people, our organisms can be. You see this a lot in the limestone lakes, which are all attached to the sea. And they have a lot of them here, but 70% of the world's seawater limestone lakes is found in this area and a bunch more found in Indonesia.

And one of the studies in Indonesia found that there's a little muscle called Raphrodontas, which is like two or three millimeters long, it's a tiny little thing. But in this area they're studying, they found that almost every one of these little limestone lakes had a different species of it in it. And that was just within a really

a pretty small area. So you have the potential in these areas where snails, for example, are a good case of this. We have almost every undisturbed cave in the region has at least one unique species of snail in it.

Now, these are microscopic snails. You have to sift the dirt and flood everything out and you can't allow apart, except that they would have a high part microscope. But all the disturbed caves, all of these are going down to this.

same two or three species. But every undisturbed caves, each time where researchers come out, they find new species in these weeks. Because they're tiny, the snails, they don't only move very far. Each cave has its own little unique system. And then the next came over, has another thing with a similar species, which out-competim if they move over because a new one moving over, wouldn't really have enough that's high in the population to take over. So everywhere

you go, you have these things. Mind you, something like snails, people don't really are not that interested, so there's no research for the available, no conservation funds available, but that's where the top level conservation comes down to protect all the other things that don't normally get attention.

We have a friend, a really interesting Dutch fellow, who specializes in orchids and snails, and he's been out of his area quite a bit, and he has now rocked up 200-something species in the area there, just of snails. That's wild.

Here, I was just imagining we talk about insular endomism. I didn't imagine this sort of microendomism, right, within... this environment. We can think of island biogeography, because it's literally island, but then within that, it's almost like a nested island is all the way down. Each little cave is its own little island.

Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah, it's really astounding. Now, mind you, the larger the animal, of course, the less and of that you tend to have, because the larger animal needs more space. Sure. We've got, it's unclear how many endemic frogs we have. We may have one or two endemic frogs. there's a possibility of one or two endemic skinks. We have quite a few skinks in the island. I don't think we have any endemic snakes.

We don't have any endemic birds. We have one endemic mammal. We have two endemic terrestrial crabs, freshwater crabs. Quite a few endemic plants. So there's a lot of endemics just in this one little area. Not to mention their snails and things like that. Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned the saltwater lakes.

Are they perpetually getting refreshed, or do you see weird sort of isolated salt lakes that have been cut off and any weirdness that arises from that? They're all connected underground. So some of them have an archway that collapsed and then open a little bays. Others have cave systems that feed them back and forth. What you do see, though, is seasonal variation,

quite a lot of that. Because the ones that are fed by underwater cave systems, They'll rise and fall with a tide. But during the rainy season, you'll have fresh water flowing in from the runoff. And you can have a layer of freshwater sitting on top of the salt water, and that'll lead to the come a brackish situation. So in certain situations, you can have changes back and forth with the species in the lakes that way. We actually think this is one of the things that you have, one of the languor behaviors is kind of unique.

With langaurs, you'll see them come down to the salt water and taste the salt water. They'll take their hand and dip it in or sip up a little bit of it or dip their tails in and suck the water off the tails. which is really weird because it's salt water and there's bad for animals. But we think what's actually going on is that since we're on the boats doing the surveys and monitoring, we're not on the lakes doing this. So we're only seeing the behavior on the salt water.

We're not seeing it on the lakes because we're not on the lakes. But I think what happens is the animals know that at certain times of the year, there's amends of drinkable water on top of the water. So they'll test that theoretically to see. Because on the lakes, you might have 30, 40 centimeters of water that is maybe not fresh water exactly, but it's drinkable water.

So I think that's what's going on. I think they're testing that, but we only see them testing out in the ocean because that's where we can get our boats. Yeah, that's really, that's amazing. That's a very cool idea. So inland, are there are any lakes that are solely freshwater?

There's one, which is up, kind of higher up in the middle of the island. Frog Lake is called your Arctic. and that has a, I wouldn't call a unique ecosystem in general, but it's a unique ecosystem for the island, where it's kind of this marshy area

with a type of willow that drill like where they were growing out of the pretty shallow water. The water is only maybe between 30 centimeters and a meter and a half deep, although there's some pits and pools in it. It's obviously a field of vegetation that runs off. And it's basically groundwater and rainwater is leaked up, it's storage in there.

And then that slowly seeps out elsewhere. We have lower down a really interesting transitional environment where you have some of the water flowing out of the hills that comes into what will eventually be a salt water lake or what was a salt water lake back about 5,000 years ago when the sea levels are a bit higher. And these are sort of like not quite tropical peat forests, but there's little tiny pockets of really rich, dense vegetation that has one end of it. mainly fresh water and the other end of brackish water when the sea comes into it with these huge, huge ficus trees overlooming everything with palm trees tucked away into them

and spider lilies, the tree craniums which are these big lily like things that are about chest high with these bright white flowers that come out of them, long spindly narrow petals on them. Lots of stick bugs and stuff flying around and that sort of a thing. And so those areas are really interesting. We've been transitional

between this freshwater ecosystem and the saltwater ecosystem. And there's the Kepa environment. There's very few of them left in Vietnam. A lot of those areas that are developed in this path because it was a big flat area. So cut down and turned into other types of things. So on Kappa, we have a couple spots left of those,

which are one of my favorite ecosystems. But we're trying to keep them kind of quiet because we don't want lots of people going to them and distribute them. Sure. You mentioned endemic plants. There's a famous epiphytic plant, right, that's endemic to the island. I know it's a lot of the record,

maybe a lot of people are coming to look at it and even amongst your team, I think he gets posted relatively frequently, right growing on the side of the limestone cars cliffs right by the sea. The Carita Drakia has a, it's really pretty little plant. It makes it, it's not quite like a dense cushion plant. It makes a larger type of small bush,

larger cushion type of thing. Has very soft, fuzzy leaves, very thick, fleshy stems, and these really long, two really purple flowers that are probably about as long as your thumb, where there's really vibrant purple color to them, which really interesting with them,

not only they end up to the air, they only grow on the limestone cliffs, usually in the sea areas, but the lenders eat them a lot during the dry season. And there's a question back and forth of why. The stems are really fleshy, they have a lot of water in them.

So a big portion that may be getting in the water from that. But another portion is that we know that certain climates will eat plants to irritate the stomach lining to force diarrhea to flush up parasites. And this is seen in cement primates in South America and in Africa. And one of the possibilities is that these very fuzzy leaves may serve a similar purpose, but we don't know which one it is, or maybe it's both of them. We don't know.

That's amazing too. Okay. A lot of animals self-medicate. This is a big field of study, how do animals self-medicate? What are they doing? How intentional is it? what types of things are they using, and that's a big portion of biomedical research, looking at what animals are doing and seeing what can we learn from animals, what are they doing.

Even ants do it. The wood ants in Europe will collect pine sap and interspersed pine sap all the way through their hives, and especially entryways because it acts as an antibacterial agent and helps to keep the hive we're safe as animals coming in and out, because it helps to sterilize a little bit as animals come in and out. So it's not just the primates, it's not just the mammals, it's not just birds, it's everything living is doing it to a certain degree or another. Sure. Yeah. It fits within sort of my paradigm of the environment, the universe, natural systems is, I call it the cosmic octopus, meaning, alluding to the fact that the complexity of nature exceeds our capacity to even understand it. can't even grasp the complexity of these systems.

Yeah, we get little windows into it. You can see pieces of a tug on a piece of it, but I call this, I think it as a network of knowledge, and I always call it increasingly promoter of your ignorance, because the more you learn, the more things you're exposed to that you don't know, and you realize there's so many things you have no clue on. If you don't know very much or unaware of very much, then everything you're around is pretty familiar.

But the more unusual things you get involved with, the more you go, wow, this is astounding. I have no idea what any of this is. Yeah, absolutely. Can you talk a little bit about the variation over the course of the year that you see on Kappa in terms of probably not that much change in light, but I bet that there's changes in cloud cover temperature, humidity, animal and prey abundance. So right now is a rainy season. So what the raining season here means is the north in the way is that you have days that are very hot and very very very hot. sunny because it's the summer of the tropics, so the sun's directly overhead in the northern section for us. So days can be actual temperature easily up to 36, 37 degrees centigrade with a real fuel of sometimes 45, 50 degrees, usually not that bad. Because we're on the coast

or get more wind blow it. Really high humidity is what triggers that real fuel temperature. Most of the time, not as much, most of the time, closer to 28 to 32 degrees, real temperature with a feels like temperature up in the mid-30s. It means that going outside, instantly, you're covered in the sweat. And trying to do anything at all is a really easy for someone like you to open. I do very cold clouds, so it's very easy for it overheat. When we get rain during the summer, it tends to be one of two kinds. It tends to be either little pockets of rain coming out of really dense clouds that are kind of boiling up everywhere,

or you'll get big, heavy thunderstorms, things that may go on for a while. typhoon season has started and typhoon season goes now until October, sometimes beginning of November. Where we are, fortunately, the typhoon has usually come and hit Hadan Island and deflect away from us in the north or south. But sometimes you get hit directly. In 2004, we got hit by Taipoon Yogi, which was the strongest typhoon just drank Vietnam in 70 years,

and it came directly over the island. Directly over my house, it tore the tree and put on the place in half and put up it. the that just trashed completely it tore off all the trees everywhere

everything on the eastern southern and northern sides were just flat trees to the point where

the bark was ripped off on some of the trees the buildings had the roofs ripped off torn apart all kinds of happened

with this and we had the road completely covered in the water and flooded and trees down every few meters for kilometers

in the roads that doesn't normally happen that's really unusual, but that has the potential happen. By October, usually we're starting to get into

the dry season. There's still a little bit of lingering effects of rain, potentially a few late season typhoons. October, weather starts to get quite nice. It starts to drop down into the mid-20s computer-wise. Tends to be more clear, and as it's drying out,

humidity is not affecting so much. November, December, tends to be really good. Then we get into January. January can drop down to, it's usually up around 18 degrees, something like that, but it can drop down to 10 or 12 degrees sometimes. Then a couple of years ago, we were dropped down to almost frost levels. I've got that by three degrees one time here, but that was really unusual. January is when we start to get what we called the mold season,

where it's, even though it's the dry season, it's kind of foggy and humid, and it's kind of sticks there, and it's cold enough that nothing really ever recovers from. that can go January, February into March. And then March, we have a little bit of good weather again, sort of like the similar winter to October, November. And then it starts to get warm again. And by June and July, we're back into that kind of summer cycle again. So that's the rough cycle for that.

But with the climate change, that's changing around. What used to be the nice, sunny, kind of calm weather type has now gotten, sometimes it's gotten with a foggy and damp. And these with it during the damp colder time has gotten, warmer and a little bit rainy sometimes. So it's been shifting around back and forth quite a bit. So it's not really quite as predictable as it used to be. The rainfall varies quite a bit, but generally speaking,

we get like a meter and a half a ring in a year, but sometimes more than that. Most of that's concentrated during the semi-months, of course. And this is also tied to cycles for things like the languor birth cycles. The langaer birth all through the year, potentially. But if you look at the long term, you see certain spikes. and what you tend to see is a spike in births in the January, February, March period. That's sort of the end of the dry period, which means that really nursing for a while.

But when they weaned off of milk, that's when you've gotten to the rainy season, and you have new vegetation growing. The new vegetation doesn't have a lot of tanemes, so it's really easy to digest. That also means that the key fertility period for the Langeras is at the end of the rainy season, which also makes sense because that means that during the entire rain season, season that females were able to eat this nice new fresh vegetation and build up fat reserves. So this, even though Languars are born out toward the year, there definitely seems to be this larger cycle if you look at the bigger picture tied to the weather cycle.

Yeah, absolutely. The migratory bird seasons going north, there isn't always so much of a season, but going south, there's definitely a season. And that tends to be August, September, October, November, basically. starting a little bit in August, September, October, November, it's an migratory bird season. So a big influx of birds coming from Siberia and Korea and all that flying south, which is also in the past been a problem because a lot of bird poaching going on.

People setting up missed nets and think that to catch the birds. We've spent the last 26 years fighting with that and gotten a big reduction in it, but it's still doing. That's potentially a problem because we have things like a spoon-billed sandpaper that come through the area. And the spoon-billed sandpaper is one of the most endangered birds in the planet. It's only a breeding population of maybe 100. animals total. They're these really adorable things. They look like a sandpiper, but they can

get in the palm of your hand. They're about this big, and they have a spoonbill, like you'd see if they have a spoonbill's torque, but it's on a bird that's literally like this big. They're really adorable little things. So the problem with that, they get caught in a mist now. That's a big chunk of population, but

even there's one or two animals. We have a lot of other birds that come through, like the Chinese spoonbill. We've got a bunch of birds of prey that come through this way as well. We have have a few frigate birds, but it's really unusual in the area. A couple of sea eagles occasionally, but that's also pretty rare. Lots of sunbirds and things like that.

We don't have no hummingbirds, but hung birds are a new world species. But in the old world, the sunbirds take over that role. I mean, these relatively small, bigger than hummingbirds, still relatively small birds with really, really bright colors and long curved bills. They have the same ecological niche with dipping in for flowers and eating small insects and things like that. So those are always really fun to watch. Yeah, that's very cool. Do you notice seeing more, is there a seasonality to where you'll see reptiles?

Is that associated with, I can imagine it from both ends and kind of see it and discuss it in the context of in the dry season. It can be easier and notice a green snake than it is when you have a bunch of fresh vegetation. Simultaneously, sometimes you would anticipate that the one season would be a more active time. Generally speaking, the summer season is the time to see them because it's warmer air about butter and there's more food availability. the rainy season brings the frogs, more frog breeding, more food from the frogs crawling around, a lot more insects out, a lot more activity. So you see a lot more of the animals out, sending on the road, active at night also. You see the crates especially, the many vended crate and the banded crate both in the island.

And we see a lot more of those during the summer season, active at night crossing the roads and checking things out. And we have... Go ahead. I was just going to say, so it's the less comfortable time a year to come, but if you're hoping to see snakes, then you probably want to be hitting that June, July, through October timeframe? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. The, um, trying to think, I'm one of my favorite snakes in the island is the Kersiotheli or not at a golden flying snake. We have those here. I've never seen them flying, unfortunately, but I've seen them a few times. I'm trying to think at the time of year I've

seen them, and I think it's always been a summer when I've seen them. I've seen a couple of young ones and a couple of adults, but they're really, very, and move really, really fast to go out of the way. I actually think I may have a small video of a young one calling to a set of bricks, which looks like a video game of snake. It's perfect. I'll see if I can dig that up and send it to you. Yeah, that's great. I had something flip through my mind.

Let's see. So I'll defer to my questions while I try and come back to it. Given the levels of endemism and then, as you just mentioned, with the migratory birds that are coming through, rare migratory birds coming through, it seems like poaching is a significant problem, or at least it's a significant concern. So feel free to take that, or the second part of the idea is because of that, is there something of a stigma that associate amongst the people on the island to, is there a stigma associated with anyone who expresses an interest in animals generally because that concern is

such is so profound. So poaching is definitely a major concern and it's one of the reasons why I have the community-based anti-proaching teams. So it's not just a concern of Vietnam. It's concern all across all of South East Asia. There is no real stigma against anyone in terms of animals. Most people are so interested in animals, even if they're able to be scared of them and all that.

In our area, we have a lot of tourists. So, of course, lot of tourists do come specifically look for wildlife. They head not to see much because it's a jungle. And also Vietnam has a lot of, um, they, is high in biodiversity, but low in biomass because of all the development has gone on, because of the damage of the environment, because of all the hunting and poachings gone in the past. But people do come specifically to look for birds sometimes, and you do have people coming out looking for herbs, looking for, usually herbs, and of course trying to look at the language, which is technically speaking not allowed because of a protected species in protected areas, but we do it anyway. But, yeah, we do have people coming up for that. There are a few people on the island. who will do guiding for those particular things to a certain degree,

but most of them don't really have good skills that aren't necessarily clear on what people are looking for. Some are, but most of them are not. There's always an issue with the level of professionalism of guides. We've had situations where guides take you to go on hikes and go, oh, look at the snake, and they'll pull out a bag and grab the snake and take it home, which is obviously something you're not supposed to be doing. So we have situations like that, but for the most part,

when it comes to having foreign tourists in the way, people are pretty good about understanding that foreign tourists are interested in seeing the animals and helping them with that and being accommodated. When it comes to domestic media tourists, the attitude towards wildlife is very different. A lot of the domestic community tourist think of the park as being someplace that can go and just take things from. So there tends to be a lot more of that sort of casual,

not intentional approaching so much, but kind of opportunistic. Oh, look at that. I was going to take that. So it's definitely something you can pay attention to the alert for. I have many, many, many times had to stop on the road and chase people away from snakes or that's what I'm like. I was coming back from a filming thing at one point. I just got in a motorcycle accident, so I hand was bandaged up, coming back from a long day of filming. And in front of me, there's two motorcycles stopped with two people fighting over who's going to take home this really big Burmese Python.

So I had the car stop. I ran out and chased them away. as I was arguing, like the snake got away. And a few times when I crossed people speeding, hit animals, and I'll stop them back up and try and take them home. Like, there was one person hit

the biggest bed in quite another scene. It was huge. It was probably, it wasn't quite as big around as my wrist, but it was a pretty good-sized snake and maybe two meters long, thrashing around the right after the guy hit it. And first of all, I didn't want him to take it because he's coaching and all that.

But also, the animal is still moving around And I didn't want to have this guy getting bitten by either. So chase the guy away and then got a stick and move it off the road. But oftentimes, you'll see people stop on the road and run off into the bushes train to get something. You have to stop and chase them away from that. And is that context? Are they planning to eat it? Is that sort of the usual?

You know, you'll see these jars full of alcohol and animal stuck inside. So snake wine is really common things. It's illegal all the areas now, especially in our area. But it's still a popular thing. So we'll do that and take it and use that and take them home. stick in and things like that sort of a thing. So it's not really eating it, but it's the medicinal purposes of the supposed medicinal purposes.

It's kind of a saying we have. If the medicine worked, we wouldn't call it traditional medicine. We just call it medicine. Right. Right. Or the old Anthony Bourdain about the working conservation by giving out blue pills throughout the world or whatever. Yeah.

Yeah. I've always been tempted to collect all the fingernails on toenails and make it when also a swore on fingernails and toenails. because it's the same thing. Right. Right. Oh, my goodness. You mentioned, so I remember my question from before, but I want to follow this narrative a little bit.

You mentioned crates now a couple times, but that specific example and the fact you have them. So those are, those can be very intimidating snakes for sure, and certainly they can be very dangerous. Because they're so nocturnal, does that keep people from kind of interacting with? with them at kind of when they're most dangerous? Yes, but at the same time, both crates and cobras are some that as popular as people to try and capture it because they're powerful with the venom. So those are the ones people want to put in the snake water and stuff like that. So if someone's going to be capturing the snake for that kind of purpose, it tends to be

either a crate or a cobra. We also have the first team's wolf snake, which is totally harmless, but it looks a lot like a crate, and people confuse those quite often. Is that's Dina Don? I think. I've done it to look up, but I'm not good with all the Latin names for this next. It's not a her person so much. It's difficult for to do that.

Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. We do have the Chinese cobra, the Naja Atro, and we have the king cobra as well. The king cobras we have don't tend to get really that big, but we get a decent size. We've seen them a few times. times, usually juveniles, but we do obviously have some adults. The biggest snakes we have

are some of the pythons. A few of the pythons have gotten quite big. They're big enough to eat small goats, but that's pretty unusual. Most of the time, snakes are much smaller than that. We think that, again, the snake languor thing. So the langa's are very, very particular about their sleeping sites, and they sleep only on exposed cliffs in overhangs or sheltered areas with no vegetation nearby. And we think, and they also have to sit touching each other. And we think that that's a snake predator response. The young landowners are really, really small, so basically easy for a snake to swallow. Even the adults would be possible for a really big python to swallow.

So we think that the lack of vegetation nearby and the sleeping bundled together is sort of like their alarm system. First, it's difficult for the snakes to get to them. And then even if they do, it'll wake one a month and a wake the last of a month. So that seems to be, we're going to have the snake's big enough to happen so much anymore, really. but there seems to be archaic behavior left over for me. Sure. Are there interactions between Burmese pythens and local residents in terms of eating their chickens and things like that?

Yeah. Since I've been there, we know at least one person who had a goat eating, and people always say that they're eating small animals and that kind of thing. Some of it is true, so it's not. And people have been keeping less pets, too, so we've been quite a few releases of hypox. Oh, really? Yeah, they get too big and people go, what do we do with this?

So we help them release them some type to us in the park. Okay. Is that local people on the island that are keeping them, maybe they as a juvenile or is there an industry around that? It's an industry, and it's usually not local within the island. It's usually people in the high farm city or other places nearby. You know, when they finally get to the point, you've got something as too big from their handle,

I'll work and I put this, and the only place you can do that, It's potentially someplace for the park. It's supposed to contact gas or contact the park. And if it's possible, we'll help them with that, but it's not always possible. There was actually a really funny incident a while ago. We're releasing a pretty good-sized one. It was probably a 20-fieler one or so. We're taking it out and we're letting it go.

As we're watching it slowly crawl away, I look down and right next to my calf, coiled up, wrapped around the branch, exactly the same color as the leaves, is one of the Chinese green tree vipers. The green ones with the red tail and the pits in there. And like this far from my cat, just sitting there watching it. It's like, oh, hello, I'm going to excuse me over here

and move for the side. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the densities on those, even in urban areas, in Southeast Asia in some places is wild. Do you see, but it seems, It almost seems like that urban infrastructure actually supports that density in a way that probably you're less likely to see in natural habitat.

I think that's the case because a lot of times the urban environments have more food for them because there's a smaller range of predators, which means the prey species of a certain subgroup of prey species can reach really high abundances, which means that if there's a predator that can come in and capitalize on that particular food supply, they can do really, really well. Yeah, absolutely. So the question that had alluded me before, bringing it specifically to rhino rat snakes. So I mentioned that, and then you adroitly pointed out that it's probably an observational bias rather than anything else. But most of the records, probably half the right for rhino rat snakes nowadays are on catbaw. And one, as I've made mention on the podcast and then we were talking about before, they're an incredibly adaptable species, and so that probably reflects all the different micro niches and climactic conditions that are available on the island. But my question was, I've come to find over time that keeping them in terms of a natural climatic cycle over the course of the year, shifting away from kind of a North American Caluburn model where we do like a hard brumation for three or four months, something like that, down at a consistent 45 to 50, 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

Instead, offering them kind of those conditions, but with the opportunity to warm up during the day, do you think, is that probably mimic more accurately what you see in the dry slash colder time of year, where as long as the sun comes out, even if the ambient air temperature is cold, you mentioned going down to nearly freezing, that it won't stay perpetually like that over the course of months.

Instead, there will be opportunity either, if not every day, every handful of days to get some sun and you could probably get up into the low 50s or the high 50s, low 60s Fahrenheit, something like that at least. Easily, easily. The, when we only had to get down, you're freezing one time for a couple of days. Most of the time in the winter, in the mornings, it'll be, like I said, like, anywhere from 12, to 18 degrees the centigrade

which is what that's again in the 50s more or less but during the day even in the wintertime it'll easily reach much higher

like up in the mid-20s centigrade so absolutely and if you're sitting up in the sun easy to get much higher than that the yeah

I suspect that a lot of that the lack of activity and lack of seeing the snakes during that time so much temperature driven so it's probably also food driven because a lot of the foods are eating

are not being exact. We don't see anywhere near as many frogs and things like that in the dry season and that may be more that it's dry not that it's colder. So it may be driven more by things like that. And also they may be shifting their habitats too. And we have a lot of rock piles,

rubble piles, and cliff sides and things like that. So it could be that during the dryer and colder times, they send more time over on those places where they can get into their rock cliffs and then come out and sun and then go back into that as opposed to other times of the year where they're less reliant, on their sun and are more active in shade areas and damp areas and under the vegetation

things like that too. Yeah, absolutely. Any time during the year, they have an opportunity to get up to pretty warm temperatures without relatively difficulty. Interesting. Back when I was subjecting them to more standard brumation, I lived in Michigan and in a not particularly well-sealed, had them in a not-particularly well-sealed basement, and one day it was 38 degrees Fahrenheit, so, you know, getting close to that 3 degrees Celsius.

And the thing that was amazing is where I had Thai snakes, debris rat snakes from Thailand that were essentially catatonic. They seemed functionally frozen at those temperatures. The rhinos were active and moving just like on one quarter speed. They would actually exhibit more like a true ganyosoma red-tail green rat snake sort of behavior in terms of throwing the tongue out, flicking it up and down and up and down and up and down, only later retracting it. It was amazing to see, like, and that became part of the suggestion that they probably are active more throughout the course of the year with the ability to warm up rather than just tucking away for months at a time. Yeah, that would not be surprising. I don't know how far they go up into southern China,

but right here in northern Vietnam, our climate regime, if you look at the coping climate models, is much more similar to mainland China than this, the rest of Southeast Asia. And I spent time in southern China. I was living in China, I was living in southern China, and in Guangxi, I was there during the winter at one point,

and it was frosted. There is the valley bottoms in a few places have a little bit of frost, even though we're still technically speaking in a sub-copical area. And we know that with the rat snakes, they can go in elevation up to a few thousand meters. Well, central Vietnam a few years ago had snow. And Sappho, it says northern Vietnam, and the whole northern border of China with the mountains are, that area gets snow. And it's only a few thousand meters elevation. So there are definitely the possibility for the overlap of the rat snake range and times of year where they do occasionally get into frost.

And of course, the climate changes back and forth. We look at the larger glacial period cycles. that would have been very different. We go back 12,000 years ago, and we're in the glacial maximum, and we had much, much colder all this whole area. And you see weird things cropping up. For example, the Italian wall lizard.

Italian wall deserts are typically around Mediterranean, and an area that doesn't really tend to get all that cold. But there's an invasive population in upstate New York and all the way through large parts of the U.S., and turns out they have, adaptations that they don't use in the native range that they've been using in Americas where they can handle freezing temperatures and they go into really deep cremation and sometimes we've been active for the wind that's cold temperatures. So there's definitely the possibility with a lot

of animals that there are hidden traits that were very important during the last glacial maximum for them that currently are no longer used but are conserved because they don't they take that much extra effort to maintain. And there's just enough benefit that. that when it does that, in those few cases where that is necessary, those kind of reactivated that. Yeah, absolutely. Did you notice, does it seem like everything is adapted to those conditions? So even when it got down towards when it was three degrees centigrade, did it seem like there were adverse effects on any of the local animals or plants? Is there anything that is sort of extralimital or just on their sort of range at this point?

Not so much. It was such a short period of time that did that for, that it really made much of a difference. It was a bit quieter, birds would be less quiet or more quiet, insectively more quiet, that sort of a thing. It reminded me a little bit of when I was working in South America, they would get their free eyes. So on the eastern side of the Andes, you'll get these cold winds, they go up Argentina, and blow along the edge of the Andes right above the tree line, and then the cold air will kind of fall down into the jungle different areas. And those can last for a few days to look a week or so. And when it happened, the whole jungle just gets dead quiet. If everything goes, this is too cold for me, I'm going to go high. So when it got that cold on the island, it felt a little bit like that, but only a little bit.

Most animals that you see in a regular basis are still being just as active and everything else. Again, because even though it got cold, it was still sunny. So when the birds took longer to get up in the air and you'd be up hanging out, sending themselves more, that sort of a thing. But, and it was, again, so it was only a couple of days. It wasn't like we got seeing a big change in reptile being. behavior because you don't see them off any way to notice the big changes like that. The ones we see the most often tend to be the utropus multifacietta, the common sense skink, and the logikilada, the green-bellied one, which is the long-tailed Nabuya.

So those are the two we see most often. And so if we're going to see any sort of change of behavior, it's those two, but they're mainly fassurals. They don't really care that much about the temperature. You don't burrow into the leaves and they're fine. Soil on the island. Is that mostly sort of leaf litter that accrues over time? Is there actual substantive soil? No, not much.

So it tends to the, obviously, any steep slip is rocks, basically. You have layer of vegetation kind of connecting the rocks together. But the soil that's there tends to mainly place. heavy tropical crows, very little organic material. Any organic material disappears right away. And there's basically, you use it in the northern forests where you got, there's a nice deep, crunchy leaf litter layer. And here, that just can eat by everything almost right away.

So we're walking around, you're basically walking on mud and a few freshly fallen leaves, but not many things don't last long enough. They either decomposed, you're going to eat in my things. We've got these really... I saw how to figure out the species. These giant purple worms, these worms that are about this long like that go in our rains, and they're big.

This deep kind of purple, almost like... Sicilians tend to have this purple color sometimes. They look almost like that, but they're definitely not Sicilians. They're definitely these giant red worms. So we have those, and those are obviously eating all the leaves. We have tons and tons and tons of snails

because of this karst landscape, so there's lots of calcium for them. We have lots and lots and melopedes and Detroit abhors and things like that, and their archipods. running around eating things. So there's a pretty serious cleanup crew going around just eating everything their goals. That's amazing. You mentioned frogs quite a bit here. Is there sort of a tadpole season? I bring that up in the context of rhinos because they're as hatchlings, they seem attracted to either

fish and or tadpoles. They eat them out of the water, but it's the movement within the water that really seems to catch their attention. Yeah. So, After the first major rain, which usually happens in June, July, there is, when these actually get enough to fill up some of the basins, there's a huge frog breeding season. And you've got basically a few days to a week of just cacophonous frog noises everywhere. And then from there, you've got the tadpoles coming later on. A lot of those dry out pretty quickly, so the frogs aren't always the best from choosing the best areas.

But we have a pretty distinct. season for frog breeding and non-frog breeding. I've got some rain buckets out to collect water to water, plant some things I get and merge the bathing too. And I keep having the polycephalis, the large, the whipping frogs, making those little hanging egg masses directly over this, which confused me at first because they didn't know what? It's like, what is this weird foam doing here?

Sure. But yeah, so you have that, so you have those frogs doing that over any bits of water that freestanding around, even small bits, and then in the actual basis. You've got a big mix of different sorts of things. And you've got, trying to think, when the baby toads come out. I think sometime around next month,

we'll probably start seeing lots and lots and lots of the combination of a baby is hopping around. We don't tend to see a lot of the other frog babies because they tend to go into the forest pretty quickly and disappear up into the trees, but the common toads are out in the ground always hopping around, so they're a lot easier to see. Right, and I don't know if those are, if those have bufotoxin, so they're a little bit more resistant to predation from different things and makes them a little more conspicuous.

It wouldn't be surprising. They have those kind of lumps over that area back of the neck, back of the head of it thing. So it looks like they might have some toxin production. Yeah, interesting. You mentioned earlier the idea that maybe people are interested in coming to look for langers to take pictures of. them, but that that's theoretically illegal as protected species. This is always an interesting conversation, right?

So that is something people do despite the illegality of that. What does that look like on the ground from a practical perspective? A difficult one. So there's always a challenge because when you have

tourist and visitors, the matter where you were, even the most well-mending ones and most responsible ones have an impact. And as long as the cumulative total impact is less than the recovery rate of the environment, things are kind of okay. It's when you transpose past that, you get issues. And that level of impact resilience

is really, really different depending on the particular area and the particular species, the environment, the habitat, and everything else that comes around with that whole process. to couple with that, if you want to have that kind of activity benefit conservation, there are certain things you have to do

really, really carefully. One of which the activity that's taking place has to be low impact on whatever it is you're observing. The activity has to benefit local communities. It doesn't mean the tour providers. It means of local communities, which is a different thing.

You have to have buy-in from every level of society in the area, local communities all the way up through the typical levels. You have to have a very transparent revenue stream. People need to see how much money is coming in, where is it going, what is it being used for in which portion is to get branched off of different types of things like that. This works really well where those particular systems are in place.

And then examples of that are in Uganda and Orlando. We've both of those and gone to another one group. And it's a very, very strict set of policies in place. you know exactly what you're getting into before you even think about going there. You know that your group sizes are going to be a maximum of X number of people. You know that even if you don't see the animals,

you're only going to be in the amount of time. You know that if you do see them, these are the ways you behave, these are the things of you, and you're never going to spend longer than this amount of time. You know all this before you get there. So when you get there, you don't have any false expectations.

Through a lot of Southeast Asia and a lot of other parts of the world, especially in Southeast Asia right now, there's none of that. it's I'm going to go and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do whatever I'm going to do. I'm going to bring my karaoke machine and I'm going out in the forest so I can do karaoke

and this is not exaggeration. This happens all the time. That sort of a thing is always taking place. So first off, one of the big challenges is that even if we want to do landowners in the area, which I currently do not support the populations too small,

if we wanted to do it legally, you would have to drastically cut back on the amount of tourism, which is obviously not going to happen. The reason for this is that right now where the tourists are going, even though the landowners are protected, the areas in the water around them are not. So there's a lot of activity in the area. And like a lot of the natural areas we have left, the area the landgras are, we didn't have a use for in the past. So landers were left alone.

But now we have a use for them. And this is the same thing. This is the reason why we have these beautiful national parks in different areas. That land wasn't useful to us in the past. We couldn't log in. It was too difficult. There's two, the resources are too difficult to get to. Now that inaccessibility and that beauty is a resource in and of itself.

So now we're kind of mining those resources also. So this is a problem now is that the animals will protect it because the area had no use. But now there is a use. It's really stunningly beautiful. So of course, that brings people there. So there isn't really good way to control. There are many people that go there. Plus it's on the water.

So it's not like a mountain trailer or something where you can say you can only go here. If there's a boat, you can go there. So there's no real Uber's that mechanism for any of that. There's no real way to enforce any of that. And there's a big copycat system through all this whole region. The one person is making money or doing something. Everyone says, oh, that's successful. I'm going to pile on and do that.

And everyone all piles on and does that until the system collapse and they move on to the next step. When I was living in China, we used to see this thing where someone to start a new business on the street. And a week later, every single store doing that business. And then market be saturated. And then someone to start doing something else, and everything will shift over to that. Just weeks at a time, the business is transatlose. transferring their entire system back and forth. So similar to that here.

Then, of course, Vietnam has an issue with corruption and lack of transparency. So money comes in, lots of money comes in, and where does it all go? No one knows and is not going to ever be told, and that causes good problems. And, of course, people who are responsible for the enforcement and for managing these things are a part of that system. So that causes some problems sometimes, too. So it's a real delicate walk back and forth. Our policy has always been, you can't go looking,

and it's been the local policy too. You cannot go looking for them. You cannot offer tours for them. You cannot do different things. If you're already doing a tour and you happen to see them, fantastic. Stay quiet.

Keep a certain set minimum distance away horizontally if you can. You cannot go on land anywhere going goes on. Don't use flashes, don't use loud noises, etc, et cetera. So it's not about not seeing them not doing it. It's about the commodification of the exercise

and making it to the right way it's heavily impacted. And this is really important because one of the things you found is that in the periods of really, really high tourism with lots of people are out in the areas, infanticides tend to go up a little bit. Not a lot. They tend to go up a little bit. And with a population as small as this,

that's a really big deal because really the population growth about 3% per year. So some years we have 12 babies born. So far this year we have three, maybe four babies born. So having one extra baby died out of the natural cycle of things can have a really, really big effect. And if there's more than that, there's a much bigger issue. So there are these kinds of issues like that. The other thing we've seen in two cases where there's a really heavy tourism group's fragmented.

And this is a problem because one of the things that seems to be the case is that if the group size is too small, there's no more babies. So the group structure is adult females and one adult male, they're reproductably active, the younger animals. And the younger males get a certain age and leave, usually a few years old, three to four years old. And it takes them a number of years to get old enough or wrong enough. They take over a group. Females tend to stay with a group.

And we have never seen babies born in any group that has fewer than three females. It seems you need to be four or so to have babies in the group. More than that, no problem. Fewer than that? since it's not happening. So if we have a group and it gets too small, then you have when we're producing group with potentially multiple babies a year, to all of a sudden no babies at all, even though it's the same number of adult animals. So this is another potential concern.

Now, sometimes these groups rejoin and move around and all that, but there's also a limited area for the groups because the sleeping sites, they're very faithful to the sleeping sites, and they only use those particular animals. If there's other ones, they'll use those if they're other ones, but there aren't other ones. and the sleeping sites are the limiting factor. This is one of the reasons where we don't see a great expansion of the range. It's not just the population size

is that the distance between the sleeping sites for the males is fine, because the males are room with the farm, the females won't. So if there's not a group of sleeping sites and then over here, relatively close by another group of sleeping sites, but it's a multi-day trip to get to them.

The females aren't likely to move into those, which limits the range. So you really have to have the population build up to a critical point to really force the issue and we're not at that point yet. So all these things, mean that the extra pressures that tourism brings in

can really have a strong effect on population in ways that are much more subtle than people realize are much bigger effects despite the pressures being relatively subtle. Yeah, absolutely. Well, inherent in all of that is the much greater psychological complexity of the animals that you're working on

than the animals I'm usually thinking about in terms of herbs and things that I don't think have as many of those limitations within the system, right? So that seeing a random rhino or a crate crossing the road, something like that, and holding it up for two minutes to take some pictures is probably not going to have the same impact as any of that complexity you're talking about. Yeah, and the snake's not helping spend two, three years raising another snake. It's laying some eggs.

Maybe it'll monitor the eggs for a while, take care of the eggs. Maybe you'll take the babies for a little while. but pretty quickly, after maybe a few months at most, they're off on their own. Well, we've got the animals living in family groups, and it takes them years to raise each other up and teach us how to behave and what's edible and what's not, and the pathways along the cliffs, all the stuff like that. And there's also, and people like to think of culture as being within as human, but culture is something that pretty much all animals that have behaviors have, and they learn it from each other. And if you break that cycle, bad things can happen. We see this in everything from elephants to codfish. With the codfish, you hunt the big ones,

and the big ones knew the little migration rocks. The younger ones don't know those anymore because they haven't been in those. You see in elephants, there's a case of wild back where there is a big drought. And the only elephants that knew where the water holes were outside the park where the elephants were old enough to have remembered the last time it got that dry, and they were taken out into the water holes. So those elephants were survived, which didn't. that lives didn't know where the water was.

And this is the same thing. If you look at something like the orangutans, orangutans have the second longest childhood of primates after humans. And they spent something like seven years with another, learning the climate cycles, learning the weather cycles, learning pathways with the trees, because it's a giant animal high up in the candy,

because it's a really difficult place to learn. So you really have to learn very carefully what the routes are back and forth. And learning the social set of things with orangutans is really confusing because orangutans tend to be so much solitary unless there's abundance, the member group together. So they have to understand both sides of that. And if you have a shortened period of youth,

you're not going to experience some of those. They have to use long enough to experience both sides of that. So there's, with primacy, it's really complex very quickly with all these different aspects to the social environment that's not just the physical environment. Yeah, absolutely. Interesting. Okay. Transitioning a little bit to sort of within that either tourism or herb space, how does it look? So not coming to look for langers, but say I wanted to come see a rhino rat snake. How practical is that from a sort of infrastructure capacity, acceptance, willingness to find a capable person to go out to the extent that that's required?

We had some friends go out a couple years ago, and I think they were hiking about, you know, went with a guide to go hiking, I would say, on the mountain, but I think the whole thing, you know, that could be anywhere, basically. But that there were in positions of saying, well, A, we don't think you're going to make it, and B, we can't do it after X period of time,

you know, after so late in the evening, those sorts of considerations. Yeah, so there's a couple ways of going about it. The other is small enough, and there's only a few roads. So the logistics of getting around isn't too bad. So mainly people stay in kept by town or someplace like that, and then they'll rent a motorbike and can drive around their motorbike.

A lot of people go out looking at night. Let's travel along the road, looking at night, they'll stop at the places and go on the forest nearby. There's a few hiking trails that people go on to during the day, and that's not an issue. There are a few places to stay that are sort of outside the town, and the edge of the forest, and you can go in from there and go into the areas around.

the forest with that. The main issue of going into the forest at night is that if you don't know the terrain, it's really easy to get injured pretty badly. It's slippery and steep and there's jagged rocks. And of course, if you're looking for herbs, there's the potential to get that. Obviously, someone's experience is a much lower chance of that. If you're not with the experience, and they're just an influencer running around with the camera, much higher a chance of that sort of happening. So people do cannot, people do that. And it's usually not an issue. But it can take a little bit of preparation first and just being aware of the dangers of it. In general, not much danger at all it. And it comes down to it now. Finding good people that know the herbs well enough to do that,

that can be more tricky. Most people don't know for the herbs. And again, most of them are not with that interest or they're scared of them. So finding the wildlet is always to be known. And this is one of funny things that jungles in general is people always think of jungles as being full of wildlife. Yeah, sometimes they are. But generally speaking, you're not going to see any of it. You might hear it, But you're never really going to see most of it because it's hidden away. Because there's other things that want to eat it, or it's trying to hide for other things, or it's doing its own thing up in the canopy or underground or wherever it's going to be.

So, like, we have the Draco lizards, the flying lizards, the orange-wined ones. They're difficult to see. They're around, absolutely. But they're not easy to see. If you do see them, it's like, oh, that's a little bump in the tree. Oh, it's actually a lizard. Oh, if it's that, that's one of those.

But you're not going to see them, usually. And you're hardly ever even going to see them. even though they might be right over your shoulder someplace. So there's that aspect also. Frogs usually are pretty easy to find. One of the things at night, which is good is that a lot of the animals are not active at night. There's kind of sitting and resting.

So it's actually a lot easier to find a lot of animals at night than it is during the day. Yeah, absolutely. What is the, do a lot of people speak English, absent speaking Vietnamese, is it easy enough to communicate? No, most people don't speak a lot of English. There are some that speak really good English. Most, many people, not so much, many people have a little bit of English, but usually only a little bit. So if you're going to go out with somebody, you need to find the right person who not only knows the area, but also has the language skills for that.

Or how them find somebody knows the area well and do it that way. Okay. Is there sort of a set infrastructure for that, or is this mostly happening on WhatsApp and social media and those things? It really depends. Sometimes you talk to your hotel. in the hotel, say, yeah, we know so and they can do that. Sometimes it's finding somebody on some social media thing, like a naturalist obviously is a really great resource for that.

But again, that naturally tends to be ourselves and our staff doing that. There are a few tour companies that sometimes have people that are more focused on the nature side of things. That tends to be usually individuals who are doing that sort of thing, and sometimes I imagine, sometimes they're not. There are a few hotels with the people themselves who are in the hotel are more keyed into that, and they're more likely to recognize there are no people who can help you, that sort of a thing.

One of the things are that is you don't have anything to be saying in the hotel. As long as you know, there's the person who has that hotel, you can stay somewhere else. You can contact them, and they'll connect you with the other person. So it's not so much that you're tied into exactly where you're staying. Sure. Yeah, there's, there's, the reasons are available. It's a little matter of,

puzzling them out. Yeah, absolutely. Other than Langer's, are there things that are impermissible to even go look for? There's a few things that probably should be, but they aren't.

Like, the cat by leopard gecko, which is endemic to the animal. That's a protected species, and we don't like people looking for them because we're concerned about them becoming the species that winds up being in the engine cycle for pet trade and stuff like that. But there's no policy right now about it. So as long as they're being really careful, that's fine.

And that's one of the reasons of the eye naturalists for this is even if people post on eye natural list, it'll obscure the location. So with species like that, no one can find from your picture where you want. That's kind of useful. But that's, to my perspective, that's the main one. But again, like I said, it's not that big of a deal. We do have put a few in the L.A. And the people that are going out, something like this,

are not for the ones that are going to be involved in the spreading of applications and approaching that's what I think. So it's not really much of an issue. Yeah, absolutely. That's, well, I'm glad to see sort of that, a willingness to see that perspective from your side at a minimum, right? Because I do think that's true, right? Just having an interest in a thing does not mean that someone's willing to use and abuse that thing. It's probably the opposite, right? Yeah, absolutely. And it depends a lot on the the group of people as well. I think people on something like our naturalists tend to be one of the more

responsible groups out there. You have some other people where and you've got the, I'm sure you've read a lot of the accounts that are people catching animals and then doing horrible things and they get in the right poses of photographs for their own and you see a lot of those are herbs with insects and with birds.

That's a whole different kind of group and that's not the group we want around at all. But most people aren't like that. Most people are a lot more responsible or a lot more interest and a lot more care of it. Yeah, absolutely. A couple sort of ancillary other questions based on what popped up here. Are the king cobras that you guys have, mostly kind of that Chinese type with the heavy banded look to them? Yeah, the younger ones have really heavy banding. The older ones don't seem to as much, but the younger ones definitely have. The bandings enough that initially

I thought they were great, so when I first saw them. Wow. Okay. Very cool. And I would love to hear just as I think I've mentioned on here. Certainly my favorite snake I've worked with for coming up on 25, 26 years, the rhino rat snake. So I think you've seen a few, right? Yeah, so oddly enough, most of the ones I've seen have been swimming. So we have, obviously, the island is just really complex shape to it, all these little bays and inlets and islands and stuff around.

So we're on the water quite a bit in the boats, looking for the landgars and looking for what else is going on as well. So not out in the deep open water, but where there's a long narrow bay, which is maybe anywhere from 20 meters to a couple hundred meters across. We'll see the swimming across that really often. You see them there. See them out sometimes in the same kind of habitat. You see the trainees green tree vipers.

You see them overlapping and habitat quite a bit in the forest there. A lot of people mistake one for the other because they have such a similar look to them. I haven't seen across the road that much, but as other people have as well. Mainly forest edge, I still like to see in them as well, kind of where it transitions from the sloping hillside where the forest is down to the agricultural land,

more on the interior edge of that band, but on that band, it seemed quite a bit there. What I didn't know at all blew me away was that when they died, they changed color. That really surprised me. Yeah, right? So the yellow, whatever that, the pigment,

was causing the appearance of that yellow pigment, that fades away first so that, yeah, well, right, and green, blue and yellow make green, right? And so that's part of it. So, and there are actually different captive lineages and things where, and interesting, I don't know if you will have awareness of this, there's a phenomenon where it seems like when they go through their reproductive cycle, females will deplete some of what's giving them that yellow appearance so that they get this hormonal blue appearance so that if you looked at a couple things if it's of interest is that they actually are sexually dimorphic if you look at enough of them and kind of appreciate them at close hand males i would call green and yellow snakes

and females i would call green and white or or blue and white snakes and males are generally can get much larger. They can get probably a meter and a half up to maybe getting close to two meters, I would think, and a really, really big one. Whereas females are more like up to a meter, point out

to a meter, something like that. I notice with the Chinese tree viper it seems like there's a distinct difference in shape than the males and females from the anal event backwards. Where it seems like with the females, there's the body's thick and then

And then it tapers abruptly down to a narrow tail. And then the males, it is one of the even tradition. Yeah, absolutely. The same will hold true in rhinos as well. Though I don't know if it's quite as pronounced as that. Certainly it is in terms of probing them. So you determine the gender and snakes based on probing them, the probe depth. And male rhinos essentially swallow the probe.

It just goes super deep, whereas females will be in that two, three, four range subcadal scales. So, yeah, quite different. Have you ever seen any of the neonates? So they're a little gray, gray brown, yeah. I wonder where they are within the landscape, right? Hidden away. Yeah, I have no idea.

I have no idea where the nest, no idea what their daily habits are like. Because we only see them occasionally. It's usually either, because it's swimming from point A to point B or staying it out in the branch someplace, or we've been crossing a road. So it's not really like we can follow them down and see what they're doing.

I wish it could. It'd be so much fun to be able to do something like it will do with whales in line and clip something onto them and have the cameras. It's amazing to be able to do that to a huge range of animals and stuff. Let's see what you're doing for the next week. Yeah, absolutely, right?

And I do think that they're probably very active, certainly seasonally, that they'll be very active and moving within their landscape. It's not surprising that there's such, strong swimmers. There is, in captivity, there's, they, people, I think actually when they feed them too much, they have a propensity to go to the water because I think it alleviates the food bolus in the same way that someone who's kind of, you know, in rehab, rehabilitation might go swimming, right? It eases some of that pressure. But yeah, it's certainly fascinating. I see it within those

records, how many of them are on the water. And I know, again, it's a big observation by it. too because you're on the water and like hey there's something moving over there so you're going to see it much more easily potentially and those are that's principally fresh water brackish water salt water salt water we usually have very little fresh water in the area so any body of water you see something on it's going to be salt water it's salt water interesting fascinating that although that probably helps with it's in salt water it's easier to float in salt water yeah i'm not sure how much of a different that makes for a snake that size, but yeah, potentially. But I don't know of any snake that doesn't swim

with, it has to. So I'm not certain if there's anything unique about them doing this. We see quite a few of the other snakes on them swimming too, but vital snakes swim quite well, a lot of other snakes swim really well. So I don't know how much of a difference it makes for that. Yeah, fascinating.

All right. Well, Niaga, this has been fantastic. I'd anxiously awaited this for a long time, and I'm really glad you could join me and make the time. I sincerely appreciate it. I'll send you a folder of photographs and things that you can use for putting up if you want to. And I'll see if I can find that little video of the flying stick calling through the bricks. It's kind of neat looking.

That is always amazing when you see snakes using that structure within like brickwork especially. Well, with the black and white banded pattern. It really looks like some animation. That's awesome. Yeah, it goes back to 80s video games, right? Yeah. Yeah. Is there anything in terms of either social media for the project, for yourself,

your i naturalist account, any of those things that you would want to put out there for people to either to watch along or reach out to you? Not necessarily. We're kind of in a delicate situation in the project right now, so we're trying to keep a relatively low-key in the project. moment. The main thing with us is that our sponsoring organization is Z-Lypsey out of Germany, and we also get sponsored a sponsorship from another organization called ZDGAP. Both are really good with us. ZedGap has been with us for the past 26 years, and their conservation of which is really

nice because they try to focus very heavily on endangered species that are not very well-known, so they're not going to be supporting conservation for rungatangang or things like that, but other animals that don't know very much about or are not really in that big pop of the media cycle. That's what they're focusing on, which is really nice to have an organization so dedicated to that particular kind of approach and having that long-term view, like I said, the work for 26 years. And Zhu Leipzig has done a lot of conservation work, not just within Europe, but through lots of parts of the world, both in Vietnam and Chile and Madagascar and could have been other places. So thanking our sponsors is really important for us because, without,

then we wouldn't be here. Right. Never enough conservation dollars to go around to have a couple of organizations like that. Support is, yeah, it's very important and amazing. And yeah, that's not. Thank you very much. It's really enjoyable. Absolutely.

Perhaps we'll do it again at some point. Yeah, that sounds fantastic. All right, hang out for a second. I'm going to click the button. Of course. And we'll wait for the upload. All right.