Reptile Fight Club - Grilling The Expert with Dustin Smith

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

In this episode, Justin and Rob discussWho will win? You decide. Reptile Fight Club!Follow Justin Julander @Australian Addiction Reptiles-http://www.australianaddiction.comIG https://www.instagram.com/jgjulander/Follow Rob @ https://www.instagram.com/highplainsherp/Follow MPR Network @FB: https://www.facebook.com/MoreliaPythonRadioIG: https://www.instagram.com/mpr_network/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtrEaKcyN8KvC3pqaiYc0RQSwag store: https://teespring.com/stores/mprnetworkPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/moreliapythonradio

All right, welcome to Reptile Fight Club. We are going to have a nice little discussion tonight. I've got an expert with us, Dustin Smith, so I'm looking forward to chatting with him and hearing about the projects he's working on and some of the conservation work he's involved in. So, yeah, welcome to the podcast, and thanks for being here. Thank you.

Excited to be here. Always happy to talk about, you know, Herps in general, our projects and everything. Looking forward to it. Right. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, I am as well, so this should be fun. Yeah, I had to have to bring up a little fun reptile news this week. I was out working in the reptile room, feeding stuff, and cleaning rodents and such. And then noticed that a couple females were on eggs. So I got three clutches this last week, Western Simpsons, jungle, and an inland. So not a bad way to have the week go. and then Diamond Python looks like she's going to lay something.

So that's kind of exciting as well. So another good week to me. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. Hoping to get out herping this weekend if I can manage it. But we'll see how it goes. I saw another video that Pat May put out on herping in Utah and found some,

you got a range extension for some night lizards out in the southeast part. of the state. So I'm like, I messaged him and he's like, hey, I might be going out tomorrow. I'm like, count me in if I can swing it with the family. But yeah. Very nice. We've been, we've been in an eternal drought. And today's the first day we've gotten rain in about a month. So I'm itching for getting out very, very soon. Right. Yeah. It is nice to see the weather change. I mean, here we had some really nice weather. It was warm. And then all of a sudden we got this cold snap and we were down freezing again. And there was snow and, you know, frost in the mountains.

And so it's just kind of, I guess, typical spring in Utah. But, yeah, a little different. But, yeah, it was really dry here as well. There's pretty big, you know, pretty serious drought conditions in Utah. I'm sure Colorado's maybe similar, although you guys seem to get a little more snow than we did. And then, yeah, it sounds like there's a big El Nino working its way in the weather systems. and we'll see how that plays a role in our herping plans. Yeah, I don't know if I'm looking forward to that at all.

Right. I don't know how much it will affect us, but I guess we'll see. Yeah, where are you at now, Dustin? So I'm in Ashboro, North Carolina, which is smack dab in the center of the state of North Carolina. Most people, when we say Ashboro, everybody assumes Asheville, which is a beautiful city in the mountains. And Aspero is great in its own way, but it's a small town nobody's ever heard of 25,000 people. And it's halfway between Raleigh and Charlotte. So it's little town, but a big, big great zoo.

So that's why I'm here. Nice. So, yeah, I guess maybe tell us how you fit into herpet culture, herpetology, that sort of thing, kind of what your background is. Yeah. So, oh, yeah, I can. I would say, you know, kind of multi-layered, right? Like for the most part right now, most of my focus is, you know, managing the zoo's collection of reptiles and amphibians,

as well as, you know, all of our conservation programs involving those groups of animals. And so, yeah, I'm the curator of reptiles and amphibians in North Carolina Zoo. I've been at the zoo now for about 11 years in that same role. And I love it. I've got no complaints at all. It's a unique, it's a unique situation being in a really big zoo in a small town. And also, we're one of only a couple state government zoos in the U.S. So that also adds its own layer of interesting things.

That's all I can say right now. But yeah, no, it's, it's great. It's a, it's a job that I love. And I'll obviously be talking more about it as we go along here. But yeah, that's where I'm at right now. Okay. It seems like the curators can kind of, shape the collection in some ways. Is that is that the case with you? And if so, what, what way are you

shaping it or what kind of stuff do you like to put on exhibit, I guess? Yeah. So we're, our zoo is not your, you know, prototypical herb zoo that that most people think of, right? You know, you think about, you know, Bronx or St. Louis or Fort Worth, things like that where they have these big, awesome herp buildings and they can just load it up with everything cool and, you know, the limitations are kind of endless. And so hours, not so much. We are spread out zo geographically. And so when they designed the zoo, they basically gave us Africa

and North America and then ran out of money because they were so massive. I mean, it sounds, it sounds bad, oh, you only have those two continents. But those two continents at our zoo are like 500 acres total. So it's not small, right? Like, yeah. Our biggest, the biggest

exhibit at our zoo is over 40 acres. One single exhibit. So that tells you, it's an, it's an, unique establishment. But yeah, we have herbs from, we have a big desert dome building. So we have a lot of flexibility there. As long as it's kind of desert, as I use my air quotes, we can squeeze it in there. And then we have a couple areas with both North Carolina and southeastern U.S. species.

And then we kind of have a few hodgepages here and there. But we're trying to open up. our next continent sometime in the next year or so it's going to be Asia. We're pretty excited about that. I've been acquiring about half of those species, but still have some more to go, but we have some time. Yeah. And I've always been curious about that. So I just got back from a trip over to Europe. I had a conference over there and got to see the Pilsen Zoo and the Prague Zoo and the Berlin Zoo and see their collections and man those those europeans know how to do do a reptile collection at a zoo you know we got to see spider tail vipers and you know uh what they had some borneo earless monitors on exhibit at one of

the zoos some sarah loricata the the uramastics type things uh pretty cool collections so i was really geeked out and then you know the the other exhibits the birds and the mammals where i've seen i'm seeing stuff that i've never seen before you know that kind of thing so kind of excited about Zooten. I wish I had visited some of the European facilities, but I haven't yet. I've heard lots about them through colleagues, but also I've met a few of them from the European AZA. We've had every couple of years, one of them will come over to our zoo herpetag meetings. And last year, Fabian Schmidt came out and he presented every day on a different topic.

and yeah, they're doing some really, really great work over there. And, you know, luckily there's a lot of collaboration that goes on. And hopefully we have more of that in the near future. But it's nice seeing some differences out there because, you know, U.S. zoos have a lot of great opportunities within, you know, not just within our native collections, but also within the sector that we have, the private sector, things like that. I think the Europeans have a little bit more and different approaches to things. Right. Yeah, it seems like some of the old herpetol culturalists in the past have kind of ruined things for zoo relations with private keepers in some ways. There's been some negative press in that regard.

And so, you know, I think zoos have had to be a little more careful about who they deal with and, you know, all the regulations. But I guess in regards to picking species, you know, or that you want to exhibit, what kind of drives that in, you know, as far as do you care about like how they exhibit? Are you looking for conservation projects? Are you looking for like flashy things that people want to see? Big giant things, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, it's, it's honestly, it's all the above, you know. And so sometimes, you know, like classically, our institution. only had a bunch of herps from, you know, the southeastern U.S. and the desert.

And, and originally our desert dome was only Sonoran Desert. We expanded it to desert to the world about a decade ago. And so for me right now, for Asia, I want to go colorful and flashy because our zoo and our community that visits our zoo hasn't seen that, right? They don't know what a green, you know, arboreal viper is. It doesn't matter what species, right? I can choose, you know, I can choose insularis or I can just choose, you know, Waglars or whatever it is, as long as I can acquire it and get antivenom, things like that, then that's not an issue. But, yeah, it's, you know, we definitely really consider sustainability.

I think that's the term we all use a lot lately. The, the level that we do and have to consider sustainability is pretty significant. But I don't think we have to do that for every species, right? I mean, I think, you know, our Komodo population needs to be sustainable. Our King Cobra population should be sustainable. Things like that should be. But other populations that need to be built out, they may not be sustainable now, but hopefully in the future they will be.

You know, building out, rebuilding out, I should say, things like some of the really cool Asian rat snakes or, you know, really just the small lizards, right? And I know that sounds very generic to say, but, you know, nobody's working with collodes. nobody's working with anything from that size and smaller, right? Very few little gnomids are being worked with. And so we do have to go to the private sector. And I have no issues with it. I just expect to be able to form relationships with vendors.

Right. Hopefully they can deal with our bureaucracy and our paperwork, which is not fun. And we don't think it's fun either, especially our purators. But there's a place for that, right? And I think as long as we're going through the proper channels and we do what we can to make sure that we're doing the right thing and doing it ethically, legally, things like that, then hopefully we won't end up in a book in the future, like all the books we've read. Yeah. That's good.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of, I always thought, you know, I would love to be a zoo curator or something, you know, do some of that work. And, you know, I didn't go down that route, but, you know, have some friends that did. And so kind of living vicariously through them and seeing the cool things they get to do. But, yeah, there's some great zoos out there. So glad to hear you guys are one of those and, you know, have those some good, good sized enclosures or exhibits. That's awesome.

Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely a goal for us too, right? Like, that's a catch-22, right? because as much as we all want to have these massive collections of all these cool species, breeding this and that, we're also kind of at that age now where enclosures need to be bigger. They need to be more dynamic. Most of us want to have more mixed species exhibit as well.

So it's balancing all of that, providing all the proper, you know, thermoregulatory needs of the animals. Lighting is, you know, so big right now. And I have a, one of my staff is a big lighting geek. So we're constantly trying new bulbs. and he's got a spectrometer, so we're always testing things from a more detailed side. I mean, solar meters are great,

but when you can use a solar spectrometer, it's a whole other way of evaluating how you're actually providing light and heat to your animals and where they're getting them, how those zones are working out, and trying to turn that into study so we can not only learn ourselves, but help others. And so I think we're evolving into doing all these things, right?

It's about curating a collection, but it's also about making sure the enclosure is big enough and looks cool and has species that not only the public likes, but also the keepers and myself like. And yeah, there's a lot that goes into it. And I think, I think some of that still comes back to, you know, like what's going on in the, in the private sector, right? What's, what's being bred, you know? And I'm not as up on that as I used to be.

You know, 20 years ago, I was much more involved and, you know, had a company of myself and had a lot of cool herbs at home. Whenever we couldn't work with at the zoo, I had it at home. It was a fun way of, you know, living vicariously through my colleagues, but then also having some of my own stuff on the side. Right. But yeah, it's a great job. I got no complaints, like I said. Yeah. That's very cool.

well um rob do you want to take us in our next direction here yeah so kind of so you were on snake talk a handful of years ago and you talked about kind of your zoo background and things i didn't feel like you got into as much i you know so we what we first met more than 20 years ago um i i know a big part of your emphasis over this over that time at least has been in conservation projects um so i was hoping you could really kind of dive into your history in herb conservation projects. I know South Florida, that's of interest. And then getting kind of shifting into the West Indian bow for, you know, virginia and tree boa work and all that would be great. Okay. Yeah, I, uh, I think probably, you know, I got into the zoo world back in the late 90s while I was still in college. I didn't know what I

wanted to do with my life. I wanted to work with reptiles, but I also grew up in a household where, you know, typical dad was a businessman. and I thought I wanted to go that route. And so when I got into the zoo world, I got a zoo world at a time where I was really interested in the herps and keeping stuff at home. So fast forward a number of years.

2005, I was lucky enough to go to Panama to help do Panamanian golden frog surveys. And so I had never been, I'd never really been out of the country before, never done any tropical herping before. And so, you know, dove right in and got to go to Panama and see golden frogs in the wild. And I can still remember to this day, standing on a rock,

looking at these wild, big, beautiful golden frogs thinking, this isn't real. Like, this is, none of this is real. It's just, it can't be, right? And so, and not just that I'm getting to experience it, but it's out there, right? And so I think at that point in time, like, that was my, that was my changing moment. From that point on, I was like, okay, breeding things for sustainability is, is my job. It's important. And there's, it's significant, right? We, we need to make sure that we have

great species that we're providing to other zoos and we have these sustainable populations for the future. But we can also do conservation. We, we should be committing just as much to that as we are to anything else. And I've kind of taken that probably to the next level to the point where my staff wants to kill me sometimes, but they understand why, right? Ultimately, we all understand why we do it. But yeah, so after Panama and getting to see the golden frogs in the wild and helping with surveys, what, six months or so after I got back, populations absolutely started crashing of the golden frog, which was kind of like even more lighting a fire, right?

It was like, oh, wow, those species that just had this big impact on me are now gone, right? And now looking back, that was the beginning of the rapid decline of that species. and they haven't been seen in the wild since, you know, 2009, 2010-ish. And so I think no matter what happens, I always look back at that. And that's, you know, that's kind of that reminder of, you know, why you're here and why you're doing what you're doing. And we also have golden frogs at our zoo. There's lots of golden frogs in U.S. zoos, which is a great thing for the species

for the future for whenever we're able to figure out how to reintroduce them. So I also have that reminder every day. And it's also my only tattoo is a golden bird. and frog and so um you know it's it's it's a it's a program that stuck with me forever i'm not as involved as i once was but that's the one that kind of that was my catalyst um so yeah around that time i was working at a a different zoo in in florida i was working at uh it was called lowry park now it's called zoo Tampa okay and so i worked there and at the time i really started trying to learn more about local stuff right like yes everybody wants to go save the cool the

species that occur in the tropics or in Africa or Australia. But, you know, our backyard is just as important, if not more important, to all of us. And so, you know, I began helping do some, you know, surveys for things like striped newts and gopher frogs, trying to start building up programs in Florida as well, trying to get more partnerships built. At that point, it was really about partnerships because there wasn't a lot being done in Florida with many conservation of amphibs and there was some with herps but indigo's at the time. There was no Orion program for reintroducing back then.

So it was a different kind of climate back then in Florida. But I think getting involved with some of those field surveys opened up the doors to to kind of where I kind of started to go next when I went to to another zoo. So yeah, that's kind of, that was kind of the start for me for conservation itself. and yeah. And then, you know, fast forwarding, fast forwarding a few years, I moved down to Zoo Miami, where I was actually originally from, I was born in Miami. And while in Miami, I had the opportunity to, you know, do more field work in Puerto Rico. And so I became the Puerto Rican Crest and Toad Stud Bookkeeper, which I thought really sounded like a great idea back then. I'm glad I did it because it has

opened up a lot of doors and and I've been going to Puerto Rico twice a year every year since 2010 barring you know a couple of years here and there COVID or other other other things getting in the way but ever since then I go down to Puerto Rico twice a year to help with field surveys we do site visits there's over a dozen zoos in the United States that breed the crest of the toad for release back in the wild it's a it's a federally endangered species and so we're involved with everything we're involved with building ponds down there. We're involved with monitoring population, creating new ponds, creating new sites. So we do it all. And so there's over a thousand cress of toads in zoos in the United States. So yeah, I'm the stud-but-keeper for all of those.

I'm the vice coordinator of the program. The program itself has evolved. It was an SSP, which I'm sure both of you have heard of SSP, is a species survival plan through AZA-P programs, but it evolved, and now it's, it's actually its own NGO. So it's called the Puerto Rican Crestatode Conservancy. And that is kind of what has led me to working with the Virgin Islands boa. So I know I kind of have bounced around right there, but before I jump into any, any VI Boa specific stuff, do you want me to touch on anything else? Or did you have questions about some of, some of the other programs I worked on in Miami, whether it was, you know, few, you know, fieldwork, local species, invasive species, things like that.

Yeah, we'll probably come around to that. One thing just on the crested toad, man, they are neat looking, right? It really reminds me of the Mexican casketted frogs in terms of that, you know, ornamentation or structure underneath the top jaw on things. So, yeah, really interesting. They are neat. So, yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing one of those. So with, yeah, with those, are they, they're disappearing from their habitat.

So obviously they need some help, but is it a kittred thing or is it something else? With the crescentode, it's a little bit of everything, right? So, you know, even though the island of Puerto Rico is really big, right? It's 80 miles across. And there's actually a lot of pretty good forests that exists there. But most of the habitat that exists there does not have breeding sites, right? So most of the breeding sites that the species once utilized are gone. and the one massive population that once was in the South,

in the Guantica dry forest, its breeding pond was actually a parking lot for many, many years. And for decades, literally for decades, every single year people would use it to park because it's right along a beautiful beach. There's a beach called Tamarindo Beach, and Tamarindo Beach is a very famous beach in the southwest, Puerto Rico, and everybody goes there.

And then every year, what would happen is, they would get a massive rain event, the pond would flood, cars couldn't park there, and then the toads came down and bred, right? And so many, many years ago, you know, there were as many as 2,000 toads that came in to breed in one event. But since then, that pond has been inundated with salt water through salt creek from significant weather events. It's in the sand.

It's probably in the mangrove vegetation around. And so that pond that was once a, you know, more or less a freshwater ephemeral pond, so to speak, you know, for comparing it to one of our ponds, that pond now gets inundated with salt water almost immediately. And so when the toads want to come down and breed, lay their eggs, then all of a sudden the salt creeps up to 20, 30, 50, 60 parts per thousand, right? More than the ocean. And so the tadpoles can't survive. So that's one big issue. And then every time we think we get ahead of the curve, then you get something like a hurricane comes in and wipes out all the tree canopy

over some of the sites. Or, you know, back around right after COVID, there was some really bad earthquakes that went through that same area, Guantica. And a lot of the microhabitat was absolutely destroyed. They use these really cool karst limestone. outcrops and they'll use the holes, the little fissures that have been created over, you know, millions of years. And so, you know, I can tell you, there were multiple holes that I would just, would go to the site and you'd just hop up, climb up this one wall and there would almost always be a toad in

this one little fissure. And then you go over there to be one of this fissure. At one site, we could see, you know, 20, 30, 40 in a night. And after the earthquakes, within two years, the earthquakes, that same site we haven't we haven't we haven't seen any i think since 2022 maybe um so yeah it's it's been it's been um really frustrating the last few years with the with the crescent program but we did um we did have some um great success with uh awareness the last year and a half because bad bunny and his album brought the awareness of the crescentode to a new level i mean oh wow um you know i've been going to Puerto Rico since 2010, and unless you're talking to one of the partners that are involved with the program, most people don't know what a crescent toad is, right? They think a crescent toad

is the big brown toad in their yard, which is a cane toad, whatever you prefer to call it. I know you all love Australia, so we can call it a cane toad. So, yeah, but everybody thinks that's the crested toad. And when they realize, no, they actually have this little cool toad that's found pretty much nowhere else in the world. You know, they appreciate it. But, but, it's not front and center right front and center is marine toads or cokeys right that's where all the attention goes but bad bunny you know when he he made the video and then um the album uh just was constantly talking about and showing the toad every appearance that he had the toad was making appearances and then of course you know the holy grail the super bowl the crescent toad on the big screen

right nobody in the history of crescent toads would have ever thought of the portoican and Toto would be at the Super Bowl halftime show. So, yeah, it's amazing. Yeah. Man, that's crazy that, you know, a big celebrity getting involved. It makes a big difference like that. That's really cool. Yeah.

What a good guy. Yeah, for sure. And what was really cool is the end of last year, he did this massive concert series in Puerto Rico that lasted about a month. And it was called the Residence. And sorry, I don't speak Spanish. So I'm not going to try to pronounce it that way. I can say enough to get by, but not enough to sound like I know what I'm doing.

And so, but during the residence, he had these photo booths set up. And inside the photo booths, you could go in there and you could have the bad bunny hat to put on and sunglasses and things like that. But the background, he had a bunch of crescent toad photos. And so it really was just reminding people everywhere they went. They could see the crescentode and remember, you know, the heritage. So that's cool. That's been awesome and definitely unexpected. And I've wanted to for years, try to find somebody that could be that spokesperson.

I'm kind of into sports. And so my thought was always like, okay, who's this cool athlete, right? Or who's this person that can do it? That's Puerto Rican. But, yeah, this happened by the wayside. And, yeah, so hopefully it doesn't stop. Not many bigger names than his right now. Yeah, that's cool.

Well, I'm glad he's involved in conservation efforts. What about restoration of like breeding ponds or, or, you know, creating new sites where they can breed that are in, you know, protected areas. Yeah, so that, that, the forest, I was talking about the Guantica forest. I'm mentioning its name, you know, the toad is protected, the area is protected. You're not supposed to go there looking for the toad. Right. And it's, yeah, it's a federal, it's federally protected.

It's state protected. I'm just telling everybody that now because I'm only mentioning the name because it's, it's all over the internet. It's all over every report. out there that knows the species knows that Guanica is it. But also, to be fair, I've been working with the species since 2010. I've seen live toads,

adult toads in Guantica, probably I can count on one hand how many adult toads I've seen in Ghana. And I go there on every trip, I go there at least two or three times. So, yeah, when they're not downbreeding, they are up in a nasty forest. And I say nasty because it's not fun to work in,

not because it's not beautiful, because it is dry, it's a dry, it's a dry desert forest basically. You know, there's cactus there, there's agave, a lot of plants that don't treat people very nicely. And those are why I said. But no, I love the coastal forests in Puerto Rico, well, in the Caribbean in general. But yeah, so within that forest, we've, knowing that that pond that the toads have always used is being indicted with saltwater. we've built two ponds at higher elevation so that they should be able to last, you know, 30, 40, 50 years based on current models of sea rise. And then we're actively right now building one or two even larger ponds that are also a little higher elevation within the Guantica dry forest.

So we're still working on working out the kinks of those ponds. But they have been used at least once or twice for breeding since we've put those in. And yeah, I would say probably in the next two years, we'll have the other two puns installed. So last couple chips, it's been mapping them out, figuring out exactly, you know, we have, we have colleagues down there that are hydrologists at the university. And so they come out, they do evaporation tests. They look at the elevation, you know, LIDAR to figure out exactly where all the low spots are. And so we're moving in the right direction.

It's just like everything else. It just takes a lot of time for sure. Yeah. Does it seem like they're pretty amenable or plastic to utilizing new ponds or does it seem like there's sort of ingrained sort of spatial memory to go to now unsuitable places? I feel like they would be amenable to using our ponds if we can get them to fill as quickly as they should and as well as we want them to and then also hold water, right? That's the issue. when you're in a dry forest, right? Imagine building a pond and, you know, in Seguaro National Forest and saying,

okay, I want water to stay here for 30 days, right? Because that's about the life cycle of the tadpole. Well, every plant's like, sweet. I've got free water now, right? And so every plant is using it. And yeah, these ponds, they'll have a few inches of water that'll get wicked up by the forest within a couple days. And so it's figuring out exactly how to build the right pond that,

will only last for about 30 or 40 days, and that's it, right? Because we don't want it to be a breeding site for marine toads. Cuban tree frogs have made an appearance now in Puerto Rico since right around 2020, maybe a couple of years before that was when we saw our first Cuban tree frog. So, yeah, we're trying to create a balance between a good environment for the toad,

but then also not create more of the enemy. Right. And has there been some, I guess, release and things like that from captive bread populations? Has that been successful? Yeah. So the population itself that I keep referring to in Guantanica, that's a wild population. We don't do any releases there. But we have currently about four other release sites elsewhere on the island that do not overlap with the natural population.

We're doing it separately. and all of those sites currently we release tadpoles in every year multiple times a year. And the number of tadpoles can be anywhere from 5,000 to 25,000 in an individual release. And all of those sites have had reproduction since they've been in existence. Some have been around a little longer. Some have been around probably since 2005, 2006. six or so was one of the first ones that was used. And then we're still actively building and developing new ponds.

Populations have ebden float, especially with the various weather events. Again, Maria did a number down there on the canopy and really impacted a couple of our populations. But there's a couple other sites where we didn't see breeding up until about around COVID. I always referenced everything around COVID, right? Because there was this big break in time and even some with our memory. But yeah, since COVID, one of our sites has exploded. So every time we go there now, I feel like we used to only see one adult every trip or two. Yeah.

And the last two trips we've seen between 20 and 40 toads. Wow. So, yeah, it's been pretty exciting. But yeah, basically every year, I think we're at 16 zoos right now that are breeding toads in the U.S. and sending tadpoles back. We have a total of about four or five releases. And so we have this whole concerted effort. Everybody gets a, everybody gets the same email and says,

hey, we need you to breed these three toads with these three toads. And then when you're done, you're going to send them all back via FedEx. And then when they arrive, our partners pick them up and they go out and release them. So yeah, we do that every year, four to five times a year. And every breeding event could have, like I said, anywhere from 5,000 to 25,000 or more. And so yeah, that's been going on for years now. That's awesome. So they're pretty straightforward to reproduce then.

Not at all. However, so this is an interesting thing. So whenever this species is reproduced, because we're doing on a very strict schedule, you know, like I have a date right now. Like we're supposed to breed the Crescentoads at North Carolina Zoo on. And I don't remember the date off the top of my head. Let's just say it's like September 28th, right? Well, we do that for a reason, right? We have multiple release sites.

We need to release that. We need to do it over certain time frames. And like, you know, we take care of these sites. We're our partners take care of these sites. So they're out there draining the ponds, cleaning the ponds, making sure they have water in them. And then, you know, they go, they get the cressetode tadpoles. They come back and a marine toad bread. So then they have to drain it again, get all the tadpoles out, start all over again.

but so we actually do most of our reproduction with the crescentodes using hormones. We do have a cycle that we put them through. We cool them down. Most of us either have reproductive biologists on site that focus on amphibians or our vets have been trained. And so the ultrasound females grade the eggs. And if eggs are, you know, this stage or this stage, we'll put the animals together. We usually give them about two or three days to reproduce naturally in a rain chamber.

And if they don't breed, then we go through hormone therapy. And it's a protocol that was actually created originally back in the 80s. And ever since then, it's evolved. We've made some minor tweaks here and there. But it's still been a pretty stable protocol that we've followed and all of our other partners followed for years now. I know it doesn't sound as exciting. And it sounds like, well, you know, why are you doing it? If you can't breed them or you're not keeping them right.

Well, you know, there are many amphibians that are explosive breeders. And for many years, some of the experts of Puerto Rico would tell you that if it did not breathe, if there was not a barometric pressure drop of X amount, I don't know, like 200 or something like that. And there weren't three inches of rain. And all of that didn't happen within 18 hours. Then the toads wouldn't breed, right? And because in the south, they breed a lot different than they do in the north. And so, yeah, we've tried just about everything.

I mean, when I was in Florida, I kept them outside during a hurricane and they didn't breed. So I felt like nobody can beat that. Yeah. And at the same time, a buddy of mine in New Orleans did the exact same thing, and they didn't breed there naturally. We have bred them naturally. Every year, a couple of zoos breed them naturally, but the output for us does not seem to

be that different. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting question, right? especially when we're talking generationally of artificially stimulated breeding, like, do you see any impact out of that? I would say. I suppose that's a good question, right?

It's kind of saying how do you manage. Is that an additional consideration? Yeah, no, exactly. And when we're breeding, I mentioned before, like, you need to breed these three pairs. You need to breed these three pairs. We do them completely separately. We don't want to take the chance of this male sperm fertilizing, you know, sperm from a different pairing.

And so they're all completely separated. So we can track that easier. Obviously, it's much easier on me when they don't have multiple parents, but that happens, right? And but from an output standpoint in the wild, there are multiple sustainable populations of Crescetodes that are only from zoo bread animals. And so clearly it's working. Like I said, last time we were down there, you know, we have to park sometimes. a quarter mile from one of the sites because when they were there before, there's so many toadlets all over the ground. The ground's moving, which it's a great, it's a great problem to have,

right? But, but yeah, it's, I don't think it has any other effects like that on, on their reproduction. I think for us, it's more a matter of, it's a tool in toolbox, you know, it's, it's no different than, you know, we, we experiment with it all the time with other species and programs, right? Like if you have a species that's in a drastic decline and maybe you want to, you know, rescue genes from the wild, but you don't want to take adults. Now we can actually go down. When I go down next week, I'm bringing our amphibian repo biologist, another zoo is bringing mares. And we're going to collect sperm from wild toads, freeze it down there, bring it back. And then we can, you know, we can enter that into the stud book and use the population management software.

and they'll tell us, yeah, that founder male would be great with this female that's not been represented or is underrepresented. So it's a different way of looking at it. And it's not just amphibians. Like, I want to be able to do that with the VI boas in the future. They're doing it with Louisiana pine snakes. I don't, I think that paper already came out. But yeah, so it's been, it's been done before. So, again, it's another, it's another tool in the conservation toolbox.

We have to be, we have to be creative, right? We can't look at everything as being perfect or ideal all the time. We have to adapt to the curveballs and I get a lot of curve balls. All right. What's the rationale behind releasing tadpoles instead of raising them up to like toadlet stage? Resources. You know, again, if one zoo alone can have, if, you know, if all three of their pairs go and all three of their females are full, they could, they could have. you know, 15 to 25,000 tadpoles and raising that many up.

Now, luckily, again, they're, you know, they're only, depending on temperature, they're in their larval state for, you know, 28 to 35 days if the temperature's right. But that's a lot of really, that's a lot of poop. That's a lot of tadpole poop. That's a lot of feeding. But, you know, water quality on that. All it takes is one day, you know, one or two tadpoles die and that crashes. And, you know, there's, there's a lot of different.

And I just had this question at a meeting recently because the person asked the question does this with gopher frogs. And go for frogs, we breed them at the zoo. Well, we headstart them at our zoo and we release those as Mets. And at halftime, I'm like, let's rear them even longer. Let's keep them as long as we can. Give them a better chance at survival. But I think with Crescentodes, too, you know, there's some level of naivety. And I think releasing him as larva probably helps them with homing back to that pond, the natal pond.

the natal pond. But I think there's studies have shown both work, right? It depends on the species, the environment, the habitat they're released in, things like that. But yeah, we go back and forth on that all the time. What should we do? And recently, we've done a lot more attempts at raising small groups to larger sizes. You know, three months, six months, nine months, things like that, doing some radio tracking of offspring as well as harmonic tags.

And so we've done that a couple times pretty recently. But I don't think it's going to change for us because it's just at this point it's about output. Right. I imagine they're probably an important part of the food web there as well. So a lot of the tadpoles will go to feeding other animals on, you know, on Puerto Rico. And that can be a helpful thing to, you know, disappearance of one thing can lead to a lot of unintended consequences, I'm sure.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. You know, when, you know, we do our best to keep the predators out of the ponds, when we release them as tadpoles, the ponds are wrapped with shade cloth because otherwise dragonfly larva would come in and just, you know, decimate them. And so would anything and everything else, you know, Cuban tree frog tadpoles can outcompete them and stunt their growth as well as marine toads as well. But once they all come out and there's tens of thousands of these little toadlets everywhere, you know, it is, you know, it is food for other animals and that's, that's fine, that's normal, right?

We only, if it was, if it was a natural breeding, we would only expect, you know, what, 2% to survive to be adults, you know, so it's, it's, it's what's expected. And that's, I think that's another reason why we go for that number, right? Go for releasing as many as you can and, and we know more will survive. Yeah. Do they have a lufotoxin or other as metamorphed animals that? Let's then be a little bit more resilient to invasive predation. That's a great question.

I'm going to say I assume that they do have the toxin when they morph out. I don't know that anybody's ever actually studied that at the metamorphosis size, but I will say they're so small, I don't know if it would matter. I mean, these things are tiny. I took a photo in my last trip, and I think the animals were morphing out a little bit quicker because of either temperature or because maybe there was some stress that was out of the ordinary. I don't know for sure, but they were a little smaller than normal.

But yeah, I think I have a photo of one on a 2025 penny, and you could still see probably 90% of the penny when the toad was on there. Normally they morph a little bigger than that. I think, you know, it's probably something, though, that a lot of the birds, a lot of the, you know, the little snakes that are there. There's a number of species of snakes that we do see around those ponds. They have probably adapted to dealing with that, with that toxin, you know, unlike, you know, marine toad toxin.

Very cool. And while we're talking about snakes in that area and you talked about limestone karst, what about not the bow at issue, but another bow, a beau of a favorite of mine, the Puerto Rican bell. Yeah. So actually, one of the sites, as I'm telling this story about, about the, you know, the pond being protected with shadecloth and us doing the release, There's a really cool site that we work out of in the north. It's in Arisibo, Puerto Rico. It's run by an organization called CDK, the Citizens of the Karst. And the gentleman that manages that group, he has this absolutely amazing piece of land.

It's basically like this massive, it looks like a crater. It's over 400 acres and it's completely lush. And when I'm staying there, every morning I wake, up. I have to remind myself, I'm in Puerto Rico. And it's not that that sounds bad, but you feel like you're in Costa Rica, right? There's acropia trees everywhere. There's parrots flying by. There's just hummingbirds everywhere. And then you get cokeys calling. And you're like, okay, I'm not in Costa Rica anymore, you know. And so, yeah, so that site is one of the, one of the sites we do see Puerto Rico's a lot. So, you know, Puerto Rican boas are, you know, they're, I don't think they're

listed any longer. I can't remember if that was just a proposal to delist them or if that has fully gone through. I can't remember. But yeah, in some areas, Puerto Rican boas are pretty common. I'm not saying that because I think they should be protected or not. The site that we work at, it's pretty awesome. It's right next to one of the field stations down there called Matta Plattano, and it's owned and managed by the same organization.

And so that's one. one of the other kind of home basis for us. And so not far from there, there's a pretty famous cave, a bat cave or boa cave, whatever you want to call it. And every chance that we get, we go there. It probably ends up for me, unfortunately, only being about once every two years. But every time we go there, you know, we usually try to bring some people who have never been.

And then it's just like this amazing spectacle where you walk up to this little cave. And there's eight, ten boas sitting around there just catching bats all night. long and you know it's it's the most amazing thing to see and the whole time you're there like the cool air is coming out from the um from the cave and then you've got all these bats flying around and you've got boas and you're like oh look at that you know every time it's like oh there's another one there's another one oh there's one by your feet you know and they're just all coming out and they're all trying to snag these bats it's amazing um and luckily for us i would say at least two of our sites um are near bat or are near caves that have portoican boa so there's been i think

my best trip ever was probably 30, I don't remember, it was either 32 or 38 boas in one trip. And that was split between three different sites. And then when you're, when you're leaving the cave and you're walking away, then you're, of course, tuned to everything. And then that's when you start seeing the younger ones that are probably out looking for annoles and, you know, sleeping birds, things like that. cokeys and those sites you know you'll see the little you know the newborns that are kind of they have that reddish color they look great and they you see them as they're doing their transitionary color and pattern but it's pretty it's pretty awesome to be able to see those guys and in some of the sites that we work in it's uh it's um not something we've ever targeted right it's just one of those like okay if you're near here you can't not visit the the Puerto Ricoas and one of our partners on the project is Dr. Alberto Puente, and he's been doing Puerto Rican boa research for

probably, I don't know, at least 30 years, if not longer. So he's our, he's our resource and our book, if we have any questions about, about Puerto Rican boas or, I mean, anything Puerto Rican, about natural history, he's, he's amazing. But yeah, he's, he's the boa guy, for sure. That's awesome. The, and just the context to be able to, you know, in a field herb context, see observe activity, right? So much of the time snakes are inactive when we get the, you know, we're fortunate to see them at all. So that if they're doing something, that's amazing. Yeah, right.

And how many times you get excited because you get to see one, right? You know, we finally get to see this one Puerto Rican boa. You're so excited. And I still remember my first Puerto Rican boa. It was actually at the, the locality where the last known northern Puerto Rican Cresthood population was breeding. It was the first ever site they were ever found breeding. And the toads are gone from there now. But we were there one time visiting. It was my first trip there. And I found one. And I was like, oh, this is awesome. Like I just found a bow. My first, my first bow in the wild period. And then,

but then you go to a site like this and it's like, okay, there's a dozen. This is, this is amazing. But yeah, to just be able to sit there and then, you know, you're, you know, talking to everybody, everybody's enjoying themselves and you flip light back on and you see another one missing. Because they, you know, they probably miss 200 bats for everyone they catch. But then they just sit there and they just catch them and eat them in a few more minutes. They catch and eat another one. It's such an awesome thing to see. Wow.

Yeah, absolutely. They do seem tuned into eating relatively small food, right? So in that kind of take brief tangent into keeping animals in captivity either at home or in the zoo, right, is that there are different seeming predilections for different species and things where my own observation with them is. been that, yeah, they like large mice rather than feeding them rats or something like that. Because, yeah, they're more attuned to eating a half dozen or even a dozen of them or whatever in an evening than they already eaten one large rat. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think we can all say that, you know, when we see, when we see whatever that species is, species A, B, or C, and then we see them in the wild. Then we go back and look at the ones we have. And they were like, maybe, maybe he needs to skip a meal or five. But yeah, no, I think more importantly, that's kind of one of the cool things I think that maybe

I think as a community, I think everybody's getting better at recognizing that what's going on in the field and how we can adapt that a little bit more. I feel like more and more and more I see people that are interested in getting in the field and seeing the species in the wild. And I think there's so much that we're all taking away from that, right? and I think being able to see the behaviors and realize how much they're able to, you know, climb this vertical wall and how much they do that every single night, you know, if there's a new moon or, you know, whatever the, you know, third quarter, whatever the moon phase is, or rain or whatever barometric pressure drop, like they're doing this frequently. And so, yeah, how can we stimulate them and how can we duplicate that in a much, much,

smaller space or temporary spaces, right? So, yeah. Absolutely. Well, maybe that's a good point to transition to the Virgin Island, Boa. I'm curious, too, like with, I imagine you have Puerto Rican toads on exhibit at the zoo, or do you not? Unfortunately, we do not. So we don't have an area where we can, where we can display any Caribbean species. So we have dozens of Puerto Rican Crescent Toads at the zoo, and I have,

I don't want to say I have way too many V.I. Boas, but we have a lot of V.I. Boas and nothing's on exhibit. We talk about them a lot through social media, through our website. There may be, I don't think we have any graphics in the park right now. But

yeah, we spread the message every chance that we get that this is the kind of thing that happens behind the scenes. But, yeah, unfortunately, we don't have the crest of toads yet. It seems like a good excuse for one of those like traveling exhibits, you know, smaller. or just get something set up just so you can tout your conservation.

I was even thinking like, okay, we don't have a theme in the gift shop. Let me put a tank in the gift. You know, I'd love to put Crescentodes in there because, you know, I love. They're unique looking. Yeah. Yeah, right? And I love the diversity of Puerto Rico. There's so many species you could exhibit with them.

There's really cool in Knowles. There's coquies. There's a lot of potential there. So, yeah. Hopefully we get there soon, but we're not there yet, unfortunately. Okay. Sorry, you're back to the BIA. No, no, you're fine.

Like I said, it's always, it's always interesting, though, to tell people that, you know, because there are times when people think that, oh, you work at a zoo, you just want to come get this animal so you can put it on exhibit. Well, actually, no, we're doing this all behind the scenes because that's the best space for the animal sometimes, right? You know, we don't want them out front where it's harder for us to control the climate. We don't want them in an area where, you know, we want them to be able to hop. and do anything and everything they want to do and not be on exhibit. So it's just, it's a different, it's a different mindset to think about, about how it's managed at a zoo and how we do have some species that that's the focus.

And some species, it's, it's not. Yeah, and VI boas are definitely that one because they would be a terrible exhibit animal if we tried to exhibit them. I think crescent toads are probably pretty similar because they are nocturnal and hide, but I feel like they're an amphibian. And so generally speaking, you know, a lot of these toads, they're thinking, you know, I have everything I need. There's no predator here to eat me. I know food's going to come from up there sometime soon. So I'm going to wait out for it. You know, but yeah, the Ibo is it's not like that. They want to be in the darkest spot away from everybody, darkest, tightest spot possible and not come out at all. Unless it's nighttime. Yeah, that's, I imagine. I imagine that's a challenge with most reptiles, you know, snakes at least, you know, and maybe not lizards. But. getting them to display or be out and about,

that's really got to be kind of a tricky thing. Oh, yeah, it is. It goes back to that collection planning. Like, you know, we constantly, I'm always like, okay, I love this gecko, but we already have two nocturnal geckos that you can't see on exhibit. Do we want to add a third, right? But yeah, it's a balance. But you know what?

And my thought is always, well, let's try it. But all three nocturnal geckos together, maybe somebody will come out. Right. I mean, you'd be surprised. I didn't realize you didn't have the I bowes on display. way. No, no, we don't. Do reverse photo period em or something and yeah. Yeah. You know, it's, it's not even that. It's really just the theming, right? I feel like, I feel like I probably could justify the fact that, you know, the Guantica dry forest is called a dry forest, right? Maybe I can say

that's the desert and maybe I should put them on exhibit in the desert. But, yeah, but we haven't done it. And it's funny because our desert team actually helps take care of the VI. Boas, but we've never, we've never actually brought it up there. I think we're always just so excited about getting something new and different that we've never had like okay cool let's get this you know whatever whatever new species i can't think of the line we just got preempty we got a prention uh last week or the week before we just went on exhibit for the first time and like so yeah i can't i can't not get another new cool you know herb so yeah did you get it from another zoo are they being successful in their breeding yeah henry henry dorily zoo and oh yeah we got this one

I mean, he's a beautiful animal, great personality. He's on the small side. I mean, he's only probably two and a half feet long. And his exhibit is probably, I don't know, I don't want to exaggerate. I'm terrible at this. I'm going to say his exhibit's probably 25 feet long, 15 feet deep and 15 feet tall. And so he disappears. But again, it's a parenti.

So he's super active. And he's young. So he's always basking, moving, basking moving. And so it's what it's what the guests want to see. Even though they all think it's a baby Komodo dragon, we all know how really cool it is. Oh, yeah, it's my favorite reptile, I think. I love those parentheses, yeah. Got to see one on my last trip to Australia.

Two of them actually, yeah, it was pretty sweet. Nice. I went to Australia in 2023, but I was there for a conference, so I did not get to pick when I went. And we did not get to see Parenti's. I was in Western Australia. I love W.A. Yeah. So it was, it was good.

We had, I was there for a conservation, um, translocation conference. And then me and, uh, another guy stayed for, actually, we went five days early to Hurt before the meeting. Um, so yeah, it's, where'd you make it, too? What's that? Where'd you go Hurp? Uh, we went, uh, so we arrived. The conference was in Fremantle. So we got to Adelaide, um, after however many, you know, 30 hours of travel.

or whatever it was, and then hopped in the car and then drove north. We wanted to make it to Shark Bay. We didn't make it to Shark Bay the first day, but we stopped just south of Shark Bay, herped around there for a day and then drove up. We spent a few days in Shark Bay before we drove back. But the weather was okay. I mean, it was, what month? It was, oh, let's see.

That must have been, I think it was early October. Oh, great time to be there. Maybe late September, early October. It was dry and cool. And so I had I had some higher hopes. Yeah. But yeah, I think they had had, if I'm not mistaken, I think it had been drier than normal. I mean, it's again, it's a desert, right?

So it's got to be dry. So, but knowing, knowing that I don't ever set high expectations for herping trips. Maybe it's a superstitious thing. I don't know, Rob, maybe this is on your list of things to talk about. I'm not one of these people that's like, okay, I'm going to go on this. trip and I'm going to see this, this, this, this, and this, right? Like, I'm not going to have these 12 species anymore. I've just, I lower my expectations and I'm just like, give me just one target, right? Just give me one, one, maybe two. And so my, my top two targets were singlebacks.

Yeah. And, and, and I wanted to see a Moloch. And so, um, I was like, well, surely single back's going to be easy, right? Buddy of mine sees, saw a hundred on the trip before this. And so, um, you, Yeah, no, I didn't. I didn't see any live shinglebacks. Only, like, I think I saw four, four dead ones. One fresh. I mean, it was like probably, I don't know. You know how it is, right?

The worst. Before we drove by. And I love shingle back. So, but I got to see a moloch. And so, and it was alive in the middle of the road crossing. And no matter where anybody, other stories, people tell you, I did not leave the car in park. I mean, in drive. I put it in park before he hopped out and sprinted back to grab it.

and take photos because that may be the coolest lizard in the world. Yeah. I don't know. I think it probably is. They rank up there. Yeah. Yeah. That's very cool. That was my number one of the trip.

At that point, I was like, whatever, I don't care what we see. I'm good. This is definitely an amazing lizard. So, yeah. Yeah. I don't know how we got on the Moloch's from the Iboas, but we're here. Australia. Yeah, you mentioned Australia.

I'll be very excited. I'll take the opportunity. Well, and I was going to say that, so we saw, I've yet to see a parenti in the wild, but we did see a handful that the Ipers have. And it really struck me, and this would probably at least come to be meaningful to you, Dustin, they really reminded me of like overgrown glowerdye is really the same sort of demeanor action movement, all those things. So maybe as this one gets comfortable with you, you'll see it. Yeah. Yeah, that's our hope.

I mean, you know, what we've picked up on so far and what, you know, I know the guys at Omaha, really well. We collaborated on a couple projects, and we were just, after our zoo hurt meeting in Phoenix a couple weeks ago, me and a couple of the guys from Omaha and a couple other state in Arizona and Hurt for a few days. And he was telling me, you know, the way he was describing his experience with Perensi, I went back and told the keeper exactly what he said. And he's like, that is exactly what it did. I walked in the enclosure and it charged me and then I grabbed it. And then it was just a puppy dog I just laid there. So I haven't personally done that yet because I've been too busy since we got the

Perentee in to go in there and check them out up close. But I was there when we put him on exhibit and he was, he was, he was awesome. So I'm happy. Is that mad out there at Henry Dorley? No, it was Andy, Andy Reeves and Derek were the two guys that I worked with out there. But yeah, I've worked with Jesse, the Herp Curator there for. for, I don't know, over a decade. He's also involved with the Crestatode program.

And they're now also involved. They're one of our partners on the Viiboa project too. So we've sent them a couple of Viiboas recently, and they're expanding their efforts with that species as well. So another great facility with a ton of great constitution work. That's one of my favorite zoos in the country. It's so great. I mean, speaking of desert domes, they've got the really nice.

Yeah, ours is like a little miniature version of that that would fit inside of Omaha's, but I'm not going to lie, I love our desert. Like, it was a draw for me. When I came to North Carolina for the first time and saw it, I was, I was in awe, you know, and now to, you know, to be able to just walk through it anytime I want, it's like, this is pretty cool. I need one of these in my house. That's very cool.

I'll have to make a trip out there. That'd be awesome. Yeah. Definitely. My buddy, Steve worked at the Omaha Zoo for a while, too, Steve Sharp and. Oh, yeah, I know Steve. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, we were, I'm trying to think last time I saw Steve was the last time he was at a zoo Hurt meeting. And I feel like, I feel like we were herping a little bit too. I can't remember where that was. Maybe, I don't know if it was Virginia or Tennessee. I don't know. They all run together, right? We do this every year, the, we call it the HRP tags.

Yeah. It's a tax on advisory group meeting. And so there's about, you know, there's just about 120 or so keepers, curators, conservation biologists from zoos around the U.S., mostly at accredited zoos that attend the meeting. You know, our meetings cover everything from, you know, hey, we just bred this species, or, hey, have anybody seen this disease because it's scary or, you know, discussing field work, things like that. I talk about our conservation programs. I usually talk about VI boas or Crested Toads or, you know, whatever else. I talked about one of our new salamander projects the other day

when I was there. But I'm also on a couple steering committees. So I'm supposed to be there also in that, in that, you know, kind of I put on that hat as well. I'm the chair of the amphibian tag for AZA. So I'm the officially amphibian guy for the meetings. And then I'm on a snake steering committee. So, yeah, I have to do some other things like organized meetings and find speakers. But when you're in Arizona, finding amphibian speakers.

is interesting. But everybody else had easy time, right? It was like, okay, who do we want to call it to talk about rattlesnakes and or Gila monsters or whatever? So, but it made for a great meeting. Like there was a ton of great talks. And obviously to be able to leave a meeting at 5 o'clock and go out and find a Speckled Rattlesnake in like 45 minutes is absolutely amazing.

Definitely. Yeah. Yeah, Steve and I were, we found our first Parenti in the Wild together in, in W.A. We were up in the next mouth. Yeah. I was taking a little nap. I was in the shade somewhere as the heat of the day. And Steve came running over.

Dude, there's a Peretti over by the car. And I was like up and running before I could even wake up. It was, was, were you on the trip? And this is going to sound like I'm a total stalker. And I'm okay with that. Whatever. The pinnacles. Were you the pinnacles?

Oh, yeah. Okay. So, on the pairs of shinglebacks around. Yes, the pairs of single back. So we were coming back from, we were. were coming back from Shark Bay and the weather was terrible. Uh-huh. I mean, absolutely terrible.

And I was, and our plan was, we were to stop at the Pinnacles because I read that web, I don't know, it was like a blog or something that, that he had shared or you or somebody who had shared. Yeah. Justin's famous, uh, trip blogs. Yes, yes. So I was reading that and I was like, okay, we're going to go to the pinnacles because the single back's like to sit at the bottom of the, of the, uh, of those structures. And unfortunately, we made a wrong turn.

And so we're looking at the. map and we were like two hours past it and we couldn't turn around and go back because we had to get to I had to get to my meeting I was there for a reason um so yeah unfortunately I tried my best to to follow in y'all's footsteps from that trip um because I saw that but no love. Oh darn yeah that's a yeah I want to go back to yeah I want to go back to yeah we saw a lot of good stuff, but I still haven't seen my, my, uh, Tulaqua, like the, the westerns and the centrallians. I still need to see those. When we were, when we were photographing the, uh, the Moloch, um, we found a dead, um, um, blue tongue in that area. And it just like beautiful, you know,

the black, the black mask was just amazing. But all we found was like the front half of the body. So right. It wasn't as, it wasn't as exciting as it should have been. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in, in the Pinnacles area, we, along the main road, we counted 20 dead shinglebacks or maybe 30 dead shinglebacks in like the space, you know, the of a mile like 30 or in that area. It was ridiculous. I just can't believe how much carnage those roads have, but yeah. Yeah. But I mean, they're pretty thriving. Yeah, I mean, yeah, on a recent trip to South Australia, we saw 40 shinglebacks alive and, and, and kicking. It was fantastic. Yeah. I never get sick of seeing those. Yeah. Good spots.

All right. Well, on to Boas. On the Boas, I guess. Yeah. So I guess I'm just going to, you want to jump into, you want to talk about VI Boas before I jump into the project? Or what do you, what do you prefer? Yeah, just a little context. And VI, VI stands for Virgin Islands.

Yeah, Virgin Islands. So, yeah, so the Virgin Islands boa, she'll the both of us grand tie. you know, was originally described back in the 1930s. It was 1932 was when the type of specimen was found in Tortola, British Virgin Islands, which is beautiful. I would highly recommend if people have not been to the British Virgin Islands, they are amazing. But yeah, so he was there doing some expedition for Herps.

And if you, by the way, let me take a step back. The VI boa type specimen was found by Chapman Grant. And so Chapman Grant was the individual who founded Herpetlogica, the journal. And so he was a really young budding herpetologist and traveling all around, especially in the Caribbean, doing herp stuff, but also some fish stuff. And he found the species or somebody gave him the species or some debate about actually whether he found it or somebody else did. And then it was formally described the next.

next year it was thought to be a subspecies of PR boas. And then many, many years later, it was then thought to be a subspecies of Mona boa. And so Mona Boa is a really cool boa from Mona Island, which is on the west coast of Puerto Rico. I have not been there yet. It's on my list, but it's a bit of an undertaking to get there and to do it and find the boas. But I'll do it one of these days. But mono boas are like a little bit larger than than VI boas and their their patterns are a little cleaner. But generally speaking, they look pretty similar. But yeah, VI boas are pretty small species of boa. The average one we see throughout most of the range is probably only about two feet long and maybe 40 to 50 grams, right? That's it. Up until excluding

Tortola, because Tortola is this weird place for VI boas. I'll talk about that later. But, you know, Puerto Rico and Boas are found from eastern Puerto Rico, right? So you have Mona on the far west side, and then you have to go all the way across the island to the very, very northeast corner. And that's the only known natural population of V.I. Boas on the island of Puerto Rico. Okay. And then if you skip just off the island, there's a series of smaller islands called La Cordillera Reserve, which is a reserve for wildlife, especially mainly for birds.

but there's an island there that has a population of V.I. Boas. And then if you skip over a little bit, there's the big island of Kulebra, right? Sounds cool for Herpers, an island named snakes. I spent, I was there with eight people, eight or ten, eight or ten people, all of us have Vyboa experience. Some of us have seen lots and lots of Vyboas. We were there for two full days looking and we didn't see any. But they say they're there, so I'm going to take their word for it. And then if you keep going,

they're found on one island in USVI, just on St. Thomas, in a pretty small area that's pretty developed. And then skip over St. John, which makes no sense, because if you look at St. John, you've got this big, massive green island that should be covered in VI Boas, but they're not there. They haven't been seen there, at least in the past hundred years. And then you get to the British Virgin Islands, and all of a sudden, they're like on multiple islands, and the snakes get big. You know, the, we recorded, we did some surveys there two years ago, the first ever formal surveys for VI Boas in the British Virgin Islands. We spent, we took two different trips. Each trip was about five days long.

And the biggest boa we found was four feet long and weighed 339 grams, I think. So we found it. And the look on the guy's face when he found it was just, it was hysterical. Giant eyes, big mouth. have a photo of when he grabbed it and he does not want me to share it with anybody but i'm happy to if anybody wants to see it um it's justin uh justin eldon from st louis zoo and then um that one i think that was the heaviest boa ever found but not the longest um then a couple days later our colleague on the project that was with us graham reynolds who you all should both know everybody

listening should know who graham is if i'm talking about west indian boas or any boa at all um and uh so So he was, we were at a site where this guy finds boas during the day, which that's the other weird thing about Tortola. They seem to be active during the day sometimes. And so we're out at night, though. Graham looks up in this tree and he finds us one and it's the largest female ever found. And that's the one I was mentioning. It's like four feet one, 320 grams. I think she was.

So, yeah, Tortola is this weird, unique place where the boas get a little bigger than anywhere else. but we're still trying to do some more work in BVI to figure out exactly where they occur. We just published a paper early, was it late last year, describing boas on Yose Van Dyke. We found them on Yose Van Dyke, which they hadn't formally been described there. There had been reports, but nothing described. So we found four there after surveying for a couple days. And so we wrote that up. But yeah, so that's kind of the range of the boa.

It is, you know, again, small to medium-sized boa, a couple feet long. They smell bad, you know, like most Caribbean boas or most, you know, they were formerly in the genus Epocrates. And most of us have probably worked with those and have been musk and don't like them either. But, you know, these guys, that's really their only defense. I mean, I've handled, I don't know, at this point, probably 75 or 80 or more VI boas in the wild. and every single one of them has musked me and not one has ever tried to bite me. The only time I've ever even seen one strike is a newborn baby when they first are born. I've had them strike at me a couple times.

But other than that, they don't try to bite, which is, I feel like that's pretty good for a Caribbean boa, right? Yeah. Now, do they do go through an ontogenic change? Like they start out kind of black and white, it seems? Yeah. So when they're born, you know, females, females clutch size is anywhere. from about three to seven. Some people say they'll have about 10 babies,

but I've never seen anything like that before. But yeah, the babies are about anywhere from, you know, three to seven or eight grams. So they're tiny. And yeah, they're kind of like almost,

almost completely black and white banded. If you look really closely, the black is more of a brownish, chocolate brown, really dark brown, but they just have this super bright contrast. And they'll have that, they'll have that kind of contrast

until they're about a year old. then they go through that onto genetic color change. And then that's when they're kind of like more of a dark brown, light brown pattern. And what's also cool about them is, I don't know if you ever see this Rob in your inner notice, but they also, they have a daytime and nighttime color as well. So the brown changes significantly. And I think, I mean, for us it helps because I think they're easier to see at nighttime. I think the light definitely hits their color a little differently.

but yeah that chocolate that chocolate brown and light brown lighten up to where it's almost like the patterns the dark brown turns into a light brown and the light brown almost turns into a light gray so yeah that's the the nighttime color change that do go through so it's pretty it's pretty cool to see that and it's not something people really think about I don't know if people just don't pay attention to that with boas I've seen boas totally shifting gears for a split second when I was in Miami, we did, we started a project radio tracking the redtail boas down in Miami at the Deering estate. And so we radio tracked a couple handful down there for, I don't know, a couple of years. And seeing an adult, we had a grab a female that would just change colors during the day.

It was really cool to see her. You know, you'd come in the morning and she'd be light gray and then midday she'd be, you know, not black, but, you know, she'd be really dark and then lighten up as the day went on and I just assumed at that point it was just because she was gravid but after working with the VI Boas and seeing that it was it's pretty cool to see that huh very cool yeah does it seem like they're reproducing every other year or every other year or every year because certainly in subflavas and inornatus they're strongly biennial um but I think maybe you said you've had consecutive years in some of these in captivity Yeah, so we assume it's every other year in most of the populations and most of the individuals.

Now, who knows? In Tortola, that's 330 gram female. She could go every year. She could probably go twice a year if she really wanted to. But we, generally speaking, only try to breed ours every other year. We feel like there's no point in really pushing it. However, I say that because that's what we started with. You know, when we first brought in our boas for the breeding program,

And we brought in about, I think we brought in 18, we brought in nine pairs. First time we went to collect them, we got nine pairs. Like, we didn't have, the ratio was perfect. And so when we brought them back, our largest individual was a 58 gram female. And so I said, there's no point in trying to breed this animal at 58 grams because, you know, what's our output going to be? It's going to be one or two individuals. Let's at least get her bigger, right? So we don't even attempt to breed females at least 100 grams.

But, you know, we try not to over-condition them either. However, it's hard, right? And thinking about this from a conservation standpoint, the goal is recovering the species, right? And so if we can maintain this animal and it's healthy, we know that zoo animal, zoo vi boas, the record is 40 years that they'll live. And so if a viabeo can live 40 years, maybe it can reproduce for, you know, who knows how long, right? I wouldn't want to push it. But let's just say they can reproduce for 20 or 25 years, even if we're going every other year and we're getting, you know, five offspring every other year. I think that's a pretty good number.

But thinking about it from the captive side, right? You know, you've got unlimited resources. The animal doesn't have to worry about fighting for food or looking for food. it doesn't have to worry about predators. If it has the fat bodies, it would probably naturally reproduce every year if it has all those things, right? If you have all the resources you need,

maybe you would reproduce every other, every single year. So we haven't done it in our zoo. One of our partners did it and tried it and they reproduced the boa two years in a row and had good output. It wasn't as good the second year. I think it may be like five the first year and three the second. So who knows?

Maybe you take advantage of what you can why you can and then maybe you give them a year off. But yeah, we've, I think this year's going to be the first year. We're trying it with, with a larger female. One of our, it's our largest, oldest female. She was, um, she was a rescue. She was found in somebody's bathroom in St. Thomas. And someone was trying to kill it. And the, the government got it and sent it to us. And so she's, she's a pretty big animal. I think she's, she's around 300, 320 grams. And so she's one that I feel like, I would rather get eight or ten good offspring out of her every other year than have five every year just to give her the break. But to me, it's something that we should at least try just to learn if it's possible.

So, yeah. Yeah, every other year is what we target, though, generally speaking. And we do, we feed our adults mice. We, if we have problem feeders, we do have a breeding population of the noles that we collected in Puerto Rico. We wanted to be able to maintain that opportunity so that when we're ready to do releases, we've got these anoles. We've got hopefully some level of microbiome, even though a lot has obviously changed because we feed the annals, crickets and isopods and whatever else we have.

But it's still something we want to be able to give them that opportunity. And plus, as everybody knows, that's worked with Caribbean boas, babies are born, and they aren't always easy. And so it is nice to have lots and lots of little annals to feed out as you need as well. Yeah, absolutely. And to have captive red ones. You know, that wasn't the whole pentastone conversation with the Knowles as an intermediate host. You know, I used to get wild caught brown inoles and they've become more leery of that as time has gone on.

Yeah, yeah. And actually, that's just kind of something that we're paying more attention to right now. because it is a concern, especially as we expand this program, we bring on more partners, right? We're not going to, this isn't going to be a program where we have 20 zoos breeding the boa's, right? We would rather have a core group having more success than spreading them out further. It's the same model of Louisiana Pinesnake did a few years back. And so, yeah, it's something that we've been telling our partners for years, like, okay, if you're going to get involved, make sure you have a stockpile of Frozen and Knowles.

and I don't think my understanding is there's not a concern from the pentostom itself once they've been frozen. I think there's some concerns with some other potential bacteria is what I heard recently from a vet. But the pentostombs are definitely a concern for the live annals, right? And everybody's saying that's in Florida. But if the pentostombs, you know, it's already being found in what, north central Florida? I mean, it's just a matter of time before it's in the Georgia populations of the knolls and the Texas populations. well. And so, yeah, it's something to consider. But yeah, luckily for us, you know, our partners, we have a lot of partners on the project, right? So in Puerto Rico, we, we work closely with the

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Puerto Rican DNR. And so I always, you know, I tell the DNR all the time, like every year, I'm like, hey, we need to re-up our, we need to re-up our annul permit. I need to to collect a few more, you know, few more females, or we need more payers because this other partners involved or, you know, right now I was talking to the, I was talking to one of our staff that helps manage the, the, um, our zoo population of VI Boas. And, uh, you know, he said that we, we have anywhere from just, just, you know, nobody likes to talk. Well, maybe I'm, again, maybe it's superstitious. I don't like talking about it. But, uh, we have at least eight VI Boa females right now at the zoo that ovulated. So if we have that many babies, that's a lot of the knolls that

that we need. That's more than we can probably produce. But that's why we always have frozen backups as well. But it's scary when you have to think about that now, right? Right. Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, luckily, you know, anybody that's been to Puerto Rico knows, there's more than enough crested annoles around and any species you want. We always do, we always do Krista Tellis because they're, they have, they're a little bit more hardy and they have more of a reproductive output. But we've also done Pocellas and had pretty good success with them as well. So, so yeah, but we breed, we have, we have a handful of tanks of Puerto Rican and Noles that we collected in Puerto Rico. And most recently, they came from the site where we

collected Boas as well. So it's, it's kind of a one-stop shop. So it works out well for us. How difficult are the Boas to find in the wild? And what kind of methods are you using? We literally just, you know, headlamp on, walk around looking for boas. I mean, luckily for us, not for the boa at all. Boas are only found in one small area in Puerto Rico and that's it. The VI boa is literally found in one small area, probably the size of maybe at least the area we work in, about three or four city blocks. There's a number, oh, oh, lost Rob. there's three or four

kind of decent forests in the area where the boas could occur we've only seen them in those other areas at least probably one other time but so yeah generally speaking like we we survey the same area each time every trip we go out we usually

see one boa most we've ever found in a trip or I guess in one night has been four. But the average, when we go to this site, it doesn't matter whether there's eight of us, 10 of us, two of us. When we go through this one site, I feel pretty good that we're going to find a boa

if there's one out and about moving around. You know, during the day, they're hiding inside of probably tree cavities at this site. And so there's no chance you're going to find one during the day at all. ever. And so we pretty much just go out at night. There's a road nearby that's not, not, it's traveled more than it should be. And so I think we found at least one DOR. May actually be my very first trip out there. I think we found a DOR. But yeah, otherwise, you know, you're just looking up in the trees the whole night, you know. And generally

speaking, most of the, most of the work that's been done in the past with VI Boas has been done just within one or two populations. And so, you know, they'll tell you that you don't see VIBO as above, like, you know, much more than one and a half meters off the ground. But, you know, I've seen them from literally on the ground up to, I don't know, probably six or seven meters off the ground, pretty high up in a tree. And so we look everywhere. But luckily, the site's pretty easy to survey.

I don't want to say that it's an edge species, but we look at edges. I've had way more luck edges than I have anywhere else. And I don't know if that's a product of that's where the annoles are sleeping at the end of the night. Or if it's something else, right? If it's, you know, there are only a couple of VI beavers that ever been radio tracked. And it was gravette female. So that data is pretty biased.

So, yeah, obviously they're end of the night. They're up high edge of a tree. tree. But, but yeah, otherwise, we just, we go out at nighttime after, after, after sunset. We prefer if it's not a full moon. Sorry about that. You know, if you read the papers, they'll say the Iboas are most active. If it's third quarter to the new moon, other papers will say it has to be post, uh, rain. So I always try to target between the third quarter and the new moon during a rain event. That's the perfect time for me to go out. out. But I will say I found them during full moons. I found them with or without rain. I feel like,

anecdotally, I find them more after rain events. However, at that site in particular, in Northeast Puerto Rico, if you've ever been there, you know, Yonkei reinforce is right there. It rains a lot. So I don't know how much that really plays a role. So we do try to standardize our surveys as much as possible. It's not always as fun when you have to think about science as much as it is when you just want to hurt. So we do try to standardize things like effort, distance, when we can. And we do it at some sites. There are some sites where we actually have to use, we use GPS and we follow a very specific track. And you're like, oh, I want to see that tree over there. There's a bow in it for sure. But nope, it's not on my track. And I got to follow it.

So yeah, we we do try to collect as much data as possible because we want to, we want to be able to provide good, accurate data from across the range of the species, right? We're not trying to, we're not trying to be too selfish because, I mean, we're not like, when I go out and do boa surveys, we're not collecting. We have, we do, we do collect when we need to, but we still do surveys across the range. So that's something else to consider is sometimes, sometimes the data may not be what it seems because we are trying to standardize it. And some of that is because we want to answer that question, Rob, that you're going to ask. So is it the moon or is the precipitation, right? And that's why we're trying to do it. Like our partners in USVI, we originally started doing surveys down there in 2018.

And pretty much every year, first we get December, they do multiple surveys for VI BOA's for about three or four days at the same site. And they've been doing it now for seven, eight years outside of COVID. And they want to do it. Yeah, that's the kind of question we want to be able to answer is, are they more active? How much more active? Is there a gender difference, things like that? But I can't answer that yet. But I will say, I prefer to go out when it's darker and whenever it's rained. Yeah, fair enough. I think we always do anyways, right? That's just the normal. Right. Well, and when you're talking that waning into new, part of it is that not only is it lower illumination, it's that the moon is mostly up during the day. So it's not even up at night for the most part. Yeah, yeah. Maybe this is a transition point to finding other things, but yeah, do you find that to, does that all things being equal if you're planning a trip anywhere? Are you trying to do that?

I guess when I say anywhere, anywhere that you're targeting nocturnal species, because I don't tend to mind as much if it's sirenol stuff that I'm looking for. I, up until, I don't know, I would say probably up until last five or six years, I didn't really, like, put that much effort into it. Like I guess I was always so focused on thinking about how I can maximize my time at a spot. And I always feel like there's some other variable that that impacts my travel to where I can't always be like, okay, if I have to go during June, I'm, it has to be at least during these three days because of the moon cycle, right?

For me, it's always like, okay, I'm there because of some of it, like, I'm there for a conference or whatever. But if I'm herping with friends or like one of my, one of my sons is. into it as well. So we'll definitely like, okay, look at the calendar, like, okay, we really should try to get out there these days. And, you know, definitely looking at the moon for certain species. But yeah, I will say I always try to look at like precipitation just as much as I do do moon cycle. But yeah, I feel like there's always another variable work or something else that messes up my schedule. So I've got to work around that. But I definitely try to avoid the full moon at all costs.

Yeah. Justin quite notably went to Australia without paying attention to that and found himself in front of a giant superman. Yeah. That didn't make for great herping that night. Although the spider life was out and driving. Yeah. There were all these like zebra stripe black and white spiders and they were all face level webs. So you'd be looking down and then all some you'd look up and it'd be right in your face. Yeah. Yeah. I've definitely experienced. that way too much when I was in when I was in South Florida and you know we don't we don't we don't as much in Puerto Rico as much as I would think we would that there's lots of tropical orb wevers but maybe it's because the sites we're working in there it's a little bit more open and so we don't have those you know those those those greetings from the spiders and their massive webs like I did in Florida this was out in the inland Queensland like not near tropical stuff I was kind of surprised that they were all so many. of these spiders everywhere. My, my daughter was out with me and she's like, oh, no, I'm not doing this. Too many, too many spiders. She went back to the car with their siblings. Yeah, I feel like I can appreciate that sometimes. Like, you only, you only, you know,

get hit in the face with them so many times before you're like, I'm just, I'm just over it, right? Yeah. I feel like there's some big orb weavers out there too. Yeah, I was just going to say, I feel like I've had that experience more in my life than South Florida than anywhere else. Like in Puerto Rico, I've never been in a, in a habitat that annoyed me that much other than, you know, occasionally mosquitoes can be a little on the annoying side, but I don't think they're that terrible there in most areas. And we work mostly coastal, right, which are to me the most evil of all mosquitoes. And the spiders there aren't too bad.

And there's a couple species of tarantula there, too, which is pretty cool. So the site on the site that we do most of our Viibo work that's in Puerto Rico, it's, we see, we see both species of tarantulas there and there's Puerto Rican boas there as well. So I haven't seen them as much on recent trips, but I feel like every other trip will find one or two Puerto Rican boas as well as V.I. Boas. So, yeah, it's pretty cool, especially for being a semi-developed area. It's kind of, it's interesting, not what I would expect. For your captive breeding efforts, are they from all, you know,

the different populations, different islands, or are you focused on one population that you're producing? Yeah, so good question. We, at the zoo, we have, I got some funding a few years back from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service when we started the project that allowed us to buy a modular building. Nothing fancy, but it was something that was all hours. And so it's basically a 900 square foot modular building that has four rooms.

Each room has its own climate control system. And so one room is for Puerto Rican population, VI Boas. One room is for USVI population. One room we keep the babies in because we don't cycle the babies. And that's also the same room we keep the annals in because we don't cycle them as well. So we can keep, even though it doesn't matter. The annals from Puerto Rico, even if we don't cycle them, they don't breed during the winter at all, which is a little surprising and frustrating.

But then again, we all know how much, you know, when those lizards get going, they produce so many eggs that you're like, you can't. Like, this isn't sustainable. You've got to stop. Right. But slow down. Yeah. But even if we wanted them too, they wouldn't do that.

So, or at least what we've experienced. And then our fourth room, which originally was planned for another project that we can talk about another day that was supposed to be for another Caribbean boa. That was taken over. We used that for our amphibian. reproductive biologist. We got to grant a few years back to hire one for an

assisted repro biologist for a few years. And so we turned that last room into a lab because the Silver Boa project never happened. We were supposed to get Silver Boas from Conception Island, but that entire project got put on hold kind of

indefinitely. I was actually just talking to Graham about that a couple weeks ago. Something may happen again in the future, but we're knee-deep in BIA boas and I want to help with every species that I possibly can, but I, again, I have too many projects. So I can't take on anymore right now. Right. But yeah, so anyways, we do, we do keep the populations completely separate. Our USVI population all came from, they basically all have the same genetics. They're all historically St. Thomas animals. And then our Puerto Rico population

that we're working with all came from one population. Eventually, I think, we'll get one of the other populations from Puerto Rico, but they'll be maintained separately. We do, again, luckily, our, one of our colleagues on the project is Graham, and he's a conservation geneticist as well as, you know, the boa god. And so whenever we're, whenever we need to discuss those sorts of things,

like, okay, have we fully bottlenecked? Like, how scared are we of this? You know, he's definitely our guy. And we have a good working group, right? Like we have every other year, we have a VI-Boa meeting where it's all of the partners from across the range from the feds, Puerto Rican DNR, USVI Division of Fish and Wildlife, the folks from BVI. Even though there's no conservation work being done in BVI, they're involved. And most of the work we're doing there is research because they have pretty good populations. So, and we're trying to expand the effort to do more research there.

But everybody's involved. We have a big meeting, like I said, every couple of years, last two days, and we just talk of the Iboas for two days. And so Graham's, Graham's our guy, right? So any genetics questions, you know, we're just like, just call or text them. I text them some of the probably most dumb, random questions all the time. But he's an amazing guy, super, super nice guy. you know, we've, we've, we've, we've hung out countless times both in the field and I've been to his house and,

um, he lives in, you know, the salamander capital of the universe. So anytime I'm out there, we try to, we always try to, he always tries to join us if we're doing field work or just going and hanging out, family, family salamandering. Um, so, but it's nice to have that to be able to make those informed decisions because I can tell you that we treat these like we would any other zoo breeding program. You know, I paid the AZA's population management center pretty recently to do an analysis of our population to say, okay, this female's bred too many times. This one is your best potential founder. So we're doing that from a planning standpoint looking at the data that way. But also, Graham has genetic samples of every single boa that we've ever captured, including all of our

founders. And so he's actually actively sequencing that. right now. Like I literally got a text message from him yesterday. He had just sequenced some of the samples that we had from Puerto Rico. Right now he's running through USB. And then finally, after a year and a half of trying, I got my permit to export, well, import my samples from the British Virgin Islands. We had 30 samples sitting over there. And so that'll be the largest data set of genetic samples from the British Virgin Islands. So he's doing that right now. He's super excited. Yeah, so we should have some more good information about the IBOA population genetics really soon. Yeah.

I was curious about that, too, with them being island endemics, you know, if they're, they probably are somewhat inbred or locally. Yeah, what the diversity is. Yeah. And, you know, really, all that conversation really reminds me of Graham's research into the captive PR boas and the surprising level of diversity that we're seeing. something that had been listed for 40 years or whatever by the time he was pulling those samples. It's amazing. Yeah. There's times where we're surprised, you know, like he did, you know, the paper back in 2015.

In 2015, there were two papers that came out of the exact same time looking at the Iboa genetics, but neither one of them had a large number of samples, right? Like if you look British Virgin Islands, I think they had like two samples. St. Thomas, I don't remember the number off the top of my head, maybe a couple dozen samples at the most. and I don't even think it was that many. And so we've been trying to collect a minimum of 20 samples from every population in the last five or six years. And we're almost there, not there yet, but we've exceeded that in a couple populations. But yeah, I mean, to give an example, like St. Thomas, as far as overall area of occupancy,

probably has the largest, at least in the U.S., I mean, they probably occur all over Tortola. So Tortola is probably the hot spot for the Iboa is there. That's that's the stronghold. And so, but in the U.S. populations, St. Thomas has the largest area of occupancy. But if you read the 2015 paper based on the genetics, and some of that's biased by the sample size. But if you look at the genetics, the effective population size, which I'm not a geneticist, I'm not going to ever pretend to be one at all. I ask a lot of dumb questions.

I just have a lot of good geneticist friends. But the effective population size of Viibo is on St. Thomas is 6. And that means that is the number of animals that are contributing to the breeding population. And so that's not good. I think I don't need to be a geneticist to know that. But yeah, so that's why I think it's been good for us to get so many more samples. We can, you know, reanalyze some of this past, this past, data that was collected, see if, see if and how things have changed, and then continue to do that,

right? Like, we're not going to give up now. We'll probably continue to repeat this as long as we can continue to afford to do the work. And as long as, you know, the technology keeps advancing. It's going to continue to help us. So, yeah, but definitely bottlenecking everywhere, lots of concerns outside of Bridges-Fertion Islands. And I think at some point, we're going to have to be a lot of to start mixing populations, but we're not doing that yet. So as far as breeding, we still keep everybody separate. I wouldn't be worried about it from, from, you know, some special allele that allows, you know, this population to thrive in this environment versus this one. I mean, I think, I think if you look at the data that's out there, they'll tell you that they require very specific

habitat and I think that may be preferred but I think it's all it's all biased I think it's good I think there's been a lot of great work you know Renata Plattenberg from UVI she did some great work and she was one of the biggest voices for her for VI Boas for for a very long time until she retired but you know she did some great work on on habitat modeling but that was very much geared around what what little was known about the species and what was known within the U.S. Virgin Islands, but I think now we know a lot more and know a lot less all the same time. So that's part of it, right? Yeah, absolutely.

Well, this has been fabulous. Let's pivot to some quick hitters. And, yeah. So first thing, so being in a lot of time in South Florida and then in Puerto Rico, in Puerto Rico, do you ever find any reticulated pythons? I have not. However, to be fair, I have not targeted. reticks. I've seen red tails. And what's funny is,

pre, I don't know, pre-2018, I'd never seen a red tail. Now, every single trip I go down, I'm shocked if I don't see a couple DORs. I don't see live ones that often, but again, we're not looking. But one of the roads we drive down, I can almost guarantee we're going to see a dead one, especially if it's rained, right? If it's rained, it's pretty much a guarantee. I've seen a couple dead PR beaus in that same area as well. But yeah, so no reticks. I've thought about going out. I know, I don't know Tim Colston that well, but we brought him out to do Vi-I Bo with us on a couple surveys ago. And he, you know, I was like, you know, how bad is it really like? And he said that he could guarantee if we went out one night. He could guarantee in one night.

we could see one, which to me, that's crazy. I mean, even when I was in South Florida doing berm work, I could never guarantee it. I could tell you there was a really good chance if it was in the summer and it rained and we were in the right spot, we could do it. But, you know, to guarantee it, and I'm not surprised by what I see on the Facebook groups.

It's unreal how many they're finding and the color morphs and everything else. It's absolutely unreal. Yeah. Absolutely. Camelians in Florida. Oh, well, I did a lot of chameleon work. I published a paper on camillians in South Florida.

We found the first ever, we found the first ever Alstallet's chameleon nest, not just in South Florida, technically. And going back to the question you asked, I don't remember if this was on the podcast or off, about whether or not it counts. I don't think it counts. Let me frame it a little bit. So the question was, if you're, well,

and we'll take half a lot. a step back. Do you keep lifeless of the animals that you find in the wild? Is that something that drives what you're looking for? Or are you just kind of going about to different places based on the different projects that take you there? You happen to be in a place? I don't have a physical or digital lifeless. I don't. I have a mental life list. I don't. I have a mental one and I'm older now, so I don't know how accurate it is, but I feel pretty good about about it. So, yes. And I definitely take trips and target stuff, right? Like I, I was actually just, I was texting somebody today who was talking about, they were on their way to the coast of North Carolina,

look for rainbow snakes. And I was like, well, that's my, that's, that's only species of snake I have not seen in the state of North Carolina. And, and I have not spent a lot of times targeting them, but it's, it's a rainbow snake, right? Like, it's a grail. So I, but yeah, no, I definitely take targeted trips. I keep a list, a mental list, and I don't know if I'm as hardcore as you walking like 50 miles a day for some of these things, but a lot of people say I'm pretty hardcore and I go all in. So, yeah. Okay. Well, very good. So on that note, right where you're, where you're headed to, so if you're not so much in the context of invasives, but in the context of species, where there is conservation effort going into it, either reintroduction to either supplementation

or reintroduction into spots from which they've been extirpated or theoretically novel introduction of things, but within native range, if you saw an animal in that context, would that count towards your lifeless? So there's a couple different options within that, right? So something, a population that's known to be supplemented, a population that's within native range, but where there aren't historic records from, maybe start there. That's a good question. I don't get into all the rules so much that some other people do. So I don't know that I've thought about it that much.

I will say, you know, like I've seen, I don't know, what, 30 or 40 species. of Herps in South Florida that are not supposed to be there, that I feel like I target them differently, right? Like, so if I'm going to look for rainbow whip tails or if I'm going to look for Owslets Camelians, in my mind, I'm targeting them as that population, right? I'm targeting them as the Florida population of Owsletts Camelian. So, boom, I've checked Owsuits Camilians in Florida off my list.

But if I went to Madagascar and I didn't find one, I would say that I didn't find an Owslet's Camillion. You know what I mean? I don't, but I'm not one that does it by state, right? So like I have not seen every species of snake that occurs in North Carolina in North Carolina. I haven't targeted them all. I haven't seen them all here, but I've seen them elsewhere in the southeast. So I'm, I'm okay with that.

It would be nice to see some of the other ones, but I'll get there eventually. But maybe I'll worry about that after the rainbow snake. But as far as some of the other stuff goes, you know, I think, yeah, I guess I thought about it a lot when I was doing all the invasive work in South Florida. But I, yeah, I guess I don't really, I don't try to take something for what it's not worth. You know, I don't, I don't say outslits, camillians are crossed off my list as a species. I just do it by population, I guess, in that sense. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. But, yeah, I mean, I've been out herping with, and I mean, you all hurt way more with more people than I do. But, you know, going out with people where they're like, no, I can only count it all. my list if I touch it or um you know if I'm the first one to see eyes on it or this and that now

I will say there are species out there where I'm like I want to find it on my own right like I indigo snake was my unicorn for many many years and um even living in florida my only one ever was was dead and um even radio tracking with people I never even got to see one even though I don't I don't know that I would have counted that for me because I it's because it's your grail right you've got your own rules for your grail, but about three years ago or two years ago, I can't remember my son that likes herping. We shot down. I have family in Florida still. So we shot down to a spot. And I walked by this gopherst, Taurus Borough, and I thought I saw an indigo snake going through this like prickly pair. And I didn't want to spook it. So I took a couple steps back and then it disappeared. And I was

like, dang. So I ran over, got my son, came back. And I was like, I swear it was right over here. And I got like, I kind of like got down low and I snuck up on this on the apron of this gopher tortoise burrow and I peek inside and there's indigo staring right at me and I was like okay that's it for soar and it just stared at me for for a couple seconds I got a couple photos and then I walked away and was just speechless and in heaven and yeah that's one of those it's one of those I'll remember forever and it's because I found it on my you know I I laid eyes on it I wasn't in a trip where somebody was like you know two two ridges over on the other side of a pond screaming that they found one and I got to go see it. I don't mind checking those off my list if it's not a, if it's not that level for me.

But yeah, I don't know. I don't have too many rules. I guess my rules also changed depending on the species and my mood and how hard it is to find something. Right. Sure. I think that's true of most of us. You do have a really, a couple of finds of a really special, difficult South Florida. to sank. Remember our crowd sank? Yeah. Yeah. So when I started at Zoo Miami, I started there as the

assistant curator of Herps back in like 2008. I don't know, 2008. And one of the first things I wanted to do was put up, I wanted to do a Herp survey there. And luckily, there was already a Herp Survey going on at the time because the general curator was a HRP guy. And so I started and he had some drift fences with funnel traps and some coverboards, but he had never seen a olitica. And so I said, okay, I'm going to ignorant. I was totally ignorant at the time. I said, I'm going to put up another drift fence. I'm going to put up two more drift fences, but I'm going to put in some pitfall traps. And I didn't realize how valuable at the time that habitat was and how many amazing endemics there were and how many, you know, rare and endangered plants there were. And fast forward a few years,

I left the HIRP team and I went to help start the Conservation and Research Department there. And we did a lot of work for years that when I was in that department with rare and endangered plants and butterflies. So my appreciation for that habitat changed dramatically. I mean, it was my focus when I first got there. It was all about, okay, there's some cool herbs here we need to see them. So back up to your question. I set up two drift fences that had pitfall traps. And within like, I don't know, I can't remember the time frame.

Less than a year, we got a, we got a litigant in one. And I was shocked, absolutely shocked, took photos, sent them to, sent them to. And I didn't, honestly, I just wanted to find it because somebody else was telling me about, you know, oh, you're going to be down there. You should try to find it. And I'm like, okay. I've only seen, I've only seen one until the before. I'll look for this one too. And then, and then I told a buddy of mine, everybody's probably heard of the name, Kenny Crisco. I used to share a lot of invasive records with Kenny. And so he was like, oh, man, this is like the 27th record at the time, the 26 or 27th record of Olitica at the time. And so then, I I met Kirsten Heinz who had done Olytica research down there and then met a few other people that had done the work. So kind of got way more into Olytica than I ever thought I would be into this little tiny snake that's this big that eats, you know, sent beads and nobody can ever find apparently except for Tim Borski. And so then then fast forward, I don't know, another

two years, same exact pitfall array. We caught another one. And so that time my photography skills got a little bit better. So I got some really cool shots of that animal. And that actually, when I took photos of that animal, I thought they were pretty good photos. They weren't like Herp Review cover worthy. But ironically, Kirsten's, her Olitica paper had just been accepted. So she was like, you should send it in right now. Send it to Robert Hansen. And she's like, you should send it. Just do it. And so I did. And he's like, it's a cool photo. Amazing species. But it has to be like, eating a centipede or doing something way cooler than it's being posed up on some olitic limestone for uh for uh for the cover of herb review so i went in with no expectations and i got him so

it is what it is but it was cool to talk to robert i had never done it before so uh but yeah so that's my olitica we we did manage to find too but i will say i don't know if being a hurt person and talking about olitica i'm going to say this other story is cooler but i think it may be so same herperay one of my keepers found a spider and they brought it to us and they were like look at this thing have you ever seen this before it's like a mini tarantula and she brought it to me and I was like okay I don't know anything about spiders but this looks like a trapped door spider and so I did some Googling couldn't find anything didn't really think much of it I took a couple really cool photos of it and I've always thought Joel Sartory white background photography was awesome so I did

that with this spider and then I sent him to Dr. Edwards who at a time was the state entomologist for Florida and he's like the nearest record for a trapdoor spider to you is 200 miles and so I was like okay so and he's like send me a sample so obviously I had let that one go so we one year later the exact same week one year later it was in May found another one this time they found a live of one. It was a male again because the males are out moving because the females are in their holes. And then a couple days later, they found a deceased portion of one. So we sent them up to Dr. Edwards. And then nothing happened at all. Found a couple spiders every couple of gears, that same spot. And fast forward to like four years ago, it was described as a new species.

And it's actually named after the site. So that species of trapdoor spider is literally named. after the Richmond tract of Pine Rockland at Zoo Miami Grounds, because that's where it was first found. We now know that there's probably a couple of their populations of that species elsewhere, but to know that on Zoo Miami grounds, you've got one of the rarest snakes in the U.S., or at least maybe the hardest one to find. I'm not going to debate people on that one. Probably the southernmost population of coachwips, and there's quite a few coachwips on grounds. Like we had a marker capture study going, lots of coachwhips, some pretty big ones too.

And some lots of other cool herps, inverts, plants. It's an amazing piece of property, that's for sure. Yeah. So that was just all on zoo grounds. I mean, obviously then you have all the other craziness of South Florida and South Florida herping. But I did a lot of invasive work down there. So one of my, one of the projects I worked on was through Dr. Mazati and his lab. So I helped with the, it's called I ramp,

Everglades invasive reptile and amphibian monitoring program. I did I ramp surveys for five years. So I did Everglades surveys. I literally road cruised once a month for five years doing surveys. And then obviously I lived 20 minutes from the Everglades. So I also cruised another probably, I don't know, 10 times that, looking for Herp. So I did that formally. And then like I mentioned sort of briefly before, I led an Auslitz Camillion project for a couple of years.

And then I did Tagu trapping for. I don't know, four years, five years. So, yeah, lots of, lots of, lots of, lots of, lots of, lots of, lots of fun and lots of stories in South Florida. Absolutely. Speaking as North Carolina, so you, so you mentioned some of these might be in other states, but you've found quite a few simus. I mean, I guess it depends on what your, what your level of finding that is.

More than a couple is quite a few. Yeah, I feel like, I feel like a loser when it comes to Simus up until barely recently. But yeah, I mean, I think considering the species is going through the decline that it's going through, and we're at the northern extent of its range. You know, it's one cool thing about North Carolina, right, is that we're the northern extent and the southern extent, and I guess technically the eastern because of the ocean. But a range of so many species, right? Like it's literally dozens of species. And so where we're at right now, if I leave my house and I drive one hour south to the sandhills of North Carolina, I can pick up 20 species of herps or more that we don't have right here. And, you know, it's not like some massive geological formation difference.

It's just definitely a difference in habitat. But yeah, so, you know, I go down there and road cruise every chance that I get. It did take me almost four or five years before I found my first one. And then ever since then, it's like every year I'm finding a couple. So for me and for North Carolina, I feel like that's okay. I will say my son, I think, has actually found, he's found a couple. He gets down there and he rode cruises too, especially when he doesn't have school. And I'll be at work.

And we do this thing. I don't know why. It's totally stupid. But it's okay. If we find something pretty cool, we FaceTime when we're herping, especially if we're not with each other. And so, like, he was in class one day and I found a pine snake. And I face-timed him. And he declined it right away.

And I was like, oh, you're in school. I get it. But then I was doing a walk through at the zoo in our new Asia area. And I see a FaceTime from him. And I'm like, you better not. And I turned it on and there's this little tiny, you know, hatchling cymus just, you know, that tip of the nose in the sand. And I was just like, why am I at work and you're down there?

Yeah, yeah, it's, we have, we have a pretty good network of people here. So when we know they're moving, we try to get out there when we can. You know, I don't, I don't like targeting the area when it's hit really hard, you know, especially in, you know, in October, October, as everybody likes to call it. You know, I typically actually don't go out much in October at all. I go out during other times. And I've found, I found way more adults than I have babies. And I say way more.

I mean, still, we're talking about a sample of like maybe, I don't know, five or six total individuals the last few years. But seeing an adult, it's people see those way less than babies. So it's pretty cool. I saw one last year. Actually, I saw an adult in the exact same spot two years in a row different individuals. And I say same spot, I mean, within inches of each other. So, yeah, yeah. That's really cool.

Yeah. So, yeah, it's amazing. Any chance I get to shoot down there, I'm going to be down there in a heartbeat, you know. My son just got a job down there as a technician just for the summer, working with the Wally Freedars Commission. And so while I was at work two days ago, he's texted me pictures of pine snakes and coachwhips and everything else, and I'm in meetings.

So fun stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I was curious if the October time frame is the same, given how much further north you are from kind of, I think it's mostly the Florida and Georgia population that kind of gives it that connotation. So I was curious if you see it earlier or later in the spring, then you would inform. I think it depends on the season. But if you haven't read Jeff Beans'

paper on Simus, check it out. I mean, it's depressing because of the over 700 Simus he had records of for 25 years, 600 of the 700 were DOR. I mean, that in itself, like, every time I think about that species. I just think about that number, right? But no, if you look at his, if you look at his data, yeah, I mean, October is still, it's it, you know? And obviously, there are certain, certain seasonal changes each year, right? Like this year, we've had this, we had a really, really, really bad winter, well, by our standards, right? Like, we had over the snow, which is terrible for me in South Florida. But we had this drought. And so, who knows how that's going to impact things. But yeah, I think generally speaking, October still

the hot time of year, although I feel like when the weather's right, I'm going to go out and look anyways because you never know what's going to be out, right? You know, it could be coach whips, I love seeing pine snakes. Like pine snakes evaded me for years and now I've seen them, I see them almost every year now, if not twice in a year. So I don't get down there as often as I would like, at least for recreation, right? We have a project down there. So I'm down there in the sandhills, releasing gopher frogs or collecting gopher frog eggs for our head starting project, at least, you know, a dozen or so times a year for that project. But when I can get out there for fun, I definitely do, especially this time of year and in the fall. Yep. Okay. Yeah, fair enough.

And what, conditionally, are you looking for low pressure, high pressure, sunny days, cloudy days, rain? No exaggeration. I'm looking for a day off from work. And I'm a weekday herper. I would rather, as much as it sounds bad, I would almost avoid, I avoid the sandhills on the weekends. I will never road cruise that place on the weekends because there's just too many people. Again, I don't want to make a bigger impact. And to be fair, like I have permits to do the work down there personally, not just do the zoo, right?

I get my own permits so that I'm covered no matter what I'm doing. But yeah, I mean, for me, I'm definitely, when I get the chance, like, if I see the weather for the upcoming week and I'm like, oh, man, it's cool morning, but it's going to be sunny. I still haven't figured out the cloud cover thing yet. You know, I talk to some people that say no clouds is better for babies and cloud cover is better for it. adults. And I may have that backwards because, again, I'm still trying to figure that out. But yeah, it's, for me, it's more about during that time frame, when can I get off from work and when can I get down there? And of course, my luck is I get off on the day where it's, you know, the high is 58 degrees. It's overcast and rainy. And, you know, I don't go down there. I typically

don't go down there at all if it rains. So that's, I know I've been down there before when people have found simus after a rain, but I won't go down there while it's raining. At least when I'm doing simus sort of work or pine snakes, whatever. But if I'm looking for amphibs or we're doing some other survey, then I'm down there anyways. But yeah, it's a big balance because, like I said, we do a lot of amphib work down there. We do some snake work, but that's usually just supporting the resource commission staff that works down there. Okay. You really need an excuse to go down to the sandhills look for snakes.

Yeah, right. Well, in Sand Hills Habitat, I assume in North Carolina is the same as the Pine Barons in New Jersey and in Florida and everywhere else. I've seen it where densities seem to be exceedingly low, but basically anything you find is a very special prize. Yeah. Yeah. And honestly, like, I, it's one of the, it's one of the few times that, you know, when I'm out herping and I get skunked, I'm just happy to be in the habitat, right? You know, you still see, I still see fox squirrels. You still see red-headed woodpeckers. You know, like the other day, I cruised it, I don't know, maybe two weeks ago, three weeks ago. And I think the only thing I saw a live, a live rough green and a DOR coach whip, but it was a nice day.

So I was happy. I didn't care, you know. So, yeah, yeah. How bad are the ticks and chiggers in the North Carolina version? Pretty horrible, especially, you know, when I first moved here, my first experience in the Sandhills was, was one of my staff that helps a lot with the Viya Boa project. He was doing some radio tracking of Pine Barren's tree frogs at the time. And so when I came in, I jumped right in and got involved.

And it was horrible. I don't know what he was thinking. But yeah, I've never had so many ticks and chiggers in my entire life as there. I'm sure there are worst areas. I can definitely, you know, I've got my different charts for terrible areas. areas when it comes to pests like that. But yeah, I think that's definitely the worst. Yeah.

I mean, you know, you're out there, you know, in the summer. So you're out there on a July night. I worked all day. And then you go, you grab some food on the way down, meet up with colleagues. And then we go out and track frogs in the in the sandhills until midnight or 1 a.m. And I get home and it's just like, then you got to spend the next hour looking for ticks. And then the next week you're dealing with chiggers. It's no fun at all.

absolutely where uh other than north carolina and florida where have you seen pine snakes that's it or pituitophis oh well yeah then out west yeah Arizona and I think I don't think I've seen them outside of Arizona out west okay sonorance yeah yeah okay how about mole kings in North Carolina um I've seen them um when I was a I don't know, last year about this time, we were doing an inspection in the new age area I was talking about in our life support room. And there was a mole king under the door. And that was the second one seen at the zoo since I've been there. So it was pretty cool. Now, I'm not going to lie, it's like the mole kings that we have here in the Piedmont in Central North Carolina, you know,

when they're younger, they're a nice tan or a light gray with pretty good, pretty good red saddles. But when they get older, all the red disappears. So they're almost like this like cream color. snake. Like there's there's nothing else to them. It's not like you go to the sand hills, you go to the coast and they're like this like tomato red snake with like dark red saddles. I have not, I have yet to see any of those. If I did, you would, you'd see them all over on my photos because I would have to take a million photos of those. But, but I do look. And I've been in some areas where other other colleagues of mine have just captured some, some stunners. But in the Piedmont, we don't have anything that's, that's beautiful like that.

Yeah, you mentioned it there. So you do have a Flickr. That's the best way for people to follow what you're doing, I assume. And it's DS Miami. Yeah, yeah. Just my Flickr page, I just, I post, I'm usually pretty lazy. And then all of a sudden, like, after, I don't know, a year or nine months of photos, I'm like, I haven't put anything on Flickr.

You know, I usually just, I put stuff on Facebook if I think about it. Text them to you, whatever. It's all, you know, whatever. But, yeah, I enjoy it. Like, I enjoy photography. you know, I, you know, around COVID, just like everybody else, I spent way more time, you know, learning about birds, taking photos of birds too, which it's a good way. It's a good way to kill some time in the winter, especially, right?

When I'm not able to go look for herps as much, even though we do work with a lot of winter breeding amphibians, there's not as much for me to do. So the birds are good, but I'm still trying to learn photography every day. Absolutely. Well, three more. We'll let you go. I've seen short tales in Florida. I have.

I'm going to count this one. So a buddy of mine used to live in, I think it was in Pascoe County. I can't remember for sure. Pasco or Hernandez. I don't know, whatever. It was about 45 minutes or so from Tampa. And he was a birder, and he really wanted to go herping. And so we literally went in his backyard.

because it was amazing scrub, just typical beautiful Florida scrub habitat. And so we, he lived in this one random neighborhood that decided to build on this beautiful property. And so we went out and we're just walking around behind this house and found a pygmy rattlesnake. And took a couple photos of that.

And then we walked back towards his house. And we were actually in his front yard. And there were some rocks in his yard and his neighbor's yard. and I was standing, I don't know, 10 feet from him. And he's like, oh, hey, there's a snake over here under this rock. And I walk over and there's a short tail underneath this thing. And of course, he's like, oh, it's a snake. Like, doesn't even know.

And I'm like, are you kidding me right now? So, yeah, that's my, that is my only short tale. I was never, I will say I was never in range for them a lot because of that general area where they occur. I hurt. I hurt around Ocala a lot. So I should have seen, I definitely should have seen more of those scrub species. But, yeah, I did, I did, I did, I can't have to see one, one short tail. Very good.

So North Carolina, coastal North Carolina, really famous for the Red Pygmy Rattlesnakes. Yep, yep. That's one, that's another favorite of mine whenever I have the chance, you know. I go out, I've seen them, you know, most of, most summer. I've never, I don't think I've ever actually looked for them in the spring before. But definitely summer, you know, June to probably September, October, I've gone out and seen them and, you know, been to been to the famous, you know, Hyde County. But, yeah, it's there's some, there's some stunners out there, man. And, you know, that habitat is, the mosquitoes out there are horrible.

I mean, they're not, but not Everglades bad, but they're bad because they're big and they're, they're, they're definitely bitey and especially at sunset but but man coastal north carolina the diversity out there is amazing like if you can find some good roads to cruise when the when the weather's good or or you know those kind of canals to hike um you know you can have a good 15 15 or 20 snake day with you know eight species you know i enjoy those days you know i know it's not the everglades you know where I had, you know, 40 snake nights, you know, but, but, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's nice. It's good habitat. And, you know, you can see, you can see a timber, cane break, whatever you prefer to call it, you know, pretty, pretty frequently out there. I feel like people come across

them. I mostly see DORs out there because there's just a lot of traffic. But luckily, I have not seen that many, um, dead, uh, red pygmies. Only maybe two. First, my very first one was hit right in front of me. I was out there with a, with a, with a buddy of mine. who's a big herper and I had never been out there before and we were driving in and this one was brighter than the red

on the I don't know if the screen on your screen on the bottom where it has that arrow I guess it's like an exit arrow it was that bright like it was it looks great and it was one of those like you could tell from a distance what it was and the way the road was elevated and so we couldn't turn around right away

and looked at it And as we looked at it, this little tiny car came by and just crushed it right in front of. Turned around. And we still grabbed it because we gave it to the museum for, so they had it for a specimen. But, yeah, that was my first one. Luckily, we saw more. But, yeah, that's another species that never gets old. And I, yeah, I've got plans to go out there this summer, although this summer's like next week.

But, yeah, I'm definitely about there this summer looking at least a couple times for them. Do they, do you find those by sound or site mostly? For me, I've cruised most of the ones I've seen. Oh, okay. Yeah, I've got, I've got a handful of roads that I target. I've got a couple different places to hike them up. I haven't had as much luck. I think the water levels really can dictate where they're at whenever you're looking for them in some of the areas because they are so coastal and because they're, a lot of times they're near those canals.

but yeah other I mean other other other places I've looked for pygmies I've done I feel like I've done both just visual whether they're near near debris flipping flipping things whatever it is but yeah I've had I feel like at least in Florida I don't know if I've ever actually found one in Florida by sound I've only ever seen them okay yeah I wondered if they're too small to hear yeah no I mean I feel like I feel like you can you can hear them like especially when you're photographing and you'll hear them buzzing at you but you know they they do all those other things right first like they coil up they flatten out they do the they do the turkey movement they do everything else before before I feel like they buzz at you um and that area if you've never been to to to that part of north carolina there are so many bears and so I don't honestly that's never really wait on my mind when I'm out hiking looking for them but if you've never been like I've seen as many as, I don't know, if I had to guess, maybe like in one, in one weekend of being out there, whether it's herping or birds or looking for bears, whatever, maybe like 10.

Wow. And the weekend, I've never been out there and not seen a bear. Wow. And so, yeah, it's, yeah, especially, like, I mean, if you, if people really want to see them, you just go up to, like, Alligator River, go to the Pococon areas. Like, those are, those are famous areas for bears. And there's times where, like, I've got probably a photo where I've, there were five, in one image that were just all hanging out.

But yeah, I remember one time I was stopped before a pygmy, and I heard a noise and I looked over, and there were two cubs that ran up a tree. And then I was like, oh, I'm not getting out for this snake, because I don't know how protective mom is, but I'm within, you know, 10 feet of her cubs. I don't want to find out. But, yeah, that area is loaded with bears for sure.

Right. Well, probably Eric's not going to visit there anymore, right, Rob? Okay. Okay, last one. Yep. And you just mentioned it, my penultimate U.S. Crote Forum to find the Cane Break Rattlesnake. Yeah. Game Breaks versus Timbers. Any thoughts, ideas?

What are the ones up by you look like? So we actually have them on zoo grounds, wild ones. Not cambrakes. They would be timbers, according to most people. I don't get into that debate too, too much. But I will say, I mean, ours are what you. you would envision for a central North Carolina

Piedmont timber, right? You know, tan, a little bit of an orange stripe, black banding. But, you know, go to the sandhills, which is an hour away.

And I've definitely seen, I haven't seen as many as I would like. Like, that is a species that I probably only see one every couple years. And, but I've definitely seen some pink ones. You know,

some down there. And I was like, yeah, okay, if we're going to have a debate, that's a came break um the coast i haven't seen any really nice ones on the coast i'm sure there are some i just i don't ever see them i always see the i always see big old um pretty pretty typical you know tan tan to light gray timbers um but yeah i feel like i feel like one of these trips i'm just going

to have to go down to you know south carolina or spend more time down in our sand hills looking for for some of the pink or peach ones but uh yeah yeah i would like to but it's nice having them on zoo grounds every once in a while. Like I said, we don't, we don't see them that often. I think we do a mark recapture study. So I don't remember off the top of my head, but we probably have seen 16 of them, 16 or 17 in the last 10 years that I've been there. So you can't make that. I did a snake study at the zoo for the first five years I was there. So we documented, I should have looked at the paper before I say this, like 13, I think 13 species, over 320 specimens over the course of that time frame.

We've since added a couple species. We've had, now we've had the mole king. We didn't have a mole king while I was doing the study. And then we didn't document any earth snakes during the study, but my son found one there not that long ago. So I know we have them there now. But yeah, the zoo is an awesome place. I mean, to have that much diversity of snakes.

We, you know, we probably have, I don't know, eight species of salamanders on site as well. I don't even know any aneurans off the top of my head. But yeah, it's pretty awesome. And are they like in exhibits? Or are they just like on the paths? No, no, I'm sorry about wild. I'm not even talking about it.

No, I mean like in the elephant exhibit or something across the grass, you know? Most definitely. Yep. Actually, one of my friends that used to work in the elephant area, she called me one day because there was a timber in one of the outdoor yards. And she was like, come get this thing before it messes, you know, messes an elephant's day up or.

I think vice versa would be more likely. But yeah, yeah. I mean, we get them all over the place. Weirdest place we ever had one was on an elevator. I got a call in my office in the admin building, and there was a little, I think it was a brown snake. I can't remember. It's been a couple of years. But yeah, we've had, had them all over the place literally.

Wow. Yeah, my life for decay snake was in the national zoo in. Oh, nice. Yeah, it's D.C. area. Yeah, we're. Yeah, we have bears. And there was one crawling across the rocks. I'm like, oh, a snake.

there you go all my work colleagues are like yeah you would find the snake in the zoo I'm like I'm glad I did this is a cool snake yeah yeah yeah so yeah and it's it's you know it's nice because then you know if I'm

if I'm you know sick of sitting at the desk dealing with emails or whatever for the day and it's my lunch time even though I usually just work through emails during my lunch but I can at least break out for 30 minutes and just run up one of the trails or you know

get up and, you know, walk around one of the wetlands, whatever, and never know what you're going to see. Right. That's cool. Yeah. Well, yeah, we definitely appreciate you coming on and sharing your experience and all these amazing experiences you've had and, you know, studying things in the wild and your conservation efforts. Where can people find, you know, stuff you post or information about what you're doing? Our zoo is one of the few zoos that is really good about sharing the diversity of projects, right? It's not just about the megafauna and the mammals.

I mean, it still is at most places. And they still get priority, but ours is great about it. And so, you know, any one of the hurt projects I'm talking about, we try to share on social as much as we can. I share what I can when I can, you know, a lot of the stuff that I do because it's through the zoo. We have to wait for the zoo to share it or until we publish it, whatever it is. But yeah, we always try to get as much of our conservation messaging out that we can through social media, through the zoo's website. The zoo's website has a conservation report that describes a lot of our projects, but in very, very small scale. And the zoo's website has some more information.

But, you know, we have a lot ranging from gopher frogs, tiger salamanders, hickory nut gourd salamanders, you know, V.I. Boas, Crested Toe. Hellbenders and everything. So we're not able to get all of it out there, but it's definitely out there on the zoo site and through the socials. Like I said, I share some stuff through Facebook. And yeah, so check any one of those things out. And hopefully people hear more about what we're doing

because we try to share it as much as we can. Nice. We're excited about it. And like, honestly, this is great because it's an avenue that gives you the ability to talk about, talk about it more in depth and also tell the stories, right? Like we covered a lot, you know, nothing in too much specific detail. But, you know, to just be able to tell some of the stories is it's fun.

But it also, I think, hopefully people listening realize that there's a lot that goes into the work that we do. But it's also fun. It's exciting. And we're just as excited about it, right? You know, like I'm, I still get excited when I find a VI boa. I still yell. And, you know, it's. It's still something we do even after seeing, like I said, I don't know how many I've seen,

75 maybe something. So, yeah, anytime we can talk about it or say it, it's exciting. That's awesome. Yeah, it's great. You haven't lost the passion, the excitement. That's a good sign. You're on the right track and doing good things. Yeah, definitely.

All right, well, check out North Carolina Zoo and for more information on some of Dustin's projects. And once again, we'll thank you for coming on. and we'll thank Eric and Owen and Raleigh-Pythons Radio for hosting our podcast, and we'll catch you again next week for Reptile Fight Club.