Reptile Fight Club - Grilling the Expert: With Zac Loughman

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

In this episode, Justin and Rob begin a new segment called Grilling the Expert. This first episode is with Dr. Zac Loughman. Follow Justin Julander @Australian Addiction Reptiles-http://www.australianaddiction.comIGFollow 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 another episode of reptile fight. Although today we're shifting things up a little bit. We're going to start a little bit of a new segment we're calling Grilling the Expert. So we want to have these highfalutin scientific minds on here and I think we scare them away talking about fighting.

That may not be the case with our current guest. Dr. Zach Lofman joins us again. Happy to have him back. But, you know, we wanted to kind of pick his brain about some of the things that we're wondering about. And so, of course, he was very gracious to come on. So thanks for being here, Zach. Oh, thank you for having me. I love you guys show. It's the one I listened to when I, when I'm working and I got to get my, my brain going. You guys are the guys that I listened to just so you know. Well, that's nice of you to say. Yeah. Appreciate the, you're, you're that one listener out there.

Pretty sure you got more than one, man. And of course, uh, Mr. Uh. Rob Stone is with us as well. This was his idea to grill Zach on some burning questions that he's got. And I think they'll be generally very interesting. I mean, I'm ready for this show and excited to hear what Zach has to say, but yeah, thanks for, thanks for being on and making the time to join us. Um, so you just got back from Pomona recently, huh? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, did a rocket run, literally a rocket run.

I had a meeting on Thursday that I had to be at, and then we had a freaking snowstorm and pushed it to Friday, but I already had my plane ticket. Yeah. So, you know, I flew out to California on Friday. I went to Pomona on Saturday, Friday afternoon, Saturday. Yeah. And then I hopped on an airplane,

flew home on Sunday and started school on Monday. Oh, wow. That is really, yeah, that's more flying. Yeah, cool. Yeah flying than kimono. Yeah, cool. Yeah. What was the best thing you saw out there? Your favorite thing?

It might shock people, given everybody knows me from Colubrid and Colubroid Radio, but my favorite thing were lizards. I was I'm I'm teaching a class this semester. It's very selfish. The class, it's biology of snakes, because I just wanted to have time to nerd out on snakes even more than I already nerd out on snakes. But I was doing like a deep dive into anglomorphs, which are things like veranids and helodramatids and alligator lizards. All those got uh shinosaurus no that guy and um when i was at the show i was already in this kind of anguimorpha vibe yeah and then they had like a ton of them um and i don't know why i've seen them before but the thing that just completely captured my attention were just the flipping beaded lizards i couldn't get enough of the beaded lizards i i keep helas um here at the house and uh my son uh was indicating

like helodermatids are his favorite and i was like oh well then we definitely need to get a beaded then yeah that's how that went down and they're they're not hard sorry they're kind of hard to find over where i'm at but oh really i think there were several yeah in the building so so those were cool um and then uh there were some shinosaurus there as well cool uh and i oh what is that chinese crocodile lizard is that right uh-huh yeah so um and given that i really like aquatic organisms, they're a good fit. Crazy lizard that acts like a salamander and looks like an alligator. I don't think you can get better than that for me. So, seeing those is always a trip.

And you normally see them in zoos. It's not that often you get to see them in the private sector. Right. Keith McPeak just picked some up, I believe. He's kind of on an aquatic lizard kick as as well he's got his plant that no today and his uh shinosaurs so he's amassing the cool collection of neat lizards so that's pretty cool yeah i i'm probably cutting back on snakes and i'm gonna head towards lizards with bigger, badder, naturalistic setups. But the shinies, as they're called, are extremely high on my wish list because where they live is not that, climatically, is not that different from where I live here in Appalachia.

So, you know, it's one of those, just the background ambience of my house are what they need nice yeah they're not cheap but uh at the same time uh you know having a couple flagships in your collection is not that bad do you remember who was uh who had those or because no i've got a guy local to me or down you know in provo area which is a couple hours south. But he breeds shinies and has quite a nice collection of those. And Joey Muggles. I think you remember. It was predator reptiles, I think. Huh.

Okay. They had a pretty professional display. Nice. The other thing I did is I walked around the show completely in a nerd-induced trance, looking at the animals and not associating the animals with any of the people that had them yeah now i have no clue who had the things that i was interested in yeah i just know they were there yeah see i take a picture of the booth and then i take a picture of the animal so i know if i have something that i get i do that at zoos too

if i see something that i'm geeking out that I don't know what it is, I'll take a picture of the sign and then the reptile. That's a pro tip right there. But it is nice to just get lost in the reptiles and just appreciate them and not really. Oh yeah. Well, especially if you have limited time, you know, you're there for a day or day and a half.

It's hard to get around to see everything first off, you know, you might miss some cool stuff, yeah yep nice and we're we had a ccr booth too which was oh cool okay we got to meet a lot of our listeners that are out on the west coast and um we also got to we lined up a bunch of uh future guests which was yeah pretty cool. Yeah. Totally worth it. We did one where Chuck and I went to the Anaheim show and we walked around and just fought people on the spot. Like, hey, you want to be on a podcast right now? Let's fight about this topic. And then we did. That's cool.

It was pretty fun. I don't know how great the fights were, but we did get a couple guests from that that came on later. Yeah, it was pretty fun yeah good times those california shows can be can be fun um yeah i always liked vending those back in the day me and ben moral would go vend the show and we i think we went to our first uh california show and we came out of there with like so many ones and twenties and we looked like drug dealers. We had just rolls of cash. We're like, this is the best thing ever. Oh man.

It was good days. But yeah, good times out there. Oh, well, um, I don't know. How's everything going with, uh, you got school started. You got a lot of of got a lot of students this year with cool yeah it's it's kind of fun the um the bio the zoosai major and you know you run lucas's committee so um it just keeps plugging along and growing uh so you know that's really cool all the other it seems like all the other majors are declining and mine is growing uh i

shouldn't say mine because i deal with a bunch of other professors but the one that i oversee because i'm department head uh but that's that's rock and rolling this is actually a really big year um for me at the school uh with the crayfish research i do, I helped fish and wildlife get two species listed. I served as a species expert and they were listed in 2016. And anytime you put an animal on the endangered species list, they always say the cliche is the immediate task is to get it right off the list. And with these animals, we can do habitat restoration. But once it's restored, there's no populations that can then move into the habitat.

So propagation and head starting has always been a part of the equation. And people grow crayfish all the time. Like this is not a new there's a whole industry in aquaculture that's focused around propagating crayfish. But it turns out that growing endangered crayfish is a little bit different. And we always talk about the regulations and agencies and all that jazz. But I kind of have this inside seat because I live this life with the agencies on the inside. And what's funny is there's situations where fish and wildlife doesn't want to grow animals for fish and wildlife because if the endangered animals are dying under their care

that's called take and they don't want to be responsible for that so then when you have these animals that are new and nobody's ever worked with you would think there'd be this like let's go get them but it's more of this like whoa whoa i don't want to get in trouble by my own and uh yeah which was a very eye-opening thing for me and i was kind of shocked by that but i was in a meeting um and uh back in when was that that was in 2019 so it was right before no 2018 and just serendipitously, it came up, we've got to propagate these things or headstart them. And somebody said, Zach, do you have the ability to do that? And I said, well, I've done it. I did it before the animals were listed. I just haven't done it since because of permits and everything. And then they said, well, if you had a building,

could you do it? And I said, yeah. And I got the keys to that building. So we have the Appalachian aquatic conservation center. We call it the act. It's real. It sounds swanky. It's essentially an extremely nice garage. That's what it's a garage with more plugs and more hose bibs and it's got a bunch of drains in the floor and that's basically what it is. We have like the shell

and in the grant, there was money to build the systems and so now finally we get to build those systems and when they had me build it, they basically said, like, we don't want just crayfish. And I let everybody know, like, I don't do fish.

I don't do freshwater mussels. I can breed a turtle, though. And so now I have a turtle propagation facility next to my crayfish propagation facility. So I'm doing hermiticulture and aquaculture which are the two things i love and then somehow i got this building where i now get to like fill it with turtles so we're nice we're part of the safe program for aza for north american turtles and we have a bunch of spotted turtles that were confiscated uh that are going to be serving as breeders and we've been kind of housing them in the zoosai program and various buildings on campus but they're getting like the taj mahal built

nice for them now that their labs there and wood turtles and eastern box turtles so cool super cool and then the endangered crayfish obviously and then part of the crayfish propagation which is awesome and i have a grad student doing this like right now, is we all know what massasaugas are. Eastern massasauga rattlesnakes have a direct association with crayfish. It was only a matter of time before I ended up working with massasaugas. And I talk on my podcast all the time about this mythical trip to Iowa. Nobody wants to go to Iowa. And then I went to Iowa, and it was like this herper paradise. And while I was there, I was talking to my host, and I was there for hodgo snakes.

And he said, have you ever thought about working with sagas? Well, they're federally protected, and I don't want to deal with permits and anything like that. And I said, well, they're federally protected and I don't want to deal with permits and anything like that. And I said, well, yeah. Do you know how to grow those crayfish that they live, like that dig the holes that they live in? And I thought, like, here we go. And I was like, yeah, I know how to grow them. And I've actually like literally planted burrowing crayfish and created a new colony. Wow. burrowing crayfish and created a new colony wow and so that then led to uh taylor swish sal's

master's thesis where we're going to be bringing into the act um what's called the grassland crayfish um brook and barris gracilis and rearing them up and we're going to get about two three hundred of them and then we're going to try to kind of literally plant these burrowing crayfish at the end of a Massasauga colony that Massasaugas live in to kind of expand it out into habitat where the crayfish were excavated. Yeah. And thus building the habitat for the Massasauga rattlesnakes. Do they just use the burrows or do they also feed on them? Is it just a commensal? Well, it's funny you say that.

This could actually be a really good Fight Club episode between me and some Massasauga biologists. use the burrows or do they also feed on them is it just well it's like you say that this could actually be a really good fight club episode between me and some massasauga biologists because there's this idea that these pit vipers are eating these burrowing crayfish and you know we we think about the crayfish as this kind of diminutive arthropod and it's being attacked by these like pit vipers but if you know anything about pit viper skulls, they're like the most delicate things on earth anatomically. And burrowing crayfish have evolved to combat things like raccoons. They actually have the highest pinching pressure of any known crayfish that's been tested.

And it's designed to pinch the septum of a mammal and just cause the most pain possible so that they can, you know, it teaches the raccoon, like don't do that again or pain. Yeah. So like knowing that, I just don't see these big burly. And the other thing about the burrowing crayfish I should say is that they're there. Some of them get very um and their claws are actually have more calcium carbonate in them to reinforce the bam than other parts of their bodies and other and freshwater crayfishes so i just picture a mass of saga going down that hole and just getting completely thrashed by the crayfish and what i what i i think what they're

doing i don't know this um but given how chemo receptive you know chemo sensory is so important to snakes yeah i'm willing to bet that they're choosing abandoned burrows over active burrows yeah and we know that the crayfishes will the the burrow fidelity for them is it's like they'll hang in a burrow for about three four months and then if they get flooded or the colony you know they they have to actually leave the burrow uh because um the the oxygen in the water down the burrow it goes away depletes so the burrowers have to actually leave the burrow right get up to the water surface to breathe in these wetlands so they leave the burrowers have to actually leave the burrow right get up to the water surface to breathe in these wetlands so they leave the burrow now they're out in the wetland and you know some

of them make it back to their holes some of them get eaten and so then the net response is that there's going to be unoccupied burrows and i think that's where the sagas are going do they dig a new burrow if they get displaced they can dig a new burrow they they get displaced? They can dig a new burrow. They don't like to. We have some projects that kind of indicate that the burrowers are long-lived in that if they can hang in a burrow, they hang in that burrow for a long time. But if they get out on the landscape, they'll totally just dive down whatever burrow they can find. So, yeah. Do they just modify it to suit their needs? They modify it to their size. Wow. That's cool. So, so you're thinking,

and that would be pretty easy to test, you know, just have a hole that looks the same as a crayfish hole and put a crayfish in one and not in the other and see if they choose one over the other. This is the part of my life. Nobody in the podcast world knows about well in all the damn time. But when you spend as much time as I do roaming wetlands looking at holes, you absolutely know the tells that let you know this is a burrow that has a crayfish in it. And this is a burrow that doesn't. And I've seen quite a few pictures of Massasaugas kind of basking outside of a crayfish in it and this is a burrow that doesn't and i've seen quite a few pictures of massasauga

kind of basking outside of a crayfish burrow yeah and kind of looking at those same tells of the burrow that the crate that the snake is in yeah i'm seeing mostly unoccupied burrows being used by the snakes okay that's cool it's neat when worlds collide, right? Yeah, it is. That's really cool. Yeah, no, I'm happy that I'm finally getting to do some saga work. But I got to be, you know, I lean on the crayfish side because they are federally protected and I have enough permits in my life. I don't need any more of those. those yeah for sure but uh but i mean you know habitat restoration in the wild is is exactly fantastic opportunity to oh yeah with them and and help them you know that's great really yeah no i'm i'm stoked i was not aware of that relationship between crayfish and massasaugas

that's neat oh yeah it's an intimate very cool uh relationship well so they utilize it to uh they overwinter in the water to keep from freezing that's the so kind of in the same vein as the sort of non-rock timbers that we saw in the pine barrens it's the same idea okay so they're actually under the water uh in the winter during the winter avoid freezing man that's crazy because therows, a lot of people don't realize, they go deep. I'm the guy that digs them out. How deep are we talking? Six foot deep. Six foot, wow.

Yeah. Most of them, I actually know how long my arms are because I use my arms as a measuring stick to get data. So my arm is 1.25 meters long and when i shut my arm down i'm not getting to the bottom i know all right we're over a meter so that's cool and so now when you're digging these are you just using like a post hole digger or something just to or do you just use your hand really just bleed a lot man some people will put on uh dawn dish gloves if you ever see a bunch of people in a muddy field or roadside ditch roadside ditches are like my paradise um

but uh we used to wear like i used to be all about putting on waders and wading boots and then um you know shovels the problem with the shovels is it just is so destructive that that you're trying to limit destruction because the burrowing crayfish are there's only so much space they can take up so when you're in there with a shovel you're doing damage and so uh you know but at the same time when it's the summertime you're going on chest waders and you're in a roadside ditch baking in the sun. I got to worry about people getting like heat stroke, which has happened a couple of times. Yeah. And so the way we do it now, we just look like a bunch of crazy people wallowing in the ditch. Like we all have my students and I, we have on shorts and chacos and old T-shirts.

And then we're wearing dish gloves to protect our hands. And oftentimes they're those kind of, I don't know how to explain them. I think they call them glam gloves. Like they've got like flowers and things on them. And we're walking up and down the road, jumping in the ditch, shoving our arms in holes like it's got to be something to see. But we've learned that you just kind of get the technique to use your hand as a shovel or a spade. And usually you're in mud. With the roadside ditches, it gets real dicey because of beer bottles.

I was just going to say one of my favorite things to do as a kid was try to break the beer bottle first at the rock. You were my enemy. I wasn't throwing the beer bottles. I was just breaking them, making them more dangerous. And the thing that's crazy about that is I don't know how to – when you cut your fingers with glass in a crayfish burrow, it's precise and perfect it does not hurt so yeah you usually tell that you you've cut yourself this has happened to me a dozen times um to get the crayfish out of the burrow you actually pump it so you basically take your hand make a fist and you're sloshing the

water around and you create a little bit of a vacuum the crayfish don't like that and so they come to the surface and you can grab them and i've been like pumping the water and then literally had bloody water coming out of the hole and i'm like oh damn it you pull your hand up and you're dripping and like uh mud in ditches just has a next level smell to it, too. It's not great. And we all smell like that at the end of the day. We've returned university vans to the maintenance guys,

and the guy that was in charge of detailing the cars, he doesn't like us. Yeah. Because I also have like 19 20 year olds with me and I don't I gave up trying to tell them not to make the van dirty it's impossible like you're just completely

covered in mud yeah so I've kind of turned on I basically told the university like I don't need the good vehicles give me the beaters that are about to be given back to the university like i don't need the good vehicles give me the beaters that are about to be given back to the state like and then inevitably i'm the only person getting vehicles in the summer and the way that they run it is they normally give out the best vehicles first and then here i am with a 2024 or whatever the hell i'm like god bless it so yeah i appreciate it but at the same time i just know i'm gonna get yelled at so my

my hometown of hooper utah is is built on a system of ditches so the guy wrote a book about hooper and called it sons of ditches so yes there you go yeah yeah i i know the ditch system very well and hunted painted turtles and leopard frogs and stuff we We get herps out of those burrows. When we're in the southeast, we've gotten baby amphumas because amphumas will go down and lay their eggs and they coil around them down in there. My students, we're actually going to get, hopefully I'm going to get this written up,

but it's actually Tyler's introduction chapter for his thesis is a review of crayfish herp associations. And a lot of that is our labs like discoveries. We had this big project in South Carolina where we, I know that we dug over a thousand burrows for that project. And my students were just you know i was going over the notes and this crazy thing happened where i'm seeing turtle turtle turtle and i'm like

there's turtles in there how are there turtles in there and then sure enough that little baby stink pots were going down in the burrows and i thought it was little baby stink pots were going down in the burrows and I thought it was little baby stink pots. And then, cause the students told me they were little baby stink pots. And then I saw the pictures of the babies and I was like, those are adults. I had no clue. Turtles use those crayfish burrows, but that's a big, like, that's kind of a big deal. Cause they create this habitat that all these animals utilize and turtles haven't been documented down in those holes that often so the fact that um

cernothrus is down in there's that's that's pretty interesting there's a couple like eastern mud turtles which is you know different genus but that's a species that's imperiled in a couple states and i know okay maybe they're in the boroughs. So that kind of gives, you know, another, another need, but yeah, the crayfish herb element of my, my professional and nerd life is actually intimately linked because of the fact that they create the habitats that the herbs use. How cool. I love learning about stuff that I didn't have a clue about. That's really awesome. Thanks for sharing that.

You wouldn't think crayfish will have this great, strong connection with different herb species. So that's really cool to hear. I mean, I guess it's like anything you don't think a lot about or you don't have coming to contact with. But how awesome. Yeah. All right. Well, I don't know. I, I, I feel like we need a coin toss just, but I guess we could, we could flip the coin between me and Rob to see who gets

to, to grill you the most, but I don't know if it's, if we, if we go without a coin toss, I just might get too anxious or something. So go ahead and call it Rob. Tails. It is heads. But since this is your, your, uh, your brainchild, I'm going to defer to you anyway. So, yeah. Okay, cool. No, I really appreciate it. So the Genesis of the episode was really, I wanted to ask Zach the unfair question, particularly in a Facebook instant message. Hey, so as a forms herper, if I'm going to include heterodon in my list, right, because I don't necessarily want to,

so I started with crudelus and that shifted to venomous reptiles of the U.S., but also as a party to that, right, we naturally run into really cool animals. Not that I wasn't aware of them previously, but well, I'm halfway through the pituitas, you know, a third of the way or half the way, depends on the count, through the heterodon, you know, and certainly sinus or something I'd love to see, you know. So my unfair question, particularly in that context, was, hey, Zach, what would you call, what would you consider to be the heterodon forms list for the U.S. that I could use as sort of my checklist. And that was really the genesis for this. Additionally, right, we've recently had episodes, can universal standards be applied to taxonomy? We assigned that to Zach as homework that she was on the other foot. And then last week when we were talking to Nick Vine, we got into the topic. It hasn't come out yet.

We had gotten into the topic of the validity of subspecies, because presuming that Zach would have thoughts on that topic. So we'll kind of start with the discrete question, grilling the expert on the discrete question. And I've tried to do my research on this, and certainly have some thoughts based on right and right. You had generously brought a flat paper from 1969, so read through that. that kind of comes into play with one uh one form and we can get there but i honestly just kind of want to talk through that i do think this genuinely be interesting to people and i hope that it uh isn't stepping on the book too much

oh it's not stepping on the book that much i love this stuff yeah um so what would be the forms of heterodon or hognose snakes in the U.S.? If I was doing this from a purely taxonomic standpoint, I think that you have to – I don't think you have to do anything. First of all, this isn't a cop-out, but I honestly think it's up to the herper. I just think that the herper's decision of what they're tracking does have to have some factual basis in it, if that makes sense, like some standard to be applied. At present, we have Heterodon nasicus, which is the plains hognose snake, Heterodon kennerlei, the Mexican hognose snake, Heterodon simus, the southern hognose snake, Heterodon pleurinos. If we go to nasicus, there's this other, it was a subspecies, then it was given species status, which heterodon gloidi heterodon nascus gloidi and if we just kind of stick on gloidi gloidi was in texas it was in missouri um you know kind of the the wahida area that that whole thing and there's some people that would recognize gloidi and there's other people that would not recognize gloidiite. But the thing is, scientists, based off the data at hand,

don't recognize gloidite. And the reason why I don't recognize gloidite is people like Platt, all the way back in 1969, when he published his dissertation, had done the hard work of going out into nature and basically, well, that's actually a lie, doing the hard work of going to the museum because other people went out into nature that's what actually happened and put these things in jars uh so that platt could then pull the specimens out he's got the locality data

he does the scale counts he does the blotch counts because that was something that was important in that designation um and he basically did this and what platt ultimately determined was there's a tremendous amount of overlap and inconsistency between gloidae and nasicus and and so you know do they have a different phenotype to a certain degree sure they, they do. But in science, we call this kind of getting away from the base population and add on an extreme, you know, in a conservative manner, you'd call that a clinal variation of the same species. Bull snakes come to mind. Like when you're in the northern part of the bull snake range, that's where you get the tricolor phenotype, which are oftentimes in herpetoculture called kankakees.

But that because of the kankakee plain in Illinois and Newton County in Indiana. But the reality is that tricolor look, it just keeps going north. Like I was standing in Minnesota and I caught the best looking kankakee bull snake I've ever seen. And that was not the Kankakee region. So, but, but, but we're not like, you know, but that bull snakes in Amarillo, Texas, that don't have that tricolor look, we're still calling those a bull snake. So that's a Klein, a North South type Klein. So with the Dusky pogs, which were heterodon nascus gloidae. And then there was this push in the early 2000s to make it heterodon gloidae, the data just doesn't support that.

And so what ends up happening is you get people that put out these papers that aren't really based in science. They're based in opinion. And then that is then given to us to receive and as herpers or in herpetoculture and then everybody gets bent out of shape but me as a scientist i just read the paper and like well i'm not gonna accept that okay i'm gonna go eat lunch like that's the extent of it there's there's no raging it's no like you know let's fight in the parking lot it's just like i don't see the evidence i'm just not going to accept it and and that is being a taxonomist that's what i do like yeah um i don't do it for snakes but i do it for crayfish all the time how frustrating is that though when

the rest of the world accepts it and everybody starts adopting it i mean is the only solution to like put out a paper that kind of refutes it or you know how do you deal with that because i'm i'm being frustrated by that whole stimson eye children i think yeah yeah the the thing that's weird about it is my world that i dwell in with in taxonomy is is very different than the herpetological realm because i'm not even a big fish i'm a small fish in a small pond there are there are i can do this real quick give me one second there are maybe six crayfish taxonomists on planet earth yeah so you know that that that gets a little annoying in one regard because we do even with six there's a little bit of tribalism so you know but i also know who's reviewing my

paper i have i i write my descriptions and i will like read it and i'm like uh that reviewer guy is gonna gut me again you know and so by not having running into that yeah so we kind of have to all come to this weird compromise of what constitutes a description but it keeps us all honest in herpetology there are so many people doing these that that's not necessarily like that compromise of like respect each other's opinion and science that's not part of it and there's also people that aren't even for flipping taxonomists that just know how to do the genetic techniques yeah that are doing the genetic techniques and getting them and they don't know anything about the animal in nature or its evolution or a biggie for me is zogeography.

They don't understand the kind of historical way of the land and how this was here and that was here. And then, you know, over a million years, this, this went away and this came in and how that impacts gene flow, which resulted in that, you know result that you got when that's not included and it's just i'm going to look at this genetically i'm going to find one morphological difference and i'm going to completely obliterate everything i do have a problem with that yeah um right but oftentimes what ends up happening is whether we like it or not, the genetics ends up being backed over and over and over again by the different genetic methods as they advance. And so I also don't think you can ignore the genetics I get in my world.

We have the rat snakes and Burbrink put out the paper that obliterated all of the rat snakes. And, you know, I went so far as to do a dedicated CCR to explain the history because I was so tired of hearing all these colubrid peoples just. Rip it to shreds. And I was like, but you don't understand the science that you're ripping to shreds you're just jumping on this bandwagon so circling back to the hognose snakes because the science you know indicated that that that phenotype was not unique it was not isolated to a given zogeography of gloid eye gloid eye was kind of just went off in the taxonomic oblivion though it is recognized by some states as a subspecies but myself i don't recognize it the only time

that i recognize it is if i am in one of those states and um i'm doing my research i have to get a permit and so in that situation i you know i recognize gloidi uh if if. I have to get a permit. And so in that situation, I, you know, I recognize Gloydi. Uh, if, if, if I'm trying to get a permit, um, I can't remember, I think it's Missouri. I could be wrong, but, uh, there is a state that still has Gloydi on their, their state list. Um, but like in my book, I'm going to talk about Gloydi, butid eye is not getting a taxonomic treatment by itself. That's not happening. Now, another one for heterodon that's fun is Kennerley eye, the Mexican hognose snake, because this one's very interesting to me because it is phenotypically different. There's these little scales called L'Oreal scales, I believe, that are around the eyeball.

No, azagis scales. That's it. Sorry. And there's like a count and it overlaps, which is great. And then people get so hung up on characters overlapping. I did this early in my career. Like when I was describing my first crayfish species, i was losing my mind trying to get three characters with no overlap and my mentor at the time just laughed at me he just sat back and openly belly laughed at my misery and he was like i was where you were at 20 years ago it's like it's nature yeah they didn't know when they were evolving they couldn't overlap and i think about that all the time like we don't talk about that with these key characters uh but uh with with the hot with the mexican hogs yeah they got the escalation that's different they got the coloration that is different with the with the speckling and the spots and that doesn't really overlap much um and so i'm fine with that being a subspecies.

I've got I've always kind of had issues with subspecies. But in this instance, I'm OK with it because of the geography, because there's not a defined break. And so when one thing kind of clouds into another, if we really want to call it a subspecies at the end of the day. Great. If we want to call it a subspecies at the end of the day great if we want to call it a species great i i'm fine with either so it's currently recognized as a species so in my book it gets its own chapter if a paper comes out and it goes back to subspecific status still gets its own chapter i'll just give it a subspecies name. And that's kind of my take on it. But for me, those four taxa would be what I would recognize for North America.

Now, for listing as a herper, this is where we get into like color phases and phenotype like for me i like to i like to a get the tats on my life list like check box first then i absolutely keep track of like the different phenotypes or looks or whatever you want to call it and so for like eastern hognose snakes uh you know getting a platy rhinos on your life list, it's done. Because currently there's only one taxa recognized. But within that taxa, you know, there's three defined morphs, if you will. There's the really bright, pretty orange-black morph that's oftentimes referred to the Halloween morph because it resembles a jack-o'-lantern or a pumpkin. There's kind of the normal.

I've heard it referred to as that, which is funny because it's got so much polymorphisms to it that there's nothing normal about it. It's just not the Halloween morph is the way that I look at it. And then there's the all-melanistic snakes, which are just black as night. And so for me, with platy rhinos,

I got the initial check. There's these three three phenotypes i want to get them all and you know i i got i got them all in one trip to pennsylvania last year so if you're doing a herb trip you could list your trip where all right we got easterns but we got to get two more phenotypes i'm fine with that i'm also fine with you not doing it because no one's holding a gun to our head it is what it is like i i don't know if it's because i'm i'm middle-aged and i have to deal with people all the time but i used to really care about this when i was in my 20s and now i just don't just like i actually sit back and watch all my students bicker over this. I know you guys have talked about this. Eric's talked about this.

I had a kid on this trip to Pennsylvania we were talking about before the show, and we're finding all these snakes, and they were geeking over, of all things, black racers. They over of all things black racers they really wanted to catch black racers which you know i'm thinking like okay you know like racers are are common but for them they were new and we had caught like nine by the end of the second day and this kid's moping on the way back to the van i was like what's wrong like what's going on he's like i don't have a racer on my life list yet and i went we caught nine of them like what are you talking about i didn't catch one i was like oh i remember when i used to do that so i used to do that and now i think i added um i had the florida kingsnake to

my life list i was in the car driving with Phil Wolfe the other direction. I wasn't in the car. I was on the road. And then my students called me like, hey, we got it. But for me, that counted because I did all the freaking research to get us to that damn road. We flipped so many coral boulders. And I was like, they're in this 50 yard section of road like i had done all that it's more about the the planning and the hunt that then actually

getting it in my hand now and i don't know if that's like i'm older i i don't know but like so so this listing stuff has always kind of it just makes makes me giggle because it's like, it's the voyage, not the destination. Like for that Florida King, all that work to get to that damn road. And then, you know, we had been on so many roads and it's in the sugar cane fields of of florida which at that time i don't know if you've been there or not it looks like the seventh circle of hell they're literally burning like hundred acre plots of cane and it's like raining down on you and there's private property and some of it's not and you've got to like yeah you're you're got in the back of your brain am i gonna get arrested at any point in time because i don't know if i'm allowed to be here and we're shot you know yeah

we're shot we drove all the way down from west virginia like i'm counting that snake there's no way i'm not you know so yeah yeah i don't know if i absolutely no yeah totally i think that's totally fair you know that that's a great answer There are a ton of jumping off points. And this is the idea. Right. So this was sort of a semi hyper specific question that I do think will have general interest. But and there's a ton, a ton here that sticks out to me at this point is really a reflection of or was born of ideation to find trips to do right it was saying okay well what do we want to do next and kind of being a progenitor for that discourse and saying okay well let's and get us to spots that we otherwise probably wouldn't go you know that i wouldn't have an inclination to go to that place and it's kind of like well let's check it out and then you find all these other cool things and you just, the list to me. Yeah.

And we had Nipper on for an episode extensively, but the kind of the point was from my perspective, that rather than seeing the list as something to finish, it's the list just expands as you get, as you get closer, right. Rather than getting necessarily stuck on, you know, Willard I Obscurus, which almost certainly I'll wind up getting stuck on. The point becomes, well, instead, let's expand the universe to all venomous forms. And then it's, well, we're no longer just on the venomous list, but it's plus Petriophus, plus Heterodon, plus whatever. You know, one point that you had made that I think speaks to utilizing forms rather than taxonomic designation would be the eastern rat snake.

So I actually haven't seen any of them at this point, despite our trips over there. But, yeah, which is sort of wild. But were I to see a black rat snake, any selfrespecting uh pantherophis fan would not uh accept that i had seen all of the you know that i ticked the box on pantherophis in the eastern united states that would be patently ridiculous so it's like okay well what's our what's the divination going to be and honestly one utility of subspecies particularly in old literature is kind of i take it as well maybe that's a starting point to try and figure out what forms there are of different things, even if those are no longer recognized as valid.

Okay. At some point in time, people had recognized these things as valid. That being said, I think subspecies generally are probably, we're with the process of globalization, we're moving towards lumping naturally because we have so much more access to information. A lot of those subspecies designations, particularly in older taxonomy, were born of a lack of information or gaps in our knowledge, right, between the populations that were known. We weren't seeing declines. It was, hey, I mean, the part that's pretty wild to me actually is reading through right and right. And actually, I guess I'll bring this one up as a specific example. But when we were talking with Nick Fine on last week's episode, I mentioned that as I was kind of going through this process associated with coral snakes,

Fulbius, the southeastern coral snake, actually had a subspecies that was written up in the 1920s, Barbari, that was supposed to be from the Everglade hammocks of Dade County, Florida. Literally the entirety of the rest of the range was a singular thing, but because there was reduced melanin in the red bands associated with this handful of animals in the 20s from Dade County, they were recognizing that as a form. And the part that's wild, you'll know this, but in the very same vein, as I'm reading right and right, there's a recognition of a subspecies of platyrhinos. That's the Dade County version of platyrhinos. And it's like, man, what is with Dade County getting its own subspecific status for everything? Brooks, Brooks Kings, too. Same deal. same deal and so i mean part of it right does speak to well maybe there is something to it

relative to there being an ecological factor that is driving differentiation in forms of these various things in this specific spot but simultaneously i don't know that you know i'm going to recognize barbara as a legitimate coral snake that i need to find. No, here's how I have started to view the old subspecies. Like if you have a copy of Conant and Collins from the Peterson's Field Guide, which, you know, if you did a herpetology class in college in the 90s or the early 2000s, that was like your text. If you're going on a field trip, you had that book. And that was also kind of the list if

you will uh that standardized everything and now you know with taxonomic revision molecular revolution blah blah those aren't there uh but they're still you know the way that i look at them is they're basically they're those subspecies when you do this, there's always a signal. They always do clade in their own little way. It's just they don't show enough signal genetically to warrant having a name associated with them. But that certainly doesn't mean if you're keeping a list or you're going herping or you're a herpetoculturalist with localities we can't honor it in those circles like i've that that's my philosophy on it is i do like i'm taking my students down to the to florida and i'm putting together the trip much the way you put trips together rob and there's this big part of me that is trying to justify driving three hours out of the way to spend half a day

in the golf hammock so that I can get, I think it's William's eye, the golf hammock rat snake. Cause that's my favorite look of all the rat snakes. Probably not going to do it because I've got a lot of kids with me and that would be miserable. But at the same time, when I inevitably find that rat snake, I am not going to call it Spiloides. On my list, I already got a Spiloides, but I'm going to check off, just like I would check off a Halloween hognose snake, which isn't a taxonomic thing. I'm going to check off, I got a golf hammock rat, and that's what I'm going to call it, and that's what it is. And I have those here at my house because I love them so much. And they are not black rat snakes here. They're golf hammock rat snakes here. And I'm not, I also don't want to go find Burbrink and punch him in the face.

Like, it's okay. Like, all right, the genes show this is a highly plastic phenotype of, you know, and that's it. So that's kind of the way that I look at it. I think that, you know, kind of segueing to herpetoculture, this is where herpetoculture becomes really valuable, in my opinion, because we honor these localities and phenotypes and try to maintain them. And we know them intimately and every now and then the scientists need that material you know and we're the ones that got it because the golf hammock region has been turned into an awful lot of walmarts lately so you know what i'm saying so uh yeah it's okay you can we can have panophis colloides, and we can still say Gulf Hammock rat snake, and it's okay. It's just the taxonomic level is where things change. And that's my take on it.

And I think the reason why I have this take is because of the work I do with the crayfish, describing them. Because when you actually do that, you realize something that is never discussed. So this is like the tea, if you will. Taxonomy is a complete disaster for the people that do it, too. It's like, it might even be worse. I'm working on a crayfish species right now. And the genetics results we got back it looks like somebody put phenotypes in a shotgun and just shot the appalachian mountain like there's no rhyme or reason and things in georgia or sorry like in

this part of kentucky are related these things in virginia and these things in tennessee are related these things in pennsylvania like it Tennessee are related to these things in Pennsylvania. Like it just doesn't like what the hell. And so when we get those papers that we read, like your Aunt Teresa paper, Justin, those authors, I read those papers. And on the inside, I'm like, you are really good at the BS. You really took that really messy tree and just made it really seem like, you know, this is very straightforward. And it just isn't because mother nature is not, it's not black, white. It is all gray. And when you get black and white, you jump up and down.

Like you, you, you, you lose your mind. I have one project right now. It was black and white. And there was a crayfish biologist named dr horton hobbs and he's the crayfish jesus he described 70 to 80 percent of our fauna in north america and he has this famous quote that he told my mentor which is when you find what you're looking stop looking like like literally when you get everything lines up, like, you know what I mean? And I read a lot of those papers. I don't remember the name.

I know you'll know the name, the new rhino rat snake. When I read that paper, I totally got the vibe of like, they just barely got across that line and they quit. We're not going to get any more. we're not going to get any more. We're not going to do any more stats. We're not going to do any more genetics. We barely got the threshold of what we need. There's one scale difference. We're done.

You know what I mean? And that can get annoying when the taxon is being done that way. All right, then I got some beef. Yeah, absolutely. So kind of, again, a question that we discussed a little bit last week, but I'm very curious, you know, with just sort of your opinion relative to all these inputs. What do you make in terms of as a forms herper of cryptic species, particularly where you can't distinguish them in the field, right? Like it's some, it's not even an easy visual or, or if it is, then it requires heavy manipulation, right? It's some, you know, I dwell with cryptic species all the time, but with crayfish and with salamanders, um, my, when it comes to herping, my dirty little secret is i am a complete salamander nut like i i love them to death and salamanders don't get the the justice they deserve when it comes to herping because if

you want to really go deep go to the appalachians go to the top of a mountain and try to identify the different desmagnathas that are up there it'll make you like scream it's it's like you know one of those exercises we do that we love that causes pain like that's that's it so and they got cryptic species all over the place my take on the cryptic species concept is if you understand what a cryptic species is and what creates them, it makes you more okay to tolerate them, is the best way to put that. There's two explanations I've been taught that make a lot of sense. One of those explanations is there's this idea of an incipient species. I don't know if you've heard this term.

An incipient species is a species on its way to being a species, or it's just crossed the threshold of being a species. And oftentimes with incipient species, there's this idea that the genotype has changed. So genetically, they're isolated. But the phenotype lags behind the genotype normally. So now we got the genetic isolation, now the phenotype will change. And when we go out into the field and we see all these animals that we love, some of those species, they ended that process of

speciation millions of years ago. Many of them are in it right now like one of the things i learned putting my lectures together with snake biology is we're actually in the age of snakes snakes are still in their proliferation period we oftentimes think that's done but they're you know they're radiating as we speak so the fact that we have cryptic taxa for snakes that makes total sense you know so that that was not one thing the other thing is and i like this idea there's this idea of homeoplasy so homeo means saying plazy means shape and the idea therein is there's only so many shapes to do what an animal does and so for salamanders living underneath rocks you've got this little minimal area of space between the earth and the top of the rock. You've got to have water for some of them.

You can live in a crevice, but you're not going to evolve horns and tubercles and like this radical difference for the humans walking by to go. You're different and you're different, you know? And we don't even know what the hell they're interpreting to make them different. Like little brown salamanders, they've got this nasolabial groove on their face and they're smelling the world just like snakes to them, the paint job and everything. It may not matter at all. It could all be chemical. And we don't have the receptors in our body to pick that up so with the slimy salamander complex i that was one that happened

when i was in high school the late 90s this guy named hyten um used a very primitive form of genetics to split up uh plus it on glutenosis into, I don't even know how many there are. There's over 10. Um, but you know, I've paid attention to that. I totally am the guy that catches them. I take a picture and then I go to the internet now and I look at the range map and I'm like,

Oh, I got a new one. Exactly. Yeah. But, uh, you know, but knowing that,

that homeoplasia thing, and I may not know how these things tell each other apart. Uh, and know, but knowing that that homeoplasy thing, and I may not know how these things tell each other apart. And to them, they could have the same shapes, the same colors, the same everything. But when they smell each other, one smells like flowers, and one smells like vinegar, and they stay away from vinegar, you know, that actual selection at play so um i used to get extremely bent out of shape with the cryptic species deal until i actually ended up getting the scenario where i describe i'm describing them i will say when you describe a cryptic species and you're a field person you do feel like you have like you have to give yourself 50 lashes every night for a year like i have a crayfish

i'm actually giving a presentation at a conference next week and this is my first cryptic species complex and uh yeah like the genetics i mean we used high-end genetics not just mitochondrial gene like this thing called rad seek and it is it's black white clear as day there are four of them and we cannot tell them apart like we just simply they are all these little brown critters with blue legs and orange claws uh but the genetic shows that they've been separated for like for for a million plus year like it's wow it's crazy so but that's that homeoplasia thing yeah there you go huh so i i'm just curious you know with you know we we talk about using uh genetic uh differentiating things by genetics and you know the the genome of a of any of these

animals is very large so you know what what areas areas are you looking at for, I mean, are we looking at highly variable areas or things that change more rapidly? And how do you decide? Sure. The classic approach, which is what we say barcoding, that that's the CO1, cytochrome oxidase one gene which is the gene that's you know associated with respiration and living things respiration is how we take a glucose molecule from our food and then break it down and get atp and the idea there is if you start like mutating that rapidly

you lose the ability to make energy and when you you can't make energy, you're dead. So it's what we refer to as a conserved gene for those who don't necessarily understand how this stuff works. And a lot of the papers, including the Berberink paper on the rat snakes from the early 2000s up until about five years ago, you would use that gene, and then you would use a couple nuclear genes, and these genes were being used because they were thought to be conserved. In other words, you don't get a lot of mutation rate in those genes, because if you're mutating too quickly, you're going to have deleterious things happen in your cells, and you're going to die. So the idea is the mutation rate is slow, therefore a smaller difference is more meaningful,

and we can use it for taxonomic investigations. What we now know after these more modern genomic methods where we're literally looking at hundreds, if not thousands, of genes and we're looking at every nucleotide, and then we're looking at these things called SNPs, which are single nucleotide polymorphisms, and using supercomputers to kind of look at the whole thing. Is that the barcoding genes were good for some creatures, excellent for some, okay for others, and bad for some.

And it just depends on the taxa. With snakes, I think the general consensus was they were okay to good it just depended on the lineage you were working with now that we can do this whole genome stuff i i think we're going to learn a lot more yeah about uh how evolution works and what really constitutes a different taxa um because you're not limited to just three genes out of a hundred couple hundred thousands depending on the critter yeah um and i would like to see a lot of these papers done again yeah with the new method like the anteresia paper you're talking about that would be cool the rat snake paper would be cool but then i'd also like

to see something like garter snakes like i have a really hard time accepting damn nerve damn nofus or talus which is on the atlantic coast and it's on the pacific coast and it's been you know down in the everglades and it's up in uh the the snake dens in Manitoba. How the hell is that all one thing? But the current taxonomy is Danophis retalis, and there's been some mitochondrial treatments that indicated it's all one thing. But if a genome paper came out, and it says it's done well, and it shows it is really all one thing, we just have a lot of variation, okay, that's fine uh but the new methods i trust more than the old okay and the other thing is people really want there to be a statistic like

if if there's five percent difference in nucleotides and co1 between this one and this one that's a new species i fell into that trap very early on in my career. And I had to have a taxonomic, you know, intervention by my collaborator at the North Carolina museum. Like we went to lunch and she was like, you know, you don't know anything. I was like, wow, that's, that's a strong. My job's always been the morphology, history naturalist guy she's like it doesn't like the the percent difference matters but what really matters is when the tree's made

like and they break off into you know the different clades you know are you consistently breaking into a clade and you have the high support with the bootstraps and things that is just as important as this percent difference and i was like oh okay and that's how you can have like a three percent difference in some taxes enough and other things it's like eight percent the the um daniel natush paper i think that's it with the green tapeythons yeah uh i remember i think he was on npr when he was talking about the paper i was walking right and i heard the percent difference between those animals and then he was like and i'm gonna i'm describing them as a subspecies and i think i like yelped out loud in my neighborhood like what like i think

like six or seven percent i mean it's like huge but then he explained like i don't have anything from the contact zone and until i got stuff from the contact zone i'm gonna be conservative yeah and i had mad respect for him because you know i'm gonna find out tell you zach loafman's writing that paper those are different species like you know what i mean yeah but but sure enough well and i did good science the other part of that right it's not only the science but there's also sort of the uh practical implications and realities right in the same way that you're talking about potentially missouri you know your permit says gloidi right In the if any taxonomic status changes for something like that. So a lot of his access is associated with herpetoculture or herpetocultural trade.

A changing the status, the speciation or subspeciation on that animal will have, at least once it's taken up by the relevant authorities, would have a massive impact on what that trade looks like. And there are probably pragmatic concerns around, you know, his access to, you know, to those resources or even the implications it will have for them. Yeah. Oh, no, absolutely. And that's where Natusha's background is is a little different than mine because he does the python trade and all that yeah me and my ivory tower i don't think

about that at all and that's where the real the real rubber meets the road when it comes to herpetology and herpetoculture is Clint was saying this when we were at Pomona and he was talking about how it drives him crazy when the taxonomists come up with these names because now I can't it makes it so hard for me to breed them don't they understand that and I told him like they don't care like there's not part of this equation at all there are non-herpetologists counting scales and pulling dna in the american museum of natural history right now that are thinking oh god pete isn't going to be able to keep this thing in utah now that thought never crosses anybody's brain and it might i mean i i could be lying, but I know.

Because that's where the science is separate from the hobby or discipline side of things. And should it be or shouldn't be, that's why I think that there's such friction because, I mean, that's just not part of the equation. I hate to be the bearer of bad news. Well, it probably shouldn't be. I think that's probably, you know, you shouldn't have science being shaped. Yeah, exactly. I mean, obviously there are some biases and some, you know, people get wanting to make their sponsors happy if they're funding research, especially for snake research, which I'm sure is hard to come by. So yeah, I'm sure there's things like that that probably happen, but they probably shouldn't. We'll leave it at that. Yeah. So I do have a couple more specifics out of right and right that I wanted to dive into with you and then some plot thoughts. OK, and they're more big picture for the most part. But so out of the right and right, the map. thing is they they don't actually mention this uh and actually well a little context that we mentioned again last week with nick vine but actually came from our conversation with jordan

parrot the week before is the i didn't realize that right and right was intended to be a three volume set on the handbook of snakes and the third volume is the reference material i always did think that the references as they were included in the book, seemed a little light and they almost seemed to refer to something that you would reference somewhere else. And so that was news to me. Jordan pulled it out and showed me and that was great. It's a little bit interesting. But so the map of Nasicus includes a population down in southern southeast Indiana, almost by the Kentucky border. So here's kind of where I went with it. So I see this there. Right. There's no mention in the discussion of that population or even Indiana or anything, what it would be. When I was looking on iNaturalist at records, there was a recent one above Columbus that, you know, presumably based on condition, let alone lack of other records and all these things is an escaped pet.

It's not a mutation, relatively rare amongst the, you know, what it would be to be there. But in all of the, you know you know the internet interneted as it is always want to do and was immediately uh pitchforks that's an escaped pet or escaped or released pet and all these things and my while i don't dispute that just in light of just having looked at right and right i was like well i think you're right i don't think you're nearly as right as you think you might be at least potentially right taken as valid you're not as right as you think you might be, at least potentially. Right. Taken as valid. You're not as right as you think you are. OK. That's so is the question, what would I say about the hognose north of Columbus? No, it's more so just that. Do you have any have you seen any sort of substantiation of what that circle is?

This disjunct little circle, you know, sort of substantiation of what that pop circle it's this disjunct little circle you know kind of that indiana thing it's not the it's not the columbus aspect it's well that's really interesting and i know you know you have a lot of thoughts or have put a lot of thought into sort of the iowa stuff which is on the kind of the eastern extent of range and and even then i have my own question maybe for off air of right and right again. Well, actually, more specifically. Right. There's a couple different. So we can chat about that maybe later. But, yeah, it's more. What do you make of the right and right map that has this little disjunct dot? That little disjunct dot. I know that dot. And that dot is a mislabeled platyrhinos from a museum so when they were you know putting these

the maps together way back when they didn't have the benefit that we do uh so there was a lot of you know literal i'm writing with my hand here are the snakes that we have here's the questionable um but uh those eastern populations that are isolated and what they all are is they're all for nasicus they're all glacial relic populations where basically you have like the wisconsin glaciers that expand and then retract and then expand and then retract and you know as they doing that, that grassland biome is just shifting and the little hognose snakes and all the other plants and animals are just following them. I mean, it's crazy to think about when you really think about this stuff.

And you can nerd out to a level that you don't even want to talk about. You have to start reading books on soils, and that's how they know where it all went but that's essentially what those eastern populations of nasicus are is they're all these kind of glacial relictual pieces um and the reason why that particular population is questioned is because the glaciers didn't make it all the way down there so if the glaciers didn't make it all the way down there. So if the glaciers didn't make it all the way down there, how the hell can you have a glacial relictual population? So it's kind of a cart horse relationship,

but I actually know what you're talking about because I've been trying to figure out for the book, what the hell am I going to do about all these erroneous records? Because if I wrote an erroneous record section, it would be 10 pages and there would be maybe four people on planet Earth that want to read it. And it would probably be one of the most difficult parts of the book to write. So it's probably going to be a paragraph of here's where they were thought to be, but they weren't. Yeah, that's my thought.

That'll be super interesting. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, no, that's my thought that'll be super interesting yeah no that's great um yeah no that's fantastic the other the other right and right final note just from having gone through it that that i highlighted right away because i thought it was funny was they put in there as a recognized common name uh for the eastern hog nose the bastard rattlesnake which i thought was notable i love that yeah and i don't i tried my damnedest to look that up i know i was like what the hell first of all why didn't that stick that that's kind of we got to bring it back let's bring it back oh yeah no but uh i guess it just is simply because when i mean if you've seen them they huff and they puff. They don't really do anything with their tail.

They coil their tail, but they don't do the, you know, rat snake pitch office, lampropeltis, rattle tail on the leaves. But no, I greatly appreciate bastard rattlesnake. That's pretty freaking wonderful. So, yeah. Excellent. So the other one, right, so you mentioned it in the context of a discussion on a recent CCR episode, but the Platt paper from 69, we talked about it briefly. A couple just points of interest, you know, and you had actually highlighted one previously in terms of looking at those preserved specimens i think i don't know just are the the context of finding snakes and the difficulty that entails and all and all these

things particularly now right we have a very much a snapshot in time or our own experience informs this when i'm reading through plat 69 is and he's referencing is it it Edgen, Edgar? Edgren. Edgren, Edgren. Yes. That the population, the pickled population that was referenced in that study was 1,200 Easterns and 300 Westerns. It's just a size and scale. Obviously, I'm glad to see, at least in this instance this instance right we're getting utility out of that but it's just almost i don't even have the capacity to understand that yeah yeah well so

that's one of the the elements of herpetology that that many people don't know that if you go into if you want to be an academic herpetologist like i wanted to be an academic herpetologist, like I wanted to be an academic herpetologist. And then I became a crayfish biologist. And then I waited until I could be an academic herpetologist on my own terms. And then I became an academic herpetologist. Because if you go out and do collecting or, you know, these trips to Africa or parts of South America, you're doing an inventory, and whether we like it or not, you're bringing specimens back to the museum. And there's a reason why that's being done.

And I'm guilty of this with crayfish. You're never going to meet anybody that loves crayfish more than me. And I am a freaking – me and my crew are a crayfish hit squad. I have a collection of crayfish at the school, which probably counts somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 to 60,000 crew are crayfish hit squad i have a collection of crayfish at the school which like probably counts somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 60 000 individual animals and jars and so i can speak to that point with what lagrim was talking about through the lens of being a crayfish biologist when you weren't in the field doing science especially systematics work you don't like you don't go out and catch this taxa

and then go eureka i caught it get me my scope get me my loop i'm gonna start counting scales and measuring like you got funding to be in the field for 20 days and you're gonna do what we do on a herping trip and grind and grind and grind and grind and try to get as many specimens now back in the old days of the 1890s 1880s 1910s 1920s we absolutely pickled too much um you can go into some museums and see some horrific things uh even me being a collections based scientist uh i've seen like, how did they not, like, how was that caused an extirpation? They're no longer there. Like, you know what I'm saying?

Because there was this over collection, uh, today we don't do that, um, anywhere near the degree, but bringing those animals back does serve a purpose, uh, ultimately. Now, I don't know if they got 1200 easterns from one site or that was the holdings of the museum yeah um which to be honest it could be either like it depends now i want to go wherever the hell they got 1200 eastern hognose snakes i'm gonna tell you that right now um but um but there is like a utility today what most scientists will do is you go on a collecting trip and you're vouchering that's what we call it you might keep all of a given tax so that you collect in a given area and then like the last day of the trip or the last couple days of the the expedition

trip whatever you want to call it that's when you're looking at what you acquired and you are going to probably keep the best um and and voucher that and then we now can do digital imagery and take a tissue sample and and kind of get to the point where we don't need to kill everything that we touch uh but you know it is a necessary evil i mean you know full disclosure when i was at marshall uh working on the herp atlas of west virginia the rule in the lab was um um if you get a county record bring it back and put it in the museum and i got a county record uh what the hell was that? Black King Snake. It was also my lifer, Black King Snake. And I'm holding this thing.

And I was like, I have my PhD in 10 years. I can say this now. I was like, oh, darn it. It got away. It slithered off into the bush. I can't do that. But I killed a bunch of frogs i i you know and that's where road killed specimens become invaluable like i had when i was a grad student for at marshall i had the county record list in my brain memorized for the 55 counties in West Virginia. And if I saw a

pulverized anything on a road, I was out there with like a spatula, just scraping that thing off the road. And if you go to museum collections, you'll see it's kind of, you can see like 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, that generation of herpetologists, there's a lot of mangled things in jars now, you know, versus before that, it's a necessary evil if it's done within boundaries. But we don't need to go out. Because spotted turtles are a great example. There's a site in Ohio where there was a fen. It was off of a U.S. road. And everybody that needed spotted turtle specimens for their herb collection and i don't

mean like we're gonna name it pete and feed it i'm talking like we're gonna shove a needle full of chlorotone into its heart and put it in a jar you went to this particular fen and they there's now no spotted turtles there and the habitat is great and it's quite literally because of biologists so wow there's definitely an example of that and then that brings up the ethics of like so if they're doing that what the hell does it matter if i go and collect one and keep it alive and then breed it and make more of them and proliferate them and you know uh and so it's complicated is my answer. Absolutely fair. Yeah. And you took it kind of in the way that I hoped you would. The other. Well, I have several more notes written down. One kind of a big picture thing that's super interesting. But what I two sites to be able to find both westerns and easterns the overall counts especially relative to what we're talking about the access

to those pickled specimens weren't actually that high right if we're saying over five years um extended summers and those sorts of things you know and there was good detail in there around sort of what the windows were for different years or whatever but approximately 240 nasa kiss and 120 basically half as many easterns um you know and if you just think about that compared to where when you guys came out um you know that that's not that great of a number to be honest with you for all the time that he spent out there yeah the the the number when I look at that number, I see it because he was essentially my I did a little bit of digging on the history of Platt because that's totally going in my book. There's no way I'm writing the book, damn it. I'm putting what I want in there. And that is something. Yeah. So.

He basically had one tech that would go out with him. So that was him and one other person. And as you know, you've got a window of basically April until the end of June and then everything. And that's in the book as well. He's got like skyrocketing, big high capture rates, and then nothing. You know what I mean? And so for that amount of time, it's fine.

But I actually went to Harvey Park, which is the place where he did the study. And being there, I understand, like, that's an impressive number for what it is. It's essentially a dune. It's, I don't even understand how they're there right it's like it's an isolated sand dune in the middle of kansas um uh so uh it's interesting that he he had that capture but yeah no it's it's not really a dense population and unfortunately when nasicus became popular in herpetoculture, people got plat. It became even less than.

And they went to Harvey. And they've just completely devastated it. So I actually had, I went there with two of my former grad students, got a picture at the sign, the way people get a picture at the sign of the Grand Canyon. I got it at Harveyvey county park in kansas um uh but the one of the wildlife managers came up to me because we were obviously herping it was like are you looking for snakes it was like whoa because you know that that constant pressure is there today and that's the downside to scotties like platt is you know we respect it we go there we know the legacy we're honoring that but people also go there and according to that dude he hasn't seen a hognose snake in a very long time

wow sure one thing that i had seen recently and i don't know whether this is a broader trend within sort of papers of that ilk i'd be curious but looking at a different species there was on something that's yeah even more um imperiled certainly throughout its range um that there was sort of a uh it would mention a general area and there would be a count of sites and then it would be kind of like bucketing them without kind of the hyper specificity that maybe you would otherwise see right so it might be sort of this location which is sort of a a in the same way maybe it actually kind of circles back to chondros and our commercial terms for them and they'll say oh it's a you know an rfac chondro and in fact you know whatever maybe there are maybe there aren't chondros in RFAC based on that, but like that,

actually it's just sort of the sort of that name designation for that. And so that was interesting. There's still utility there, right? It's still even kind of gets into the Hurt Mapper versus INAT, you know, and in some contexts, I know that's presented as being worlds apart, particularly by advocates of one or the other, you know, usually it's one. But in reality, sometimes just having the county, if you, I guess maybe it takes that extra additional layer of like, well, I have to know what appropriate habitat would look like. But in some counties, right, San Juan County in Utah is massive, absolutely massive. And seeing

a herd mapper record from there, a lot of that habitat looks super similar. That's not super helpful. On the other hand, East Coast counties tend to be smaller than West Coast or Intermountain West or wherever, right? So even that, if you then have the sort of ability to apply the knowledge that you do have or the willingness to seek out that knowledge, it might not be as big of a difference as we might, as some people might like to suggest. Yes. Yes. It's funny that you talk about this. So this is actually something that comes up a lot in conservation agencies right now. And these permits that I'm always talking about when when i get a permit so i go and do a crayfish survey now i'm doing herb surveys i have to get a scientific collecting

permit um and then i'm going to go out everything i find it's essentially inat uh just you're getting the decimal degrees you're writing them down and then you send that all in and blah blah back in the day and what i mean back in the day i mean like 2010 to 2015 it was standard operating procedure to turn in the decimal degrees to the the state agency and then when you publish your paper you would put that right in there uh and the reason why is we're never going to have the ability to go to those places because it's so complicated and involves a computer that sits on your desk that is a word for word statement i had with somebody in 2012 and now google maps will take me to every single location i have published for some of these crayfishes. So the kind of trend now is publish county level.

That's standard. When I do crayfish stuff, it's kind of level. And talk to your agency or your funder and find out, like, what level of detail do they want to be released to the masses? Because if you release too much, you're going to run into problems. And what's kind of interesting is in North America, crayfish aren't like there's not there's there's there's definitely a subset of aquaculture that works with crayfish. But when you go over into Germany, it's always Germany, and you go to Korea, South Korea, those two countries have a very, like, crayfish culture and all the different, it's just like us with herps. It's no different. And I was, you know, I understand why scientists would publish just the county we described a species of crayfish um that was in alabama

and mississippi and the publication went out and then like it was like what you hear about with geckos and i never thought it would happen with a crawdad like sure enough on youtube here are these two people from korea making a video and they're just demolishing this site. And now that's one that species is one that's probably going to get listed because over collection. So, you know, you just can't give the keys to the kingdom. And I know there are plenty of people like the three of us that respect nature. We just want to go see it. We to experience it we have that right uh but as a conservation biologist unfortunately we have to play we have to always protect ourselves against that you know negative element and out there's been times we've all done

it as herpers where you're like on i naturalist you're going someplace and you're like on iNaturalist, you're going someplace and you're like, oh, there's a sign. I'm going to get on Google Earth and try to find that exact sign. I've done that. I did that trying to find Eastern Kingsnakes. So the scientists are going to be a little bit more conservative in what we're publishing and putting out there. Yeah. And that's why uh the world is

our phones have made the world a very small place absolutely um the next thing and this is really broader and i guess i'll be curious if this is something you had considered previously or considered outside the context of this paper but he goes into sort of a long discourse on the number of ventral versus subcaudal scales as indicative of sexual dimorphism right and it makes some sense and even talks about locate you know the locus of the umbilical scar in males versus females and things and i thought that whole discussion was really interesting and i don't i'll have to look at i don't even know if there was firm conclusion there was trends right in the paper not necessarily not necessarily

firm conclusion but it was just super interesting yeah no i i love that stuff um i think there's utility in it like i think you could use it and i think people do use it actually uh i know the nerodia people or i'm saying people but the people there's a lot of like traits in response to environment uh common water snakes do this thing where when they're in a wetland they get bigger because they're feeding on frogs and they don't have the confines of a stream corridor but when they're in a stream channel system or river they're smaller and lankier because you need to be more streamlined to battle current you're feeding primarily on fish and for that kind of science there's a lot of counting of scales and ventrals and you know compare and contrast but yeah no uh i see that

and i agree with that and i think that there's something something to that absolutely the last thing and this is more of a general comment but it's definitely topical was so as as i was reading through it there was a reference to the fossil record associated with heterodon and it was fascinating you know the name i'm sure the same happened for you as you're reading through it just the name on the paper that that was referencing a heterodon form described from maybe a part of this, right? Two prong. The first would be that the name was W. Offenburg on a Florida snake, you know, from the early 60s. And just as a name so well known associated with Komodo dragons and a long history with, you know, UF and all that stuff.

But so that immediately jumped out the other part of it just whenever we're talking about fossil snakes is the paucity of the record and the lack the the sort of taxonomy that we're getting into relative to so little is is just sort of i mean i'm at the arguments we have in the context of living creatures that are right in front of us whose ecology we have at least can can perceive and here we are we're defining things based on two vertebrae on you know literally a fossil no no you don't know what you just did so for myology of snakes the class i'm teaching special topics class whenever i do a class like that i always start with origins like where did they come from

because it just gives me complete validation to nerd out and uh you know i mean you might be able to see that but there's dinosaur i i call them models my wife calls them toys um but i am a massive paleo nerd i did not really leave my dinosaur phase and so this whole idea of paleo snakes is great but if you go if you dive deep you will learn very quickly there are an awful lot of snakes described from very subtle differences on vertebrae um but what's interesting is i guess most genera have some kind of osteological signal. But no, it's the fossil record of snakes and just in general and reading that and learning that. It's been fascinating to me how like a fragmentary square of bone can lead to like, is where snakes came from like well now wait a

minute like you know don't we need a little more than just that uh so yeah no but with the hogs what's cool about the ancient the the the species that are no longer with us um i think one is paleo heterodon or something like that but this thing was it was big like it based off the vertebra size it could get probably the four four and a half feet which i don't know if you've seen like a three foot eastern yet when you see a three foot eastern hog it's one of those snakes rattlesnakes do this with me too where you see a big one and like oh my god that's got to be like four or five feet. And then just because of the bulk, and then you get up, you actually measure it, and you're like, that's only three feet?

So I can't even begin to imagine what the hell a four-plus-foot hognose snake looked like and what it was eating too. That's kind of fun um yeah but yeah no uh what was also really cool in that section if you remember it which if you you know if we're not selling plat you need to get plat and i've got it i emailed it to rob i emailed it to everybody i'm i you know push this thing is that they discuss and it's been corroborated with genetics that easterns kind of evolved on their own and then nasicus and simus the the plains and the southerns are the ones that are related and once you read that section of that book and you go and look at the animals you're like oh well yeah of course like a simus really does look like a nasicus and a nasicus really does look like a simus and a platyrhinos doesn't look like any of them

it's it looks like this alien that came up from south america from the xenodon genus like so anywho but yeah no i i like that section on in paleo uh snake paleobiology is is definitely if you want to go full nerd that's a subject you need to jump into um because it's it's interesting yes absolutely i'm curious do you have i know every every author loves this question but uh how close are you on the book or what what phase of the the writing process are you in? I am desperately trying to get my lit review done. I, um, and I am,

I am doing it by March. I am writing February 1st is my, I am writing. I actually budgeted time in my day where it just says writing block on my schedule. I'm not letting people know what I'm writing and I'm not going into school. I remember I asked you this question, Justin, like, how do you write? When do you write? You don't realize how hard it is to do that until you have to do this.

And you said something about I take the train or the bus in and I would just write on the bus. Well, unfortunately, in West Virginiaia we don't have any buses um and we my college is in the middle of nowhere so i can't do it there and then the second i get to school just boom uh so yeah no i'm getting up early and i'm writing and then the morph section of the book because hogs right now i don't know if y'all are aware of the morphs but the morphs are exploding yeah and there's actually if you use morph market as kind of a guide because they'll list morphs um there's more morphs of hogs right now than any other colubrid and i'm not a morph guy so i'm kind of like what the hell am i going to do and whether i like it or not, that's going to drive sales of this book.

And so I brought on a co-author, John Rice. We had him on Colubrid and Colubrid Radio, and he was super cool. And I didn't know who he was. Sorry, one of our listeners suggested get John on, Fathom Hogs. And what was fun is I think it was like at the end of the episode, he said, yeah, I'm here in Zanesville, Ohio. That's like an hour and 40 minutes from my house. And I was like, OK, now wait a minute. There's a Morph guy with a huge collection of Morphs.

He's made Morphs. Seems cool. And he's two hours away. Like now he's my co-op. So we're going to be doing, we're, we're, we're referring to it as the morphopedia, but I was trying to kind of, I didn't want it to be the wild West. So last fall we Jerry rigged a standardized little stage, if you will.

And then I got my like high-end camera that i take into the field and do the plates for all my pubs and so we figured it out at the right angle where we can like literally take a hognose snake and plop it and you've got that five seconds that we all do where they're like what and the way their head is and everything we can see all the scales and so we're going to try to actually make a field guide uh to the morphs and that's what john is going to do um okay and then he's been working on the history but then i'm i'm cranking my goal species accounts um will be done by uh july 1st okay and and they will this is what happened with the last book i reached a point where i was like kind of mad at the universe.

And then I gave myself deadlines. When I give myself a deadline, like there's no kicking of the can. Right. You know, it will be met. So. But, yeah, no. The goal is to have a draft by January, which I think we can do. And then, um, I learned you actually, you don't know this, Justin, but I got done writing the first book and I was like, I'm done. And then you messaged me, do you have the pictures yet? And I was like, it was so innocent the way you asked that question. I've been working on it and it added a fricking year and a half to the whole

damn project. So I've already started on it and it added a freaking year and a half to the whole damn project. Oh, yeah. So I've already started getting like, yeah, I'm well ahead of the game on the picture. So handing it off to Russ, hopefully this time next year. Nice. OK, that's awesome. That's very cool. One additional note that that your conversation discussion of the book brought up from Platt again.

I did find it fascinating that so in there, there was a little bit of discourse amongst all of the book brought up from Platt again, what I did find it fascinating that, so in there, there was a little bit of discourse amongst all of the pickled specimens and observations and things saying that they saw a little bit of, well, obviously the color and pattern variability that we've talked about in terms of Easterns, um, mention of a stripe or a partial stripe, um, in a Western, but otherwise spoke of no mutations you know there it was like these eastern and now here we are sitting you know coming up on what 55 years later and it's these it's the westerns that at that point in time no mutations across all these pickled specimens

across all these observations and now they're just morph crazy it just had it jumped out at me like crazy no it's really that's interesting and what's what's cool about that is you know you can argue that lots of times the morphs pop out in the populations where they're already genetically depressed so you know you get stripes and spots and leucistics because it just kind of gets narrowed down and that's just an option that pops up because of the genes that we're left with um but some of these populations of snakes that have produced very important morphs they're not isolated at all like and they're robots populate sables came out of montana where apparently they're very common the the infamous lucy from colorado you know i was in that general area uh there's probably like i showed you where apparently they're very common. The infamous Lucy from Colorado.

You know, I was in that general area. There's probably hogs. I showed you. I found a fire. I didn't even realize it. You know, I found a heterozygous form with Tim from Gecko Nation Radio. We had gone out and found one. And then I looked at the picture and was like, oh, there you go. And, right, a lot of it is Richard Evans, right. With the pet shop down in Lubbock. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So these I just here again, I just wonder if Platt cared because he was a scientist and he was just like I picture him at a bench as a Ph.D. student. Just like, oh, God, I've got to get this data. I've got to get this data i've got to get this done there's you know it's it's funny when you're a grad student and you approach science it's very different than when you're a professor and you approach science and you're like i'm gonna eat tonight because i got a job you know when you're in grad school it's just like i gotta do this i gotta get as much done in as little time as possible and i just see platt you know platt doing that back in the day anywho but yeah no but i um this is the year for for hognose snakes i also i planned a lot of my field work where i'm sending the students off and i'm going to go and then I'm going to be in the Airbnb, I never do this. This is not my way

of being a professor. I'm there with them. But to get this book written, I've got to go away and just live in the Airbnb and write like that. That's going to be happening, too. Yeah. Well, I you know, when I saw that you were out there doing your field studies in Colorado, I'm thinking, man, I'm only like eight hours away. I could be there and drive and go herp with Zach and Rob. Yeah, you should have come. I was kind of jealous. You should have. Rob?

Give me a heads up next time you're out there. You look great. I know, yeah. That's what I'm saying. I could have made it out there pretty quick. Next time, yeah. I still need to see a live hogn in the field i i definitely seen dor so i'm uh very sad about that but yeah and they've actually become my favorite like i actually really

like herping for hogs it's my kind of herping you don't you can get them on a road but you've got to get out there and just walk in you know where they're at that's the only way to get them on a road, but you've got to get out there and just walk in, you know, where they're at. That's the only way to get them. And I have a great appreciation for, for that kind of gorilla herping. And that's the way I like to do it. Yeah. Me too. I think Rob would agree. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Very much our style. Yeah. Well, cool. Well, I'm sure if people don't know where to find you, they probably don't deserve to find you.

But there you go. Kluber and Kluber radio. Great program. Yeah, it's fantastic. You guys do a really good job with that one. Thank you. So if you haven't heard that, go take a listen and check it out. But where else can people find or find your research or whatever? Easiest place to find me is just Zach Lofman on Facebook or Dr.

Crawdad on Instagram. I don't know if people do this with you guys, but I always get these messages from people and they're like apologizing for taking my time. And I'm like, no man, you're making my day better. I'm stuck in some horrible meeting talking about a fricking mission statement for two and a half hours. And I get to act like I'm writing a text to someone that's important. And we're talking about snakes, like send the messages, please.

Yeah. I want to talk about snakes. Yeah. It's a nice diversion from the mundane part of the job. Right. Yes, absolutely. Agreed. Message away. Cool. All right. Well, I don't know any really cool new herpetological news or things out there that you've seen in the last little bit? Not really, just because I've been so focused on getting this

class that I've kind of backtracked a little bit and then on ccr when we do our science update i i since we've talked so much about the plat book i you know i thought we were clint was like yeah do like up to date da dee da and i did a search and there just wasn't anything I wanted to talk about. Like, and I thought, what the hell I'll do this. And I'll say, I have a copy of it. And that really resonated with people,

which is cool. So now I'm kind of getting away from keeping track of the modern stuff. Yeah. One of the science updates, I'm just plugging books and things that I think, you know, would be, would be great.

I, I plugged another book on CCR last night because we recorded last night called A Kansas Snake Community, and it's by Fitch. And it's just natural history because Fitch went out and caught these snakes for 30 flipping years at the same spot. But it's got a lot of cool nuggets. So that's the kind of stuff that i'm into right now but yeah no i don't have much uh modern stuff uh or up-to-date stuff um but yeah i'm just i'm happy 2025 was the year that i decided we're gonna pull the we're gonna stop dabbling in

herpetology and just have a grad lab and just do it. And so, and I, I have to thank in a weird way, Amarilia Python radio network, because the damn podcast makes it so it never goes away. And I don't mean the damn, I mean, it's just kind of like, it just, it, it, you, you, you can't stop that. Like, I don't know how to explain it. I'm always paying attention to stuff. And then that led to writing the book, which led to going to Iowa, which led to the research opportunity. And then I was like, I have to do this. 10 year old Zach would be so pissed

if I'm on my deathbed and I didn't, I didn't do this. So now we're doing flat out herpetology. So, yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. I, I mean, I, I faced i face the same question like am i going to be a herpetologist like i always said i was as a kid or you know i'm gonna take the lucrative position as a you know a poor research scientist but relatively lucrative position i suppose um yeah i i uh i'm i'm glad the choice i made but sometimes i look and say man how cool would that be to be out digging holes and catching turtles and stuff like that? That'd be sweet. I'm kind of on the same deal. I'm just so focused on planning this trip to Central Australia that that's about all I've been focused on.

But I picked up a new camera because I fried my last one on the last trip to Australia. I think I heard that. Yeah, it's not great. picked up a new camera because I fried my last one on the last trip to Australia. And so I got that. Yeah, it's not, not great. You know, it's a pretty expensive camera. So now I'm, I hope, hopefully I can get it fixed. But, um, in the meantime, I found this cheap, you know, cheap camera with a zoom lens. And so I was thinking, well, you know, maybe it'll do. So I ordered it to, and I did these comparison shots with my iPhone to see if, you know, maybe it'll do. So I ordered it to, and I did these comparison shots with my iPhone to see if, you know, just having an iPhone would be just as good, but they actually took some fairly decent shots from fairly far away. So, and it only costs like a couple hundred bucks. So I'm, I'm not very happy with that. So I should be able to get some pictures of rannids or other lizards

that may not allow a very close approach. So, um, and, of course, so I can ID them later and, you know, get my year list or whatever. But so, yeah, I'm excited about that. And I just put the Fitch book in my Amazon. Oh, you gotta buy it. So, yeah, not bad. It's too much. It's a ton of fun. Yeah, that looks cool.

And I've always that's kind of a bucket list item. I'd like to make out to kansas and do a you know herp trip out there and see just kansas no you all need to do kansas yeah i was not prepared for kansas no one talked like herpers talk about kansas but if you just want volume of snakes yeah nothing will compare to kansas uh and ironically i've talked about this a bunch. We went out there to get my Leifert Western hog during Hogtober and didn't see a single one. And we got, I mean, we had, I think that, if I remember this right, we were between 280 and 300 snakes.

Wow. And almost all of those were road cruised, but we also stopped and were in those Cretaceous chalk, which is crazy. Because there's fossils everywhere. And I don't get Cretaceous fossils where I'm at. And I'm a dinosaur nerd. So it doesn't get much better than that. And then you're flipping the fossils to find Gentilis.

Like, what is going on? That's that's cool to know i have a massive appreciation uh yeah for um for kansas we were on one road and uh we we ended up getting like 15 western massasaugas wow and i would and we had gotten so much veirdis, which are like little bombs. Yeah. And our flight got canceled due to some just weird fluke. There was no real weather reason why. So it got delayed. And my students and I were like sitting in the hotel just vibrating. And it was really hot.

I was like, we have got to go road cruising. So I told them and i i think you guys know david kelly he's been on npr before diamond pythons well he was a zookeeper there and and we called david was like i'll pay for the gas if you take us to a road and he's like what do you want i was like i don't have a western massasauga yet um and he was like oh i got a road and he had a freaking road wow we got one like 30 feet into the road and then it was just like every 50 feet there was another it was insane and bull snakes and mri and a really really cool um store area uh the brown snakes there were really neat and then the red-sided garter snakes which are just

phenomenal um you know no i i can't say enough good things about kansas And then the red-sided garter snakes, which are just phenomenal. You know, no, I can't say enough good things about Kansas. Yeah, definitely a bucket list. I'll make it there someday. Yeah. Hopefully with Rob and Eric. No, it was great. Yeah.

It was great. Nipper would probably make that trip too, I bet. Cool. Yeah. Well, thanks so much for coming on we really appreciate it and letting us grill you for a couple hours here and yeah it was fun thank you guys yeah we'll be back again so yeah anytime just reach out okay well thanks for uh listening to reptile fight club and we'll or grilling the expert as the case may be. And we'll catch you again next week.