DUNWOODY, Ga. — Some metro Atlanta veterinarians are warning pet owners to watch out for snakes.”When we start to go back into the winter months, snakes are trying to absorb as much heat as they can. So this is a time when they are going to be out in the open. As a result they might bite more dogs at this point in time,” said Shauna Nicholas, a veterinarian.At the Brook Run dog park in Dunwoody, signs have been posted warning dog owners about the danger of snake bites.”I saw a copperhead right along the main path here,” said pet owner Courtney McNealy. “It was really hard to see because of the coloring and it was just curled up. The dogs were really interested in it so I had to corral the dogs in one area.”The Georgia Poison Center said so far this year, it has received 236 calls related to copperhead bites. In 2008 the number was 172.”Just this summer alone we’ve had just under 100. I have handled four or five myself and I am not even on the emergency team,” said Shauna Nicholas.Experts said if your pet is bitten, get to a vet as soon as possible.”The snake bite itself is going to cause a lot of swelling, so if the dog’s face has a lot of swelling, it could effect their breathing,” said Jennifer Pittman, a veterinarian.
Category Archives: Snakes
Traverse City woman startled by 4-foot boa snake
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) – It’s not unusual for deer or even the occasional bear to turn up in northern Michigan towns, where you’re never far from the woods.
But a boa constrictor?
Traverse City officers alerted by a woman’s screams found the 4-foot-long snake a short distance from their headquarters Tuesday.
The woman had been removing wood pallets from behind a business when she came across the slithering reptile.
Using a pole designed for snaring aggressive dogs, police nabbed the snake and placed it in a bag. A resident familiar with large snakes has agreed to care for it.
Police say they think the snake was a pet that escaped from its owner or was set free. It couldn’t have survived for long in the area’s cool climate.
New Homes for Reptiles at Barford Road Pocket Park, St Neots
ACD Ecology discovered that reptiles were living in the area where the new development will be built, so they approached countryside services to see if Barford Road Pocket Park could help. Wildlife surveys were carried out and common lizards and grass snakes were found to be using the park. Luxury wildlife homes called hibernaculas have now been built which are ideal for these species.
Ranger Matt Hall said: “Hibernaculars are structures built out of rotting hardwood logs, rubble and soil. They provide a fantastic dark, damp site for reptile species to breed, feed and hibernate. The chance to have these structures and a larger population of harmless reptiles in the park is fantastic news and will really increase the parks biodiversity. Common Lizards are quite a rare species in this area, but we have established that there are small colonies in the park which, as a result of this project, will hopefully be increased. These hibernaculas will also be good hibernating ground for frogs and toads.”
Man has strange taste for live snakes and centipedes
Luo Zhonglin, 35, of Dafang County in China’s Guizhou Province, has been eating live snakes and centipedes which he has done for 23 years. His bizarre eating habits, which began when he was just a small boy, have now grown into a full-blown obsession.
Luo ritualistically puts his hands into a net sling and takes out a curled-up snake about 50 centimeters long and as thick as a thumb. He then pins the snake’s head down in one hand and holds the tail in the other hand. Afterwards, he bites the snake’s head off with his teeth and shucks off the skin.
Eventually, he begins to eat the snake’s body with relish. About five minutes later, the snake has been completely devoured. Luo recently stunned visitors with this startling display.
One snake was not enough to fill Luo’s atypical appetite, so he looked around in an unused space near his restaurant and caught two 10-centimeter-long centipedes for dessert. He put the centipedes into his mouth and began to chew again after cutting off their heads.
He said that he began eating live snakes and centipedes when he was 12 years old and he has been doing it for 23 years. Luo was very fearless and unique when he was young. He wanted to catch and eat snakes and centipedes once he saw them in the village or on the mountains.
Luo has been bitten by snakes and centipedes many times when trying to catch them over the years.
“I have never been poisoned as a result of eating them. My body is very strong because of eating live snakes and centipedes and I have not been ill for many years. I am now addicted to eating live snakes and centipedes,” Luo said.
Snake’s value compared to rare jewel
BRENTWOOD – The theft of a rare snake worth $10,000 led to the conviction of a Haverhill, Mass., snake dealer who bought the exotic Axanthic killer bee ball python for roughly $500.
“There is only four of them in the world,” Assistant County Attorney Jerome Blanchard said of the snake yesterday. “One of them sold overseas for $10,000, so it’s at least worth that. Maybe more than $10,000.”
Scott Seavey, 38, of Haverhill, Mass., was convicted on Thursday in Rockingham County Superior Court on a felony count of receiving stolen property.
Jurors in the case had to learn about how a coveted snake wound up created in New Hampshire, after the victim, Kevin McCurley, spent eight years genetically designing the unique kind of python by tinkering with recessive genes.
McCurley said yesterday the success rate for breeding such a snake is exceptionally slim.
Stolen last year, this exotic Axanthic killer bee ball python has an estimated value of $10,000.
Before the theft last September, he sold one of the four pythons to a reptile dealer in England for $10,000. That store, in turn, sold it to a private collector for $15,000, McCurley said.
McCurley had to aid Hampstead police in searching for and handling the snake late last year when detectives executed a search warrant at Seavey’s business, CV Exotics in Hampstead.
“It was a great relief once we saw it,” McCurley said yesterday. “Once we realized it was stolen, I thought it could have been anywhere.”
During the trial, Blanchard had to explain to jurors the value of the python in the world of snake collecting.
“They’re all the same snake, but in 20 or 30 different colors,” Blanchard said. “It’s like a car with 50 different paint jobs, but in this case you’re dealing with four recessive genes.”
McCurley’s snake, which has been back in his possession since it was found, did not make an appearance in court. Blanchard used a chart of different pythons instead.
McCurley, owner of New England Reptile Distributors in Plaistow, had an unusual role in the trial, being both the victim and the state’s expert in the case.
“I really, truly tried to be unbiased, even though I was the victim,” McCurley said.
Plaistow police were called to McCurley’s vast shop, located on Route 125, in late August, about two days after the snake was stolen.
Joshua Rogoff, 29, of Haverhill, Mass., who frequented the store because his girlfriend worked there, eventually admitted stealing to the snake and selling it to Seavey. Rogoff pleaded guilty to misdemeanor theft and was sentenced to 60 days in jail.
Seavey, a former apprentice of McCurley’s, claimed to Plaistow police that he did not know the snake was so rare, according to court documents and prosecutors. He made that same claim at his trial, in which a jury convicted him after hearing testimony from several witnesses.
Seavey is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 10 on a felony charge, which is punishable by 7 1/2 to 15 years in state prison.
McCurley, who has been a victim of employee theft in the past, said he worries that Seavey could walk away with a light sentence because people do not understand the dollar value of the snakes he deals with.
“If I had a jewelry store and lost a specialty diamond — say the only one in the world — that is something people would understand,” McCurley said.
He said he plans to speak in front of the judge at the sentencing hearing to lobby for a sentence.
Snake Trapped
On Oct. 9 at 5:15 p.m., La Grange police received several calls about a snake that people trapped in a bucket in the 300 block of East Calendar Avenue. An officer said the snake was “taken care of,” but did not report where it ended up. The snake probably was let loose in a forest preserve, said Police Chief Michael Holub.
Some reptile species show signs of decline
Many lizard and snake species populations are crashing at Organ Pipe National Monument, researchers have found.
The declines match a recently discovered global decline in snakes and lizards that scientists say could be linked to climate change.
University of Arizona research scientist Phil Rosen said his analysis found 50 percent declines in eight snake species and a half-dozen lizard species that he has trapped for 22 years at Organ Pipe Monument, about 140 miles southwest of Tucson.
He thinks climate could be a factor, because the lizard and snake species whose populations dropped are far more sensitive to heat and drought, respectively, than those whose populations didn’t drop there, Rosen said. The National Park Service financed and conducted most of the monitoring for the research, which is ongoing.
“I think this points to a potentially quite marked and severe effect of climate across the board,” Rosen said. “I am not going to claim to be certain about a thing like that. I am just saying that these data are consistent with the trend toward impacts of hotter, drier weather. I think it is a brick in the wall – a pretty solid brick.”
Ecologically, the effect could be significant, researchers say. Snakes are heavy eaters of rodents. Lizards eat flies, ants and grasshoppers, and are prey for mammals and birds, said Rosen and other researchers.
Rodents are carriers of disease such as plague and hantavirus, Rosen said. “That is what happens when ecosystems go out of whack. You get huge amounts of things and they tend to get sick and carry diseases,” he said. While rodents carrying such diseases aren’t common here, that’s partly because they’re held in check by predators, he said.
Globally, researchers are concerned that if snakes decline and rodents increase, the rodents could hurt production of food crops.
Specifically, Rosen and two researchers working at Organ Pipe found that:
• Five snake species that fared well at Organ Pipe are adapted to drier weather because they live on the monument’s western side, where rainfall is lower and where the desert is dominated by dryland survivors such as creosote and bursage. The eight declining snake species live mainly in the monument’s eastern, wetter section, where the desert is similar to Tucson’s saguaro-palo verde habitat that gets more rain.
• The monument’s six declining lizard species “make a living in the sun,” by being active in the open and shuttling between small patches of shade and the sun. So when the monument’s temperatures rise, the heat affects them more, he said. Six species that didn’t decline live in trees or on the ground at night, and can stay active in hotter temperatures.
The global snake study found that snake declines accelerated from about 1998 to 2002 and never recovered. The same pattern occurred with the Organ Pipe snakes, Rosen said.
Similarly, the global lizard studies have found the sun-dependent lizards were suffering more than those that live in trees, said Don Miles, an Ohio University researcher who worked on the global lizard study.
Rosen said he originally picked Organ Pipe as a research site to try to isolate the effects of climate compared with the effects of urban areas such as sprawl, road-building and road kill. Off and on for a decade, he camped at the monument to carry out his research.
Organ Pipe’s climate has a transition from very dry at its west end to rainfall levels approaching Tucson’s at its east end – 25 miles apart. That makes Organ Pipe’s findings a bellwether of what could happen here someday, Rosen said.
“I doubt that the same pattern has happened in Tucson yet because Tucson’s not as dry as Organ Pipe,” Rosen said. “But as things get hotter and drier, the effects will move across the Tohono O’odham Reservation and toward Tucson.”
Also, if it turns out that climate change is as important to reptiles as research suggests, it would add a new impact on biological diversity besides development, habitat degradation and non-native-species invasions, he said.
“It would mean there is no easy answer for them . . . Keeping all these animals alive in reserves wouldn’t work,” Rosen said. “It undermines the idea of a reserve system as the answer to habitat degradation.”
On StarNet: The critters of Southern Arizona database at azstarnet.com/ critters can help you identify that visitor in your back yard.
Species declining
Snakes declining at Organ Pipe National Monument include:
• Mojave diamondback rattlesnake
• Western diamondback rattlesnake
• Kingsnake
• Gopher snake
Lizards declining at Organ Pipe include:
• Zebra-tailed lizard
• Red-backed whiptail lizard
• Regal horned lizard
Reptile declines elsewhere:
• Snakes. Researchers found that 11 of 17 snake populations studied in Europe, Nigeria and Australia had plummeted between 1998 and 2002 and haven’t recovered. Researchers suspect they had multiple causes with a common factor such as global climate change as their root. (Source: Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in England.)
• Lizards. Researchers found that 12 percent of local populations for 48 lizard species in Mexico have gone extinct since 1975. Researchers predict that by 2080, 20 percent of all lizard species globally will be extinct. A researcher on that study, Don Miles of Ohio University, has found significant declines in ornate tree lizards at Saguaro National Park in the Tucson area since about 2003 and found that local populations of two other lizard species have disappeared in Western Arizona and the Southern California desert.