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Thanks to Nora and Richard from NC this week as we learn about some scary-sounding reptiles, including the hoop snake!
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\nFurther reading:
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\nThe Story of How the Giant \u201cTerror Skink\u201d Was Presumed Extinct, Then Rediscovered
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\nSan Diego\u2019s Rattlesnakes and What To Do When They\u2019re on Your Property
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\nSnake that cartwheels away from predators described for the first time
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\nGiant new snake species identified in the Amazon
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\nThe terror skink, AKA Bocourt's terrific skink [photo by\xa0DECOURT Th\xe9o - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116258516]:
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\nThe hoop snake according to folklore:
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\nThe sidewinder rattlesnake [photo taken from this article]:
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\nThe dwarf reed snake [photo by Evan Quah, from page linked above]:
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\nThe green anaconda [photo by\xa0MKAMPIS - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62039578]:
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\nShow transcript:
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\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.
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\nAs monster month continues, we\u2019re going to look at some weird and kind of scary, or at least scary-sounding, snakes and lizards. Thanks to Nora and Richard from NC for their suggestions this week!
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\nWe\u2019ll start with the terror skink, whose name should inspire terror, but it\u2019s also called Bocourt\u2019s terrific skink, which is a name that should inspire joy. Which is it, terror or joy? I suppose it depends on your mood and how you feel about lizards in general. All skinks are lizards but not all lizards are skinks, by the way.
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\nThe terror or possibly terrific skink lives on two tiny islets, which are miniature islands. These islets are themselves off the coast of an island called the Isle of Pines, but in French, which I cannot pronounce. The Isle of Pines is only 8 miles wide and 9 miles long, or 13 by 15 km, and is itself off the coast of the bigger island of New Caledonia. All these islands lie east of Australia. Technically the islets where the skink lives are off the coast of another islet that is itself off the coast of the Isle of Pines, which is off the coast of New Caledonia, but where exactly it lives is kept a secret by the scientists studying it.
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\nThe skink was described in 1876 but only known from a single specimen captured on New Caledonia around 1870, and after that it wasn\u2019t seen again and was presumed extinct. Colonists and explorers brought rats and other invasive animals to the New Caledonian islands, which together with habitat loss have caused many other native species to go extinct.
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\nBut in December 2003, a scientific expedition studying sea snakes around the New Caledonian islands caught a big lizard no one recognized. Once the expedition members realized it was a terror skink, alive and well, they took lots of pictures and videos of it and then released it back into the wild. Since then, more specimens have been discovered during four different expeditions, but only on the islets, not on any of the bigger islands. It\u2019s so critically endangered that its location has to be kept secret, because if someone captures some of the lizards to sell on the illegal pet market, the species could easily be driven to extinction.
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