Cristina's Blog - Herpetology at SCBI

My name is Cristina Castro and I'm a rising senior at MHS. I spent a week at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia and took a course in herpetology (CONS 110) with the Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation. Summer programs and internships regarding zoology are rare, and almost every internship is restricted to undergraduates because of the potential risks involved working with animals, so I was glad I found this course, even if it lacks the glamour of a traditional internship.

June 25, 2017

Today was the first day, so nothing much happened. I arrived at around 1. The class met at 4 at the Academic Center to discuss rules and to go over how our journals were going to be set up and how we were going to be discussing scientific articles.

At 7:30 we walked to Racetrack Hill and started campfire to help break the ice. I learned that the land where SCBI is now originally belonged to the US Army. In 1909, the United States Army bought forty-two 100-acre farms in the vicinity of Front Royal to establish four major remount depots to supply horses and mules for military operations. And that is why there is a horse cemetery on Racetrack Hill.

Buried in that cemetery are Jeff and Kidron, the favorite horses of General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force on the Western Front in World War I.

The SCBI studies and breeds more than 20 species, many of them endangered. You could hear the maned wolves roar-barking at night.

June 26, 2017

We started the day in the academic hall. The teacher, Hannah Bement, gave us a lecture-style lesson on herpetiles. I'll give you a summary.

Herpetology is the branch of zoology concerned with reptiles and amphibians. Even though birds and reptiles are more closely related to each other than reptiles and amphibians, they are studied together because they often occur together in the wild, are similar physiologically, behaviorally, and ecologically, and because scientists still have not moved on from Linnaeus' taxonomy even though it's been 300 years.

Amphibians first appeared in the Devonian period (370 mya). Frogs, salamanders, and caecilians are all amphibians. All toads are frogs, but they differ from other frogs in that toads don't really hop, are more terrestrial, and have warty skin. All newts are salamanders, but they differ from other salamanders in that they have a terrestrial juvenile stage in which they are known as efts before returning back to the water and becoming an aquatic adult. Other salamanders usually just go from aquatic larvae to terrestrial adults. Caecilians look like big worms. People don't really know much about them because they are subterranean.

Reptiles first appeared in the Carboniferous period (315 mya). Tuatara, snakes, lizards, turtles, crocodilians and birds are reptiles. There are two species of tuatara. They look a lot like lizards, but are in different orders. Snakes evolved from lizards and are actually just lizards without legs. However, some lizards do not have legs and are not snakes. Confusing? Very. Sea turtles, tortoises, and terrapins are all turtles. For ages, scientists have tried to figure out if turtles are more closely related to lepidosaurs (tuatara and lizards) or archosaurs (crocodiles and birds). Apparently right now the consensus is archosaurs, but that might change as more fossils are found and more DNA is compared. Crocodiles, gharials, alligators and caimans are all crocodilians. Birds are dinosaurs and therefore reptiles. They are closely related to crocodiles. Herpetology really should be broken up, with reptiles folded into ornithology. Perhaps in the future, when the words of a 300 year old man do not take precedent over modern discoveries.

Then we had a guest lecture by Dr. Rocky Parker from James Madison University. His research was about using chemoecological tools to find solutions for invasive reptiles. Pheromones could be used to manage invasive species by increasing trapping, making it harder to find mates, and killing animals by synthesizing a toxic version of that chemical. It is known that when garter snakes come out of brumation (reptile hibernation), up to 25 males can swarm one female, creating mating balls of pure snake. The females produce a pheromone that attracts the males to them, which is how they know where the females are.

One of Dr. Parker's undergraduate students, Shannon Richard wanted to find out if the Burmese python, an invasive species that has virulently spread through Florida, also used pheromones to find mates. To do this, she has set up y-mazes with either a male or female scent trail in each arm and observed male pythons' behavior, scoring their choice, tongue-flick rate, and trailing behaviors.

The research paper is still in prep, but so far she is the first to document several Burmese python behaviors, and has analyzed them to see which behaviors are linked.

Later, we created newt traps out of plastic bottles and styrofoam in order to passively survey the salamander species in Leech Pond. Since we only had one week, we couldn't make an entire experiment out of this, but it could be thought of as minor pre-experiment research. Some of our traps had Vienna sausages in them, some had glow sticks, some had nothing, and some traps were professional minnow traps, baited as above.

At around 7:30, we drove over to Leach Pond (No, I did not misspell that) to go herping. We set up the traps, making sure to anchor them to shore and keep a small pocket of air so that the salamanders could breathe.

Then we hiked over to a small creek and attempted to actively survey the species of salamander in the area. A few people were very good at flipping over rocks and catching salamanders, but I had no luck. I could hear a lot of frogs croaking, but couldn't see any.

It was around 9 when I decided that I would go further upstream to look for frogs. Flashlight in hand, I stepped into the creek. I didn't expect to go any deeper than my ankles, but the further I walked, the deeper the water got. I kept turning off my flashlight and listening for a while to see if the frogs' croaking would help me locate them better. I was up to my waist when I first saw a frog. I walked toward it and swiftly made a grab at it, but it was too fast. Wading deeper, I spotted another frog. This time, I managed to catch it and held the frog in one hand, the flashlight in my other hand as I walked victoriously back to where the rest of the class was. They had mostly already finished looking for salamanders. As I held the frog up to them, one of them told me that she thought I wasn't holding the frog the right way. I don't think either of us knew how to hold a frog. As I adjusted my grip, the frog decided to jump out of my hand and back into the creek. Unperturbed, I decided to look for another frog. This time the water rose up to my chest before I saw the shimmering eyes of a frog reflecting my flashlight. There were actually two of them, but I sadly only had one hand for catching frogs. I caught it quickly, but tripped on something on my way back. Luckily, my backpack didn't get wet, but my flashlight did and stopped working, so made my way back in the dark. This time, I held firmly onto the frog. It turned out to be a female bullfrog. Using calipers, its snout-vent-length was about 11cm long. We didn't mass it because there was nothing to mass it with.

As soon as we got back, I took a shower.