Herpetological Highlights

Herpetological Highlights is a science conversation in which Tom Major and Ben Marshall take published studies of reptiles and amphibians and talk them through. A run of titles gives a sense of the range: '241 Poison Frog Parents', '242 Spot the Viper to Survive', '243 Pythons are Seed Pipelines', '244 Frogs Bringing the Pain'. Snakes and frogs keep coming back. The conversations travel further than that, though. The python discussion is a good example. Burmese pythons in the Everglades are implicated in steep declines of raccoons, opossums, rabbits and white-tailed deer, all animals that help spread the seeds of fleshy-fruited plants, and the hosts follow that thread to a rattlesnake that eats a seed-carrying mouse and passes the seeds intact. A study of a camouflaged snake gets the same attention to detail. Birds spotted it about 90 percent of the time and mammals about 5 percent, at an average distance of around 60 centimetres, and the hosts point out that this is farther than the longest strike the researchers recorded. Results like that feed their plain enthusiasm for spying on snakes, meaning the painstaking fieldwork, radio telemetry included, that it takes to learn how snakes actually behave. The toxin conversation is more hands-on. A pain-causing compound turns up in fire-bellied toads and even in the common frog, and one host, who has handled common frogs at length without feeling a thing, wonders whether it acts in the gut rather than on the skin. The practical takeaway is blunt: do not lick amphibians. On poison frog parents, the puzzle is a species in which females sometimes carry the hatched tadpoles, a job males usually do in that family, along with the behavioral experiments and genetic work used to look into it. None of it comes across as a lecture. The pair riff, coin words like 'frogfellas', and let a discussion of an animal fattening up on grass before hibernation drift into a defence of the giant panda, which picks bamboo shoots or leaves depending on the nutrients it needs. Then there is the frog call. Episodes often open with one host playing a recording and the other trying to name the species from clues: whether it is active by day, what it eats, which continent it lives on. Sometimes the clues point to the setting of the episode's study, steering the guesser toward Florida or Hungary. A running score is kept, and when a listener set the tally straight, the news was met with theatrical despair. Listeners supply calls too, including one from a friend of the podcast the hosts met at the World Congress. Sign-offs usually invite emails with questions, thoughts or corrections and thank the patrons who support the podcast.