Sean Mowbray, Author at 91av Science news and science articles from 91av Sun, 12 Jul 2026 11:22:14 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0.1 242057827 Bats in Germany are riddled with pesticides and toxic pollutants /article/2327533-bats-in-germany-are-riddled-with-pesticides-and-toxic-pollutants/?utm_campaign=RSS|NSNS&utm_content=currents&utm_medium=RSS&utm_source=NSNS Wed, 06 Jul 2022 13:32:08 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=2327533 2327533 ‘Invasive’ snake is really a new species and should be protected /article/2148751-invasive-snake-is-really-a-new-species-and-should-be-protected/?utm_campaign=RSS|NSNS&utm_content=currents&utm_medium=RSS&utm_source=NSNS /article/2148751-invasive-snake-is-really-a-new-species-and-should-be-protected/#respond Wed, 27 Sep 2017 11:33:44 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=2148751 The cobra-preta
A case of mistaken identity
Tiziano Pisoni

On an island off the coast of West Africa lives a deadly snake. Pictured above, it was thought to be an introduced species and plans were afoot to wipe it out. Now it turns out to be a species unique to the island, one that should be conserved.

The cobra-preta, as local people call it (the name is Portuguese for “black snake”), lives on São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea. The people also have a saying about it: homem mordido, homem perdido, or “man bitten, man lost”.

The cobra-preta was long thought to be the forest cobra (), a black snake with a mottled white collar, found in mainland Africa. Regarded as the largest cobra in the world, the forest cobra can reach 3 metres in length.

The story was that Portuguese farmers introduced the cobra-preta to São Tomé to control rats. This seemed odd to of Villanova University in Pennsylvania. “Why would you introduce the deadliest snake in Africa to an island?” he asks.

Read more: Four-legged fossil holds secret of snake’s slithering origins

Ceríaco found a report from 1540, which included an account of a visit to São Tomé by a Portuguese explorer in 1506, when it was being colonised. The explorer described a black snake that was “so venomous that when it bites a man, his eyes will explode out of the head and he will die”. That was undoubtedly the cobra-preta, Ceríaco says, albeit depicted with eye-popping hyperbole.

Ceríaco face to face with forest cobra specimen in the lab

When Ceríaco (pictured above with a forest cobra) looked closely at cobra-pretas, he found they tended to be even larger than forest cobras and that the scales on their underside had far less white. Genetic analysis confirmed that the cobra-preta is a new species, one Ceríaco has named Naja peroescobari.

“It’s pretty incredible,” says Ceríaco. “It’s like discovering a new crocodile… It doesn’t happen every day.”

Read more: Snakes outpacing other invertebrates in race to evolve

The discovery came at the right time, says Ceríaco. São Tomé is becoming more conservation-conscious and the cobra-preta could have been earmarked for eradication, since it did not appear to be a native species. Locals already target and kill the snakes because of their deadly bites, Ceríaco says. Some, however, catch and eat them as a delicacy.

“I think it says a lot that the type specimen, which is considered the gold standard in taxonomic research, is a snake that was chopped in half by a local resident of São Tomé,” says of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, who has worked on São Tomé. “Clearing up the misconception that the cobra-preta doesn’t belong on São Tomé will be an important first step towards conserving these unique snakes.”

Zootaxa

]]> /article/2148751-invasive-snake-is-really-a-new-species-and-should-be-protected/feed/ 0 2148751 The plan to reintroduce a big cat that might never have existed /article/2147137-the-plan-to-reintroduce-a-big-cat-that-might-never-have-existed/?utm_campaign=RSS|NSNS&utm_content=currents&utm_medium=RSS&utm_source=NSNS Wed, 13 Sep 2017 18:00:00 +0000 http://mg23531433.000 2147137 New beetle species bites army ant’s butt and hitches a ride /article/2120872-new-beetle-species-bites-army-ants-butt-and-hitches-a-ride/?utm_campaign=RSS|NSNS&utm_content=currents&utm_medium=RSS&utm_source=NSNS /article/2120872-new-beetle-species-bites-army-ants-butt-and-hitches-a-ride/#respond Fri, 10 Feb 2017 01:00:23 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=2120872 Secret hitcher
Spot the beetle (it’s on the top)
D. Kronauer
Species: Nymphister kronaueri beetle Habitat: Army ant abdomens and nests in rainforests of Costa Rica Moving around the rainforest floor can be tough if you’re tiny. But a newly discovered species of beetle has an ingenious method of getting around with little effort: it bites on to an army ant’s butt and hitches a ride. Nymphister kronaueri uses its mandibles to do this when its hosts are on the move to a new nest, attaching between the ant’s thorax and abdomen. This emerged after Christoph von Beeren at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany and Daniel Kronauer at the Rockefeller University in New York noticed that an ant they were observing in a collection vial looked as though it had two abdomens. “When Daniel shook the vial, the beetle detached and expanded its legs and antennae. That is the moment we realised we had discovered something new here,” says von Beeren. Army ants frequently move to new colonies, so the beetle would be left searching for a new host colony almost every night if it didn’t have some way to keep up, he says.

Free taxi

Hitching rides with army ants in this way is nothing new. Other critters regularly ride on their backs, follow in their wake on foot, or stow themselves on top of “booty” that the ants carry from nest to nest. N. kronaueri’s method of clinging on as a second rear end appears to be unique, however. The army ants, which assume the role of an unwitting rainforest taxi service, might have a hard time noticing that N. kronaueri is there: the beetle has cunning adaptations to look like its host’s abdomen, being similar in both size and appearance. It may seem strange that the ant wouldn’t notice a beetle hanging from its rear, and precisely how the creature fools both its host and others in the colony is still unknown.
The beetle bites the ant to attach itself to it
Holding on tight
D. Kronauer
What exactly N. kronaueri gains from all this deception is not well understood either, because information about its basic biology has yet to be collected. But other hitchhiking species exploit ant colonies for protection from predators, to find a place to sleep, and so they can get food easily without having to look too hard themselves. Joseph Parker at Columbia University in New York says that when looking at adaptations in species that live with and depend on ants, the “bizarre almost becomes the norm”. But among those, he says, N. kronaueri’s adaptation is one of the most remarkable. Given that N. kronaueri managed to go undetected by people, despite living with one of the most well-studied species of army ant(Eciton mexicanum), von Beeren suggests it’s highly likely there are more of these bizarre critters out there waiting to be found. Parker agrees, adding that the strategic use of ants by other species is an underexplored area of biology: “This is evolution at its most extreme: the more we look, the more these creatures force us to modify our ideas of how organisms make a living.” Journal reference: BMC Zoology, DOI: Read more: Pink rays spotted hitching a ride on the backs of stingrays; Venomous pseudoscorpions use huge pincers to hitchhike on bats; Zoologger: Baby lobster with a taste for jellyfish surfing ձ> /article/2120872-new-beetle-species-bites-army-ants-butt-and-hitches-a-ride/feed/ 0 2120872