Episode 77: Herp Science Sunday with Dr. Alex Krohn and Jules Farquhar

02/05/23 • 101 min

1 Listener

Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Seventy Seven! And I hope you all remain safe and healthy out there, and I want to wish all of you a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year. It’s the first week of February and it’s good to be back home and to be turning out another episode, after being away for nearly a month in Peru. It was an interesting trip, to say the least, with a lot of travel issues going both down and back. I’ll spare you the details, but I am beginning to suspect that the golden age of air travel is behind us. All travel issues aside it was a great trip to Peru, and across 25 days and two back-to-back tour groups we managed to find a total of six bushmasters. Pretty incredible and I'm still processing all of that. Needless to say, I recorded segments with some of the folks who encountered their first bushmaster, and I will put that out sometime in the next few months. So Much Pingle Patrons! I want to give a shout-out to Craig Howard, the show’s newest patron. Craig was on our first Peru tour last month and he took some awesome photos, I especially liked some of his frog shots. It was good to meet you Craig, and thanks so much for your support. And if you’re out there listening and you would like to kick in a few bucks, it’s easy to do, you simply go to the So Much Pingle Patreon page. You can support the show for as little as three bucks a month – less than a fancy cup of coffee! You can also support the show via one-time contributions via PayPal or Venmo (please contact me via email to [email protected]). Well, here we are again with another edition of Herp Science Sunday with Dr. Alex Krohn. That’s right, two in a row, even if they are a month apart, and, this one again features a guest from Australia. As I said before, this is more by accident than design, but Alex and I are happy about it and we hope you are as well. Our guest this week is Jules Farquhar, a doctoral candidate in the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University in Victoria, Australia. Jules is a co-author on a paper published in the Journal of Biogeography last year entitled “Using Crowd-sourced Photographic Records to Explore Geographical Variation in Colour Polymorphism” Alex and I talked with Jules just before Christmas, about this paper, which concerns Lace Monitors, and we cover some other cool Australian herp stuff as well. Thanks for listening everyone! And as always, please keep the comments and suggestions coming, and please take time to rate the show on your podcast platform! The show email is [email protected], and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions, baby monitors to watch baby monitors, tips for herping better, etc. -Mike

Previous Episode

Episode 76: Herp Science Sunday: Hemiclitores in Snakes with Megan Folwell

Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Seventy Six! And I hope you all remain safe and healthy out there, and I want to wish all of you a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year. Well it’s Sunday, and New Year’s Day, and that can only mean that the first episode of 2023 is a Herp Science Sunday show with Dr. Alex Krohn! I’m happy to get one more show in before I head down to Peru in just a few days. This visit is a prolonged trip, actually two trips back-to-back, and I won’t return home until almost the end of the month, which means the next SoMuchPingle episode will drop the first week of February. But as always, I will be bringing my mobile recording gear and I should come back with more content, complete with screeching jungle birds as a backdrop. As always, I want to say thank you to all of the show’s patrons! I’m grateful for everyone’s contributions and it does keep the show rolling along. And if you’re out there listening and you would like to kick in a few bucks, it’s easy to do, you simply go to the So Much Pingle Patreon page. You can support the show for as little as three bucks a month – less than a fancy cup of coffee! You can also support the show via one-time contributions via PayPal or Venmo (please contact me via email to [email protected]). This edition of Herp Science Sunday centers on serpent genitalia. The paper we discuss is "First Evidence of Hemiclitores in Snakes", published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society on 12/14/2022. The paper should be available for download here, and as always, you can also request a copy of the PDF from me. The co-authors are Megan J. Folwell, Kate L. Sanders, Patricia L. R. Brennan and Jenna M. Crowe-Riddell. I believe Alex and I both got wind of it from a post made by Dr. Emily Taylor. And we nearly simultaneously decided we needed to talk to at least one of the co-authors of this paper, and soon, since so many people have been interested in the discoveries outlined in the publication. Long story short, Alex and I had a lovely chat with co-author Megan Folwell recently, and I rushed it through the production process to have it ready for New Year's. Thanks for listening everyone! And as always, please keep the comments and suggestions coming, and please take time to rate the show on your podcast platform! The show email is [email protected], and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions, entertainment partitioning ideas, tips for herping better, etc. -Mike

Next Episode

Episode 78: From Kansas to South Africa with Daren Riedle

Hello everyone and welcome to Episode 78 and I hope you all remain safe and healthy out there. After three weeks at home, I am heading back to Peru this afternoon for this year's third and final tour. I'm happy to get another show out before I leave, and we will touch base again in early March when I return. So Much Pingle Patrons! As always, I want to thank everyone who keeps the show rolling along. And if you’re out there listening and you would like to kick in a few bucks, it’s easy to do, you simply go to the So Much Pingle Patreon page. You can support the show for as little as three bucks a month – less than a fancy cup of coffee! You can also support the show via one-time contributions via PayPal or Venmo (please contact me via email to [email protected]). Our guest this week is Daren Riedle. Daren is the Wildlife Diversity Coordinator for the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks and he wears many hats as a researcher, administrator, and avid herper. I recorded this interview in Peru this past January, and I enjoyed the opportunity to herp and just hang out with Daren during our stay. Our conversation took us from Kansas to South Africa with many points in between. Thanks for listening everyone! And as always, please keep the comments and suggestions coming, and please take time to rate the show on your podcast platform! The show email is [email protected], and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions, baby monitors to watch baby monitors, tips for herping better, etc. -Mike