Exploring snake occurrence records: Spatial biases and marginal gains from accessible social media

The Reptile Relocation Industry in Australia: Perspectives from Operators

Thousands of reptiles are relocated annually in Australia, yet there has been relatively little research aimed at understanding how the reptile relocation industry operates. An online questionnaire was distributed to anyone who had relocated a reptile between April 2019 and April 2020, including wildlife relocators, wildlife rehabilitators and the general public. The questionnaire explored demographics, decision-making and concerns about how the industry functions, through 24 questions and two opportunities to provide open-ended comments. We received 125 responses and 123 comments from operators in all Australian states and territories. Beliefs about appropriate times and places for reptile releases were not reflected in practice for the majority of operators. Confidence about reptiles remaining at recipient sites was low regardless of how many years’ experience an operator had. Escaped captive native reptiles were encountered by most operators, and a quarter of operators were called out to exotic non-native snakes. Operators across all levels of experience indicated a need for changes within the industry, including increased training and professionalism, and more scientific studies on the outcomes of relocations to address concerns about the impacts that the industry has on the wildlife that it is trying to protect.

Dactylogyridae 2022: a meta-analysis of phylogenetic studies and generic diagnoses of parasitic flatworms using published genetic and morphological data

Dactylogyridae is one of the most studied families of parasitic flatworms with more than 1000 species and 166 genera described to date including ecto- and endoparasites. Dactylogyrid monogeneans were suggested as model organisms for host-parasite macroevolutionary and biogeographical studies due to the scientific and economic importance of some of their host lineages. Consequently, an array of phylogenetic research into different dactylogyrid lineages has been produced over the past years but the last family-wide study was published 16 years ago. Here, we provide a meta-analysis of the phylogenetic relationships of Dactylogyridae including representatives of all genera with available molecular data (n=67). First, we investigate the systematic informativeness of morphological characters widely used to diagnose dactylogyrid genera through a parsimony analysis of the characters, character mapping, and phylogenetic comparative methods. Second, we provide an overview of the current state of the systematics of the family and its subfamilies, and summarise potentially poly- and paraphyletic genera. Third, we elaborate on the implications of taxonomic, citation, and confirmation bias in past studies. Fourth, we discuss host range, biogeographical, and freshwater-marine patterns. We found two well-supported macroclades which we assigned to the subfamilies Dactylogyrinae and Ancyrocephalinae. These subfamilies further include 16 well-supported clades with only a few synapomorphies that could be deduced from generic diagnoses in the literature. Furthermore, few morphological characters considered systematically informative at the genus level display a strong phylogenetic signal. However, the parsimony analysis suggests that these characters provide little information on the relationships between genera. We conclude that a strong taxonomic bias and low coverage of DNA sequences and regions limit knowledge on morphological and biogeographical evolutionary patterns that can be inferred from these results. We propose addressing potential citation and confirmation biases through a 'level playing field' multiple sequence alignment as provided by this study.

Citizen science and online data: Opportunities and challenges for snake ecology and action against snakebite

The secretive behavior and life history of snakes makes studying their biology, distribution, and the epidemiology of venomous snakebite challenging. One of the most useful, most versatile, and easiest to collect types of biological data are photographs, particularly those that are connected with geographic location and date-time metadata. Photos verify occurrence records, provide data on phenotypes and ecology, and are often used to illustrate new species descriptions, field guides and identification keys, as well as in training humans and computer vision algorithms to identify snakes. We scoured eleven online and two offline sources of snake photos in an attempt to collect as many photos of as many snake species as possible, and attempt to explain some of the inter-species variation in photograph quantity among global regions and taxonomic groups, and with regard to medical importance, human population density, and range size. We collected a total of 725,565 photos-between 1 and 48,696 photos of 3098 of the world's 3879 snake species (79.9%), leaving 781 "most wanted" species with no photos (20.1% of all currently-described species as of the December 2020 release of The Reptile Database). We provide a list of most wanted species sortable by family, continent, authority, and medical importance, and encourage snake photographers worldwide to submit photos and associated metadata, particularly of "missing" species, to the most permanent and useful online archives: The Reptile Database, iNaturalist, and HerpMapper.

Sharing for science: high-resolution trophic interactions revealed rapidly by social media

Discrete, ephemeral natural phenomena with low spatial or temporal predictability are incredibly challenging to study systematically. In ecology, species interactions, which constitute the functional backbone of ecological communities, can be notoriously difficult to characterise especially when taxa are inconspicuous and the interactions of interest (e.g., trophic events) occur infrequently, rapidly, or variably in space and time. Overcoming such issues has historically required significant time and resource investment to collect sufficient data, precluding the answering of many ecological and evolutionary questions. Here, we show the utility of social media for rapidly collecting observations of ephemeral ecological phenomena with low spatial and temporal predictability by using a Facebook group dedicated to collecting predation events involving reptiles and amphibians in sub-Saharan Africa. We collected over 1900 independent feeding observations using Facebook from 2015 to 2019 involving 83 families of predators and 129 families of prey. Feeding events by snakes were particularly well-represented with close to 1,100 feeding observations recorded. Relative to an extensive literature review spanning 226 sources and 138 years, we found that social media has provided snake dietary records faster than ever before in history with prey being identified to a finer taxonomic resolution and showing only modest concordance with the literature due to the number of novel interactions that were detected. Finally, we demonstrate that social media can outperform other citizen science image-based approaches (iNaturalist and Google Images) highlighting the versatility of social media and its ability to function as a citizen science platform.