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Giant Garter Snake
The giant garter snake (''Thamnophis gigas'') is the largest species of garter snake. Relatively rare, it is a semi-aquatic snake with a limited distribution in the wetlands of central California. Description The giant garter snake is the largest species of garter snake, with the adult snakes ranging from in length. As with many snakes, the female giant garter snakes tend to be longer and larger than the males. The snakes have keeled scales, with a yellow dorsal stripe against a black or dark grey background, and two additional yellow stripes on either side that run the length of its body. Although, some unstriped checkered patterns have been observed. It is venomous, but harmless to humans; it possesses a very mild neurotoxic venom that helps subdue its prey. A bite to a human will at most give a red itchy rash around the area of the bite. Distribution The giant garter snake is found in Central California. Its historic range extends through much of Central California's Sacramen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Sheldon Fitch
Henry Sheldon Fitch (December 25, 1909 – September 8, 2009) was an American herpetologist. Fitch was born in Utica, New York. When he was a year old, the family moved to Medford in the Rogue Valley in Oregon. Growing up, he had a keen interest in all the reptiles he could find on his father's 116 acre (0.5 km²) ranch. He recounts that he especially liked snakes, because "the real bonus was in seeing horrified adults scatter." In 1926, he enrolled at the University of Oregon, but switched to UC Berkeley for his graduate work. He obtained his M.A. in 1933 and a Ph.D. in zoology in 1937. From 1938 to 1947, he worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) as a field biologist in the department of pest control, studying rodents such as squirrels, gophers, and kangaroo rats. He served from 1941 to 1945 in the Medical Corps as an army pharmacist, stationed initially in the United Kingdom, then France, and finally in Germany. In 1946, he married Virginia Ruby Preston, wi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pseudacris Sierra
The Sierran chorus frog or Sierran treefrog (''Pseudacris sierra'') is native to the state of California, Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, and Montana. It has a range from the West Coast of the United States from Central California inland through Idaho. They can live at sea level, but also up to more than 10,000 feet utilyzing trees, ponds, grasslands, farmlands, meadows, and lakes as habitats. These frogs, alike other, reproduce in aquatic settings. They occur in shades of greens or browns and can change colors over periods of hours and weeks. These colors help them easily blend into the background and hard for the eye to catch. Taxonomy The naming of this frog has a very confusing history. These frogs have long been known as Pacific chorus frogs ''Pseudacris regilla''. Then, in 2006, Recuero et al. split that taxonomic concept into three species. Recuero et al. attached the name ''Pseudacris regilla'' with the northern piece, renaming the central piece the Sierran tree frog (''Pseudacri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Endemic Fauna Of California
Endemism is the state of a species being found in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found elsewhere. For example, the Cape sugarbird is found exclusively in southwestern South Africa and is therefore said to be ''endemic'' to that particular part of the world. An endemic species can be also be referred to as an ''endemism'' or in scientific literature as an ''endemite''. For example '' Cytisus aeolicus'' is an endemite of the Italian flora. '' Adzharia renschi'' was once believed to be an endemite of the Caucasus, but it was later discovered to be a non-indigenous species from South America belonging to a different genus. The extreme opposite of an endemic species is one with a cosmopolitan distribution, having a global or widespread range. A rare alternative term for a species that is endemic is "precinctive", which applies to s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reptiles Of The United States
Reptiles, as most commonly defined are the animals in the class Reptilia ( ), a paraphyletic grouping comprising all sauropsids except birds. Living reptiles comprise turtles, crocodilians, squamates (lizards and snakes) and rhynchocephalians (tuatara). As of March 2022, the Reptile Database includes about 11,700 species. In the traditional Linnaean classification system, birds are considered a separate class to reptiles. However, crocodilians are more closely related to birds than they are to other living reptiles, and so modern cladistic classification systems include birds within Reptilia, redefining the term as a clade. Other cladistic definitions abandon the term reptile altogether in favor of the clade Sauropsida, which refers to all amniotes more closely related to modern reptiles than to mammals. The study of the traditional reptile orders, historically combined with that of modern amphibians, is called herpetology. The earliest known proto-reptiles originated around 31 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Snakes Of North America
Snakes are elongated, limbless, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes . Like all other squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales. Many species of snakes have skulls with several more joints than their lizard ancestors, enabling them to swallow prey much larger than their heads (cranial kinesis). To accommodate their narrow bodies, snakes' paired organs (such as kidneys) appear one in front of the other instead of side by side, and most have only one functional lung. Some species retain a pelvic girdle with a pair of vestigial claws on either side of the cloaca. Lizards have evolved elongate bodies without limbs or with greatly reduced limbs about twenty-five times independently via convergent evolution, leading to many lineages of legless lizards. These resemble snakes, but several common groups of legless lizards have eyelids and external ears, which snakes lack, although this rule is not universal (see Amphisbaenia, Dibamida ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Northern Water Snake
The common watersnake (''Nerodia sipedon'') is a species of large, nonvenomous, common snake in the family Colubridae. The species is native to North America. It is frequently mistaken for the venomous cottonmouth (''Agkistrodon piscivorus''). Common names Common names for ''N. sipedon'' include banded water snake, black water adder, black water snake, brown water snake, common water snake, common northern water snake, eastern water snake, North American water snake, northern banded water snake, northern water snake, spotted water snake, streaked snake, water pilot, and water snake. Description The common watersnake can grow up to in total length (including tail). Per one study, the average total length of females was , while that of males was . From known studies of this species in the wild, adult females can weigh between typically, while the smaller male can range from . The largest females can weigh up to while the largest males can scale . ''N. sipedon'' can be brown, gr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sacramento Valley
, photo =Sacramento Riverfront.jpg , photo_caption= Sacramento , map_image=Map california central valley.jpg , map_caption= The Central Valley of California , location = California, United States , coordinates = , boundaries = Sierra Nevada (east), Cascade Range, Klamath Mountains (north), Coast Range (west), Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta (south) , towns = Redding, Chico, Yuba City, Sacramento , watercourses = Sacramento River The Sacramento Valley is the area of the Central Valley of the U.S. state of California that lies north of the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta and is drained by the Sacramento River. It encompasses all or parts of ten Northern California counties. Although many areas of the Sacramento Valley are rural, it contains several urban areas, including the state capital, Sacramento. Since 2010, statewide droughts in California have further strained both the Sacramento Valley's and the Sacramento metropolitan region's water security. Geog ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
San Joaquin Valley
The San Joaquin Valley ( ; es, Valle de San Joaquín) is the area of the Central Valley of the U.S. state of California that lies south of the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta and is drained by the San Joaquin River. It comprises seven counties of Northern and one of Southern California, including, in the north, all of San Joaquin and Kings counties, most of Stanislaus, Merced, and Fresno counties, and parts of Madera and Tulare counties, along with a majority of Kern County, in Southern California. Although the valley is predominantly rural, it has densely populated urban centers: Fresno, Bakersfield, Stockton, Modesto, Tulare, Visalia, Hanford, and Merced. The first European to enter the valley was Pedro Fages in 1772. The San Joaquin Valley was originally inhabited by the Yokuts and Miwok peoples. The Tejon Indian Tribe of California is a federally recognized tribe of Kitanemuk, Yokuts, and Chumash indigenous people of California. Their ancestral homeland ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Habitat
In ecology, the term habitat summarises the array of resources, physical and biotic factors that are present in an area, such as to support the survival and reproduction of a particular species. A species habitat can be seen as the physical manifestation of its ecological niche. Thus "habitat" is a species-specific term, fundamentally different from concepts such as environment or vegetation assemblages, for which the term "habitat-type" is more appropriate. The physical factors may include (for example): soil, moisture, range of temperature, and light intensity. Biotic factors will include the availability of food and the presence or absence of predators. Every species has particular habitat requirements, with habitat generalist species able to thrive in a wide array of environmental conditions while habitat specialist species requiring a very limited set of factors to survive. The habitat of a species is not necessarily found in a geographical area, it can be the interior ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ovoviviparity
Ovoviviparity, ovovivipary, ovivipary, or aplacental viviparity is a term used as a "bridging" form of reproduction between egg-laying oviparous and live-bearing viviparous reproduction. Ovoviviparous animals possess embryos that develop inside eggs that remain in the mother's body until they are ready to hatch. The young of some ovoviviparous amphibians, such as ''Limnonectes larvaepartus'', are born as larvae, and undergo further metamorphosis outside the body of the mother. Members of genera ''Nectophrynoides'' and ''Eleutherodactylus'' bear froglets, not only the hatching, but all the most conspicuous metamorphosis, being completed inside the body of the mother before birth. Among insects that depend on opportunistic exploitation of transient food sources, such as many Sarcophagidae and other carrion flies, and species such as many Calliphoridae, that rely on fresh dung, and parasitoids such as tachinid flies that depend on entering the host as soon as possible, the e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gravidity And Parity
In biology and human medicine, gravidity and parity are the number of times a woman is or has been pregnant (gravidity) and carried the pregnancies to a viable gestational age (parity). These terms are usually coupled, sometimes with additional terms, to indicate more details of the woman's obstetric history. When using these terms: * Gravida indicates the number of times a woman is or has been pregnant, regardless of the pregnancy outcome. A current pregnancy, if any, is included in this count. A multiple pregnancy (e.g., twins, triplets, etc.) is counted as 1. * Parity, or "para", indicates the number of births (including live births and stillbirths) where pregnancies reached viable gestational age. A multiple pregnancy (e.g., twins, triplets, etc.) carried to viable gestational age is still counted as 1. * Abortus is the number of pregnancies that were lost prior to viable gestational age for any reason, including induced abortions or miscarriages but not stillbirths. The abort ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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