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RE: Mark O'Shea Q&A - 18 month Backlog!
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by Snake17 on February 17, 2005
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Hi Mark.
Would I be a major pain if I would ask you for an aoutograph too ? You could send it like a collect call, so that I would pay for the delivery and the stamps when it gets here. It would realy be an honnor for me, honestly. If it weren`t for you I wouldn`t be so interested in reptiles and I wouldn`t have wanted to be professional in what I do. If you don`t have the time to do it I understand but in case you do here is my address:
Romania,
Al. Jupiter Nr. 8, Bl.129, Sc. E, Ap. 18, Orasul(city): Suceava, Judetul(county): Suceava.
My full name is Alexandru Strugariu.
I would highly apreciate it. Thank you & take care.
Best regards, Alex S.
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RE: Mark O'Shea Q&A - 18 month Backlog!
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by Mark_OShea on February 17, 2005
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Dear Chirag
In answer to your questions, one at a time.
1. I do visit local markets to highlight the misuse of endangered species. I cannot buy the animals, even to save them, because that would create a market worse than before and every tourist or film crew would be pestered by people trying to sell them livestock. You cannot just release animals back into the wild without a lot ot research because you do not know if they are now carrying any disease that would harm the wild population and in any case you do not know exactly where they came from. In the case of the monkeys and birds, they are so stressed they might not even survive. Any sort of rescue can only be conducted by local authorities with the power to confiscate protected species (without having to buy them) and the time to rehabilitate before release. In Thailand (Siamese Crocodile ser.3) I was with the Thai authorities and they were confiscating the living animals found but I cannot do that, I am a foreigner.
2. No I am not working for Nat.Geo. The film you saw Serious Desert, was a BBC production which the BBC must have sold to Nat. Geographic for worldwide transmission.
3. I cannot modify the site, I've been told it does not belong to me, it belongs to the film company.
And finally, I do not have Minto's address nor any way of obtaining it although you might be able to contact him via the National Park service in Assam. I think he lives near Kolkata like you.
Regards
Mark
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RE: Mark O'Shea Q&A - 18 month Backlog!
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by Mark_OShea on February 17, 2005
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Dear Alexandru
Of course you can have an autograph, I will post it early next week, and there is no need to pay for the postage. The fact that my films have caused you to be interested in herpetology and become a professional is sufficient reward.
Am I correct in thinking that Suceava is the name of the city and the country (in Romania) so the word Suceava appears twice in the address ?
Mark
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RE: Mark O'Shea Q&A - 18 month Backlog!
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by Snake17 on February 17, 2005
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Hello again Mark,
Suceava is both the name of my town and my county. You should write the adress just as I`ve writen it because once it will get to Romania the mail-men and post ofices will understand. So yes, it shall apear twice on my address. Thank you again Mark, I truely apreciate it. Take care...
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Mark O'Shea Q&A - 18 month Backlog!
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by CJROY on February 21, 2005
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hi mark,
today i dont hav any question, but infact i am having a serious problem.
it is that i wanted to hav your signature series hook. so i contacted midwest (tongs .com) for further information. the charges they mentioned for shipping and others was absolutely out of my budget.
infact the cost was three times the price of the product and they cant even garuntee the delevery.so as a result i cant invest such a large sum of money..so do u hav any idia how i will get the item without having a tension of delevery. do u know any body in india who can help me with this? or even can u send me the hook where i wil pay the price on delivery?
pls dont take it otherwise
pls reply
chirag
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RE: Mark O'Shea Q&A - 18 month Backlog!
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by Mark_OShea on February 23, 2005
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The trouble is Chirag, that when you buy a single item of almost anything from overseas the shipping costs more than the item itself. I spoke to Dana Savorelli at MidWest about your situation and he told me that he uses UPS at the moment and their India rate is $100+ which is more than twice the price of the $45 O'Shea snake hook. He can offer a different service, Global Express Postage, for $35 BUT although this method should bring the hook to your door in 3-5 days, but it may never arrive at all. Although it has to be signed for at every stage of its journey it can still go missing. This method is at the buyers risk only and payment cannot be by credit card, it must be a money order or some other tangeable form of currency because if it fails to arrive and has been paid by credit card it would be at MidWest's risk, not the buyer.
In truth, you have two options apart from the risky $35 postal method. 1. wait until someone you know if visiting USA and ask them to order one there from MidWest and bring it back in their luggage. 2. Talk to your friends and get an order together for 4 hooks, shipping should still be around the same and shared between four people it would only add 50% to the cost of each hook. Or buy four and sell them, enterprise, make a profit.
MidWest does not have an Indian agent and I don't keep or sell snake hooks in the UK so i can't help you.
Regards
mark
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Mark O'Shea Q&A - 18 month Backlog!
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by CJROY on February 28, 2005
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hi mark,
how r u ? i saw ur flim the pythons grip for the fifth time today. it was amazing.
1.u teamed up with dr. bhupathy at rajasthan. how did u contacted him?
2.and u r the third scintist in india who had been permited officially by the goverment.. how do u feel about that?
3.just curious, what did u of that cage after u left chattisgarh.
4. did u come to kolkata when u were in wesst bengal??
5. thanks for replying my last letter , both of ur idias are good , but i am afraid the market is not so good for snake hooks and grab sticks in india, so i gess i have to wait for some body to vist US.
but i hav a request . at present as nobody is there to vist US so can u send me some mesurement of the snake hook that u carry with u. and if possible the grab stick too. so that i an make one over here in india, u can send me the designs in my e mail address:
herpetofauna_snakes@hotmail.com.
6. and mark lastly the most important question. can i call my myself a herpetologist or a snake expert. though i dont have any herpetological degrees, but what i hav is experience. is that all what i need....
pls reply
thats all for today
regards
chirag
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RE: Mark O'Shea Q&A - 18 month Backlog!
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by Snake17 on March 7, 2005
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Hy Mark. I just got your autographed post cards today and I wanted to thank you. Like I said, I realy apreciate it. The post cards are realy cool.
I don`t want to push my luck but I would relay need some guidence for my future career, advice on my future Ph.D...I promise I won`t constantly bug you. If you could help me please write me at Bitis_arietans_arietans@hotmail.com or Bitis_arietans_arietans@yahoo.com
I won`t mind if you won`t, I understand you`re realy busy. Thanks for everything again...Best regards, Alex S.
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RE: Mark O'Shea Q&A - 18 month Backlog!
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by jon_b on March 13, 2005
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Hello Mark!
I've been a bit confused regarding to the East African - and the West African gaboon viper.
I’ve understood that some people are still referring to the gaboons as subspecies to each other. Although I’ve understood that the latest research results have shown that Bitis g. rhinoceros and Bitis g. gabonica are as differentiated to each other as they are from Bitis nasicornis…
So my question is, why haven’t these researches and propositions been accepted (by everyone) and the subspecies been separated into Bitis gabonica and Bitis rhinoceros (by everyone)? And what need to happen for everyone to accept it?
Cheers, Jon
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RE: Mark O'Shea Q&A - 18 month Backlog!
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by Mark_OShea on March 14, 2005
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Hello Jon, Long reply I'm afraid (I cannot always promise immediate or long replies by the way). Please excuse lack of italics on scientific names and journal titles - this is an aberation of the site which removed them from my cut and paste.
It is true that the western subspecies of Bitis gabonica, formerly known as Bitis gabonica rhinoceros, has been given specific status and so there are now two species of gaboon vipers, the East African gaboon, B.gabonica, and the West African gaboon, B.rhinoceros. The paper containing this taxonomic change is Lenk, P., H.-W. Herrmann, U. Joger, & M. Wink (1999) Phylogeny and taxonomic subdivision of Bitis (Reptilia: Viperidae) based on molecular evidence. Kaupia, 8: 31-38.
[This scenario immediately creates a problem because there is already a rhinoceros viper, Bitis nasicornis, and some people suggest is should now be known by its second name, river jack, to avoid confusion with B.rhinoceros. That is not such a good idea since river jack is less well known and the viper in question does not always hang out around rivers.]
But that was not actually your question and I digress.
First off you have to realize that there are trends in taxonomy and some taxonomists are clumpers, preferring to lump species together, while others are splitters who tend towards elevation of subspecies, creation of new species and even new genera. We are definitely going through a splitting phase at the moment, with mitochondrial DNA analysis a valuable tool in the armoury of the taxonomist in that they can make more accurate statements about the closeness of relationships between species, than were possible using scale count or other data.
That said, taxonomy is really concerned with naming and organizing organisms and does not have to reflect their closeness of relationships, although it helps if it does. In the past phenetic taxonomies where the rage, when organisms were placed together because they looked alike and the group Vermes contained worms, snakes and other elongate organisms. Today we use phylogenetic taxonomy which classifies organisms on their apparent closeness of relationships and evolutionary descent, but it does not always work out, especially when you consider some of the larger families such as the Colubridae or the Boidae which obviously contain many species with totally different ancestral lineages.
Back to the Bitis discussion. It is long been recognized that the two subspecies are from different parts of Africa. Bitis gabonica, as it was originally recognized, is a rainforest or woodland species rather than an open country species like B.arietans, though specimens may occur in open woodland. The two subspecies were separated, not just by their characteristics (nose-horns, sub-occular markings) but also by their geographical distribution. B.gabonica gabonica, now B.gabonica, occurs from Nigeria and Cameroon, east to southwest Kenya, south through Congo/Zaire to northern Angola and Zambia, with isolated pockets inTanzania, Mozambique, Zambia and of course, KwaZulu Natal in S.Africa. It is a wide spread species. Bitis gabonica rhinoceros, now B.rhinoceros, is much more confined, being found from Ghana, west through Ivory Coast, Liberia and Sierra Leone to Guinea. In between the two distributions of these rainforest/woodland species lies the Benin (formerly Dahomey) or Togo Gap, a narrow sliver of savanna, running down from the arid sahel of Burkina Faso and Niger, containing two small W.Africa countries. Although there are isolated reports of gaboons from within this corridor it does pretty effectively separate the two populations and over time they may have become reproductively isolated enough to be considered separate biological species. According to Lenk et al 1999, they diverged in antiquity and have evolved different venom compositions, presumably fine-tuned to different prey, and require different antivenom therapy. So yes, we should be recognizing them as separate, full species.
But there is not Law that says we must.
If I may use a quote or three from Wolfgang Wuster’s excellent venomous snake taxonomy alert website < http://biology.bangor.ac.uk/~bss166/update.htm>
"Taxonomy is a matter of personal opinion..."
H.G. Cogger, 1985, quoted in Golay et al., 1993.
"Taxonomy is a matter of consensus ..."
Golay, 1993
"Taxonomy is a matter of evidence... "
Wüster, 2002
So you see, we do not even agree what taxonomy is. Lenk et al’s work has found considerable support but not everyone will agree with them and so some authors, either through ignorance of the changes or because they disagree with the conclusions, may continue to use B.gabonica for both populations.
Even the work of eminent taxonomists does not always find favour. Arnold Kluge is one the most respected of herpetological taxonomists and he has done much to sought out the pythons, boas, geckos and pygopodids, skinks etc. but some of his decisions were less than popular and have not been generally accepted, I will only list two here for emphasis. Kluge favoured placing the Calabar ground python, Calabaria reinhardti, an oviparous burrowing species from W.Africa, in the same genus, Charina, as the rosy boas of California ( Kluge 1993 Calabaria and the phylogeny of erycine snakes. Zool. J. Linn. Soc. 107 (4): 293-351). He also placed all three Madagascan boas in the genus Boa (Kluge1991 Boine snake phylogeny and research cycles. Publs Mus Zool Univ Michigan 178: 1-58). The current trend seems to be to reverse these decisions ie. Vences et al 2001 (Phylogeny of South American and Malagasy Boine snakes: Molecular evidence for the validity of Sanzinia and Acrantophis and biogeographic implications. Copeia 2001 (4): 1151-1154) and Gossmann et.al . 2002 (Zur Herpetofauna Gabuns. Teil II: Kommentierte Artenliste der gefundenen Reptilien, Bemerkungen zur Artenvielfalt. Herpetofauna 24 (136): 19-33).
Nothing is cast in stone.
Lenk et al recognized a subgenus of Bitis, Macrocerastes, for the species B.gabonica, B.rhinoceros, B.nasicornis and B.parviocula – the Ethiopian mountain viper.
On the subject of the splitting of wide-ranging species into several species and the elevation of subspecies to specific status, this is not an isolated incident. The two African python subspecies are now treated as separate species, Python sebae and P.natalensis, the three subspecies of blood or short-tailed pythons are now P.curtus, P.breitensteini and P.brongersmai, the Angolan cobra, Naja ancheitae has been elevated from within the snouted cobra, N.annulifera, the Nubian spitting cobra, N.nubiae, recently came from within the red-spitter, N.pallida, and the two subspecies of Russell’s viper are shortly to be recognized as full and valid species, separated by habitat and venom a least. I can see good reasons to recognize Python molurus bivittatus as a valid species, similar to the elevation of P.natalensis, and various people are working on the taxonomies of Ophiophagus hannah, Naja nigricollis, Naja melanoleuca and others. So expect more changes, but don’t expect everyone to accept them all.
Hope this clarifies.
Mark
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