Herpetology

My name’s Dane Trembath, I'm the Collection Manager of Herpetology for the Australian Museum Research Institute. Herpetology is the study of reptiles and amphibians, which is kind of interesting because it's sort of two totally different groups that have been lumped together into one.

The Australian Museum Research Institute Herpetology collection is the largest collection of Australian reptiles and amphibians. The collection currently is over

180,000 specimens and there's probably more that we're slowly discovering, databasing and registering. About two thirds is reptiles, and about one third is amphibians.

So one thing that helps us study cryptic species especially is museum collections it allows you to very fast look at a large amount of animals. So some of these animals are very hard to find, at least when you have a museum collection, especially one like here, which is hundreds of years of collecting, you can pour out jars and make piles, and you'll very quickly start seeing the differences. So the main, main use of our collection currently is our taxonomic work. A visiting researcher can come

in, to look at a species of lizard, and we might have 500 specimens which makes it a lot easier than going to catch those.

My name’s Rick Shine, I'm a professor in biology at Macquarie Uni. One of the big problems we have with Australia, of course, is many species are becoming endangered. It's really hard to conserve a species if you don't understand it. And the Australian Museum has got a vast number of these animals. We can look inside them,

we can find out what that species eats, what size they mature, how many kids they have when they have them, and that's critical information.

If you want to conserve biodiversity, you've got to understand the species

and the collections give us a window into an enormous amount of ecological information.

My name is Dr Jodi Rowley and I’m the curator of Amphibian and Reptitle Conservation Biology at the Australian Museum and University of New South Wales. The Australian Museum Herpetology collection is core to the work that I do. These collections, they help us understand our biodiversity. What we have, how many species of frog and other amphibians are there in Australia and the world. And they help us understand how things have changed over time.

So things like disease, how they've started impacting our frogs, which is been absolutely horrible. With many species under threat and even extinct because of disease, our collections can help unlock secrets as to when these diseases arrived, and help us manage our frogs into the future. And the same thing with climate change,

habitat loss, having this kind of library of how our biodiversity was in the past

helps us figure out how to help make sure we have the amazing biodiversity

that we have now into the future.

Herpetology comes from the Greek herpeton, which is ‘things that crawl’. And so I think at the time they decided that all the things that crawled was probably all the creepy crawly things that were not insects, and that's how amphibians and reptiles seem to have been lumped into what we call herpetology.

There are four orders of reptiles. Number ones like Crocodilia, crocodiles

and alligators. Number two are the Testudines, the turtles and tortoises. The third one is the Squamata, which comprises the snakes and lizards. And the fourth one is the Rhynchocephalia, which is only the tuatara. There are three orders of amphibians. The first is the Anura, which comprises all the frogs and toads. The second is the Caudata, which are all the salamanders. And the third is the Gymnophiona, which are the caecilians.

Some of the misconceptions about herpetology that I've encountered is the idea that they're slimy. Amphibians are certainly sort of moist-ish when you touch it, but reptiles definitely aren't, they're drier. That's basically what the scales are doing. The other misconception is that they're not intelligent animals. Reptiles and amphibians were thought to not be actually smart creatures. But now with more, more study people

finding that they're actually highly intelligent creatures. They actually do cool social behaviour, like, like they have parental care. They're ancient animals, and I think

people don't just don't connect that well with really ancient animals.

Cold blooded is sort of an old term. All reptiles and amphibians are ectothermic. They all require climatic variables to regulate, to basically make their body temperature.

What you eat to produce your energy, 70% of that energy goes into keeping yourself warm. Whereas in a reptile, because it can't make itself warm, none of that energy it's creating from eating is actually going into making itself warm. So for a snake to become warmer, it will bask in the sun.

Yes, the Australian Museum herpetology department definitely still collect specimens, but these days our collection is more targeted, so we will collect things that we're currently working on. But we will also do broad scale collection if we went to an area

where we may not already have material. Another way we get a lot of material is

through donations, especially road kills. I'm a great proponent of if you've got a roadkill snake, you should bring it to the museum because often some of those animals

are not totally destroyed. And people bring them in here all the time, we prepare them, and they actually become great scientific specimens.

FrogID is the Australian Museum's national citizen science project, and it's forming a born digital collection. So people out there on their smartphones across Australia are recording the calls of frogs, to identify species. So far, we've got around 800,000 audio recordings that result in over 1.2 million records of frogs and they're a collection. They have all the data that we love so it's time, date, location. We have these audio files

that are evidence. So we can go back to them, we can listen to them, we can get all sorts of information out of them. And it's an amazing resource and a novel way that museums are building digital collections that help inform, how we can, conserve our amazing frogs and other biodiversity into the future.

Both the Australian Museum collections and the FrogID database are really,

really core to what I do. I need both to better understand and conserve frogs and biodiversity in general. And we need this long term data set that the Australian Museum Collections, gives us and all the information that the specimens can reveal. Combined now with this really intensive born digital collection, this FrogID, audio database that helps us get a really intense snapshot of how our frogs are doing

it's kind of revolutionized, how we do research, being able to combine these two amazing collections. It's been an absolutely game changer for biodiversity conservation in Australia.