Herpetological Review Volume 52, Number 3 (September 2021). Our cover features the Southern Flat-tailed Gecko (Uroplatus sameiti), photographed by Jannico Kelk near Ranomafana National Park, Madagascar. The charismatic gecko genus Uroplatus is endemic to Madagascar and surrounding islands, and all species contain extreme camouflage adaptations and have flattened tails. The journal has been printed and mailed. Full contents are now available online to SSAR members at https://ssarherps.org/herpetological-review-pdfs/. Natural History Notes, Geographic Distribution Notes, and Book Reviews are Open Access and are available for download at the same link. If you are not a member of SSAR, please consider joining the leading international herpetological society. Student and online-only rates available. Follow the “Join SSAR” link on the home page. Congratulations to Jannico for a great cover image!

Victor Hutchison Graduate Poster Award

The SSAR Graduate Student Poster Awards honor Victor Hutchison for his extensive contributions to herpetology and the development of future herpetologists. For the second year in a row, we held the 11th annual SSAR Victor Hutchison Student Poster competition in a novel virtual format. In 2021 we used a new platform of ePosters on 26 July. Nine students competed. This year we gave a total of two awards across categories, owing to the relatively small number of participants. The awardees received a check for US $250.

This year’s judges were Dominic DeSantis (Georgia College), Christopher Schalk (Stephen F. Austin State University), and Denita Weeks (Colorado Mesa University)

The 2021 winners of the Hutchison Graduate Poster Award are:

For Conservation, Management, Ecology, Natural History, Distribution and Behavior:

Rachel Alenius-Thalhauber (Texas Christian University), “Differential diets, growth rates, and survival of captive-bred hatchling Texas horned lizards (Phrynosoma cornutum) reintroduced at two locations in central Texas”

Click here to view a PDF of Rachel’s poster.

For Evolution, Genetics, Systematics, Physiology and Morphology:

Kyle Emerson (Duquesne University), “The effects of microbial environment and temperature on neurodevelopment in larval amphibians”

Click here to view a PDF of Kyle’s poster.

George B. Rabb Undergraduate Poster Award

SSAR’s George B. Rabb Undergraduate Poster Award is sponsored by Zoo Atlanta and honors our colleague George Rabb (1930-2017), former Director of the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, IL, and highly respected advocate and spokesman for wildlife conservation. 2021 marked the 3^rd year of this competition, which was held, like 2020, in a novel virtual format owing to the coronavirus pandemic. This competition used the ePosters platform, and five students competed on 26 July 2021. The winner received a check for US $250.

This year’s judges were:

Allyson Fenwick, Chair (University of Central Oklahoma) and Ethan Royal (University of Arkansas)

The 2021 winner of the George B. Rabb Undergraduate Poster Award is:

Yucheol Shin (Nanjing Forestry University), “Distribution modeling of Onychodactylus koreanus predicts drastic decrease of suitable habitats in response to climate change”

Click here to view a PDF of Yucheol’s poster.

Seibert Award Winners for 2021

The 29th annual Seibert Awards were presented virtually at the SSAR Business Meeting held over Zoom on Aug 6^th, 2021 following the 63^rd Annual Meeting of the SSAR in Phoenix, AZ on July 21^st – 28^th, 2021.  These awards are named in honor of Henri C. Seibert, an early and tireless supporter of SSAR (having served as an officer for over 20 years).  Because of the unusual nature of the Annual Meeting (in-person and virtual), awards were not made in the usual categories (Physiology/Morphology, Evolution/Systematics, Ecology, and Conservation). Instead, in recognition of outstanding student presentations at the annual meeting, two awards were made for in-person presentations and one award was made for on-line presentations.

Winners: In-Person Competition

Justin Bernstein, “Muddy Systematics: The Diversity and Biogeography of Mud Snakes (Serpentes: Homalopsidae).”  Co-Authors: John Murphy, Harold Voris, Rafe Brown, Sara Ruane.

Julia Joos, “Thermal Ecology and Activity Patterns of Adult and Juvenile Bolson Tortoises (G. flavomarginatus).”  Co-Authors: Christiane Weiss, Scott Hillars, Donald B. Miles.

Winner: On-Line Competition

Richard Kim, “Developing Alternative Control Strategies for Invasive American Bullfrogs to Protect Threatened Giant Gartersnakes and Their Native Anuran Prey.” Co-Authors: Marissa Baskett, Sharon Lawler, and Brian Halstead

All awardees will receive a check for US $200 and a book from SSAR.

HR Volume 52, Number 2 (June 2021). Our cover features the Annam Flying Frog (Rhacophorus annamensis), photographed by Randy Babb in Ta Dung National Park, Vietnam. The Rhacophoridae includes ca. 440 species distributed from sub-Saharan Africa through southern Asia to The Philippines and Indonesia. The journal is scheduled to be mailed on or before 30 June. Full contents are now available online to SSAR members at https://ssarherps.org/herpetological-review-pdfs/. Natural History Notes, Geographic Distribution Notes, and Book Reviews are Open Access and are available for download at the same link. If you are not a member of SSAR, please consider joining the leading international herpetological society. Student and online-only rates available. Follow the “Join SSAR” link on the home page. Congratulations to Randy for a great cover image!

HR December 2020, Volume 51, Number 4. Our cover features a beautiful photo of a juvenile Tandayapa Andes Toad (Rhaebo olallai). This rare endemic was photographed in the Río Manduriacu Reserve, western Imbabura Province, Ecuador, by Ross Maynard. Ross is a researcher and photographer with The Biodiversity Group (biodiversitygroup.org) and is the director of their Biodiversity Research Program in Ecuador. The journal is scheduled to be mailed on 31 December. Full contents are now available online to SSAR members at https://ssarherps.org/herpetological-review-pdfs/. Natural History Notes, Geographic Distribution Notes, and Book Reviews are Open Access and are available for download at the same link. If you are not a member of SSAR, please consider joining the leading international herpetological society. Student and online-only rates available. Follow the “Join SSAR” link on the home page. Congratulations to Ross for a great cover image and thank you for your conservation efforts in Ecuador!

Please tell your friends about this grant opportunity. The Jones-Lovich Award in Southwestern Herpetology from the Herpetologists’ League is due this Friday 4 December 2020 at 5 pm PST. One award will be given to fund $1000 for graduate research on any amphibian or reptile from the Southwestern US or Northwestern Mexico. Students that wish to apply must be HL members for 2021; they can join by going to http://herpetologistsleague.org/. Award requirements and cover sheet are here. Contact Carol Spencer atrox@berkeley.edu for more information if needed.

Largely in response to the upcoming shift away from paper copies of Journal of Herpetology, the SSAR Membership Committee was charged with updating the list of membership categories and reducing some of the redundancy.  The committee produced this new list of membership categories, which was recently approved by the SSAR Board of Directors.

https://ssarherps.org/about-ssar/membership/

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Subscription periods for all memberships (except Life) are for 1 year and membership renewal date is January 1st.  There are no automatically recurring payments.

Regular Member – $120.00 (USD) Regular Members receive online access to the Journal of Herpetology and in print and online access to Herpetological Review. In addition, Regular Members have voting privileges, receive special prepublication discount offers on SSAR books, and a 10% discount on all SSAR publications. See below for online only membership options.

Regular Member – Online Only – $110.00 (USD) Matches Regular Membership and receives online access to the Journal of Herpetology and Herpetological Review.

Student Member – $65.00 (USD) These members receive all benefits of Regular Membership, but at a reduced rate.

Student Member – Online Only – $60.00 (USD) Matches Student Membership but receives online access to the Journal of Herpetology and Herpetological Review.

Senior Member, over 70 years old – $75.00 (USD) Senior Members receive all the benefits of Regular Membership. Must be 70 years old or older.

Senior Member, over 70 yrs old – Online Only – $75.00 (USD) Matches Senior Membership but receives online access to the Journal of Herpetology and Herpetological Review.

Sustaining Member – $150.00 (USD) Sustaining members have all the benefits of Regular membership and provide extra support to SSAR.

Sustaining Member- Online Only – $150.00 (USD) Matches Sustaining Membership but receives online access to the Journal of Herpetology and Herpetological Review.

Associate Member – $75.00 (USD) Receives Herpetological Review in print and online. However, Associate members do not receive pre-publication discounts, discounts on publications, and do not have voting privileges in SSAR elections.

Associate Member- Online Only – $70.00 (USD) Matches Associate Membership but receives access to Herpetological Review online.

Zoo Keeper Member – $55.00 (USD) Zoo Keeper Members receive online access to the Journal of Herpetology and print and online access to Herpetological Review. In addition, these Members have voting privileges, receive special prepublication discount offers on SSAR books, and a 10% discount on all SSAR publications. Available to zoo and zoo-related employees whose positions are below that of curator and veterinarian-type positions.

Zoo Keeper Member – Online Only – $50.00 (USD) Matches Zoo Keeper Membership, but receives online access to the Journal of Herpetology and Herpetological Review.

2nd Family member – $35.00 (USD) Second Family members, living in the same household as another SSAR member, receive all the benefits of Regular membership, but without an additional hard-copy of Herpetological Review. To utilize this category, one family member should register as a member of SSAR and the second family member should select this membership.

 Life Member – $2,750 (USD) Membership period: Unlimited. Life Members receive all benefits of Regular Membership, including voting and all publication discounts, but without the need to annually renew. Add a 2^nd Family Member for Life: $875 (USD).

Non-Membership Subscriptions:

Institutional Herpetological Review Subscription – $125.00 (USD) Regular Institutional Herpetological Review subscriptions receive online access to Herpetological Review (4 issues/year).

Regular Institutional Subscription – $245.00 (USD) Regular Institutional subscriptions receive online access to the Journal of Herpetology and Herpetological Review (4 issues/year).

20 October 2020

To SSAR Members:

On 12 July 2020 the Board of Directors of SSAR voted unanimously to move Journal of Herpetology to an online-only format beginning with the first issue of 2021. Herpetological Review will not be affected and will continue to be offered in print as well as online. The Board considered this decision very carefully, taking into account financial information and results from the survey of SSAR members initiated on 26 May 2020 (see below).

In short, printing costs are so expensive that the Society can no longer justify spending more than $30,000 per year subsidizing production of printed copies of Journal of Herpetology. Currently, to receive printed copies regular members pay $10 more than online-only members pay in annual dues. This amount is not sufficient to offset the ever-increasing cost of hard copy. After careful analysis, the Board accepted the reality that it would be a persistent challenge to cover costs of printing Journal of Herpetology. Offsetting the expense would have required charging a minimum $50 subscription fee on top of regular dues. If fewer than 500 members were willing to pay this cost in any given year, once again SSAR would be spending thousands of dollars for print copies while creating additional fees for storage of copies that have no commercial value.

The bulk of your membership dues continues to cover costs of producing Journal of Herpetology and Herpetological Review; the remainder is operational costs. The SSAR does not expect to lose institutional subscriptions. Most importantly, we are confident, based on the results of the survey, that this decision will not drive our members away or de-incentivize new herpetologists from joining SSAR.

The savings obtained by moving the journal to online-only should allow SSAR to continue to develop new services and to reach herpetologists across the globe. As examples, we recently held our first online Student Poster Competition, made the SSAR Audiovisual Shows available on the website, and of course continue to update and improve the entire suite of services that SSAR provides—CAAR, Herpetological Circulars, SSARHerps.org, Manuscript Review Service, and more.

In making its decision, the Board understood, and discussed at length, that some members have a strong preference for print copies and are willing to pay extra for them. To this end, we have identified a print company and have a plan that will provide print  opies to those members who are willing to buy them. We are offering a “group buy”, managed by the SSAR Publications Secretary, whereby members who wish to pay for a hardcopy of each volume of Journal of Herpetology may order it annually. The Society will charge them at cost, with 50 copies being the minimum order. The price will vary by number of pages in each annual volume and by number of copies ordered by members. The Group-Buy Program option will be available only for those members who respond to the annual notice from the Publications Secretary. We are sorry, but we cannot guarantee availability of print copies to any member who fails to respond to the annual notice. There will be no ability to order any missed volumes. If the printing company changes their fee structure, or if we do not receive enough orders to make it financially tenable, we may need to cease the Group-Buy Program. Like many SSAR members, we will miss receiving the Journal of Herpetology in the mail and reading our flagship journal in printed form. At the same time, we recognize that the best decision for our Society is to accept the present-day realities of scientific publishing and the financial and environmental benefits of online publishing.

Sincerely,
Marty Crump, President, SSAR
and the SSAR Board Members

*Interpretation of survey results

The survey conducted beginning on 26 May 2020 provided important information that informed the decisions made by board members:

• Desire for print copies of Journal of Herpetology is not strong and appears to be waning.
  • Of 679 respondents, 54% were not willing to pay above $10 to receive print
    copies.
  • Thirty-eight per cent of respondents would pay “up to $60 additional”, but only 8% would pay >$60.
• When we extrapolate these numbers to the Society as a whole (~1400 members), it is unlikely that subscriptions would be able to offset the costs of printing 500 copies of Journal of Herpetology over the long-term.
• The table below summarizes the data from the 26 May 2020 survey.