Amphibians and Reptiles

[Jim_R]

Table of Contents:

• Field guides
• Good Website
• ways to identify frogs
• ways to add notes
• Sample Test
• How To identify
• Basic tips
• Good info
• Crocidilians
• Frog calls
• Post it clarification

Original post:

Code: Select all

What does everyone think of this event?  It is my second favorite event [behind reach for the stars] and I am really excited for it next year.  Did you guys buy a field guide or make a student prepared field guide?  I chose to make a field guide and it took FOREVER.  It ended up being 500 pages and really HEAVY.  It was also a pain to turn the pages and it wasted all of my school's ink which never got replaced because my school is really poor.

[gneissisnice]

I enjoyed the event, but thought it was sorta difficult (to me, all the snakes look the same, as do the turtles). I made my own binder, which helped me learn the event better, but unfortunately, i made it too concise; i had 2 reptiles per page, but not enough information, so it screwed us up at states.

[Pleiades]

What type of info did you put for each reptile/amphibian?
I put:
Description along with photo
Subspecies [if any]
Breeding Info
Habitat
Range
Additional Info

[gneissisnice]

i sorted mine by:
Name
Picture
habitat and range
behavior (including reproductive habits)
Diet
Morphology (like distinct characteristics)
and Extra, for additional facts about name origins or whether its the state reptile or something

[gneissisnice]

Do you guys know of any good resources for this event, by the way? I mainly used Wikipedia, which did not help too much (except that they used the same picture for the wall lizard that i had. That made me happy )

[dickyjones]

The Audubon and Western/Eastern Peterson field guides are definitely the first things to look at. 'A Key to Amphibians & Reptiles of the Continental United State and Canada' is also good for identification only. I use some Animal Life Science encyclopedias as well to get the rest of the individual specimen information as well as general herpetology stuff. Quite honestly, there aren't that many good websites for this event, but my library has about 20 books on different herpetology subjects, so some sort of library would probably be one of the best places to look.

[Pleiades]

I personally like the Audubon field guide more than the Peterson guides because Audubon is one book and Peterson is two books [eastern and western]. The rules only allow one field guide [published or student made] so if i decided to bring in the Eastern book [i'm from the east] and then there was a question on a western animal i'd be screwed. Thats why I made my own field guide. A lot of the info came from Audubon, wikipedia, and other random amphibian and reptile websites that i found on google.

[gneissisnice]

Thanks, you guys are a big help. And they really gotta get rid of that stupid "one field guide rule". Thats just dumb.

[rocketman1555]

i helped in this, and we made our own field guide, but i would suggest knowing enough that u can do it without the field guide

[dickyjones]

Yeah, I highly suggest making your own. You should have ID down only using your list by competition if you want to do well and only use the field guide to get information. Going back to the top, my organization for my binder for individual specimens was..

Name Origin
External Anatomy
Internal Anatomy
Behavior
Biodiversity
Diet
Habitat
Distribution
Life History
Reproduction Strategies
Conservation
Impact to Man
Ecological Role
Other Info

And then I just left blank a couple (usually impact to man and name origin) if I could not find them.

I actually prefer the Petersons to Audubon in learning identification. None of the field guides are very good in giving specimen information, I use encyclopedias and google for that.