BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — The Mississippi gopher frog would join Louisiana's endangered list and the Eastern diamondback rattlesnake and two pine snake species would be protected under proposed changes to regulations covering reptiles and amphibians.
The state Wildlife and Fisheries Commission voted recently for changes that would require a state permit to kill an Eastern diamondback or Louisiana and black pine snakes, or to take one from the wild. The proposed changes also include simplified wording.
Scientists don't know of any wild Louisiana populations of Mississippi gopher frogs, also called dusky gopher frogs. But they once lived in Louisiana and the species is on the federal endangered list. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has designated 1,500 acres of private land in St. Tammany Parish as critical habitat for the frogs — a designation the owner is fighting.
Conservation groups say all three kinds of snakes, like the frog, need longleaf pine habitat, which has almost been logged out of existence. Longleaf pine savannas once covered 90 million acres from Texas to Virginia. But by 1998, fewer than 3 million acres of the slow-growing trees remained.
Like the frogs, black pine snakes are thought to have vanished from Louisiana. They're now thought to be limited to three Alabama counties and 10 in Mississippi, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. There may be some black pine snakes and some Eastern diamondback rattlesnakes in Washington Parish, state wildlife biologist Jeff Boundy said in an email Friday.
The Louisiana pine snake is known in four Louisiana parishes and five Texas counties.
Again like the frogs, pine snakes are hard to count in the wild because they live underground. The frogs generally take over burrows dug by gopher tortoises, which already are on Louisiana's endangered list. The snakes live in tunnels dug by pocket gophers, their main prey.
The rattlers have been targeted by "rattlesnake roundups" in Alabama and Georgia. Louisiana does not currently have a bag limit on them. Nor do Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida or South Carolina. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is studying whether to list them as endangered.
The proposed changes were recommended by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
The commission will take public comment at its Feb. 7 meeting and by mail through Feb. 20, the department said in a news release Friday. Mailed comments should be sent to Robert Love, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, P.O. Box 98000, Baton Rouge, LA 70898-9000.
The frog would be the first amphibian on Louisiana's endangered list. It now comprises the gopher tortoise, all five sea turtles found in state waters, and the ringed sawback turtle, found only along the Pearl River in Louisiana and Mississippi.
The three snake species would be added to five kinds of salamanders currently on the "restricted" list of those that can be killed or taken from the wild only with a state permit.
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MAY 17 This post by JR Ball in the Baton Rouge Business Report is an interesting tongue-in-cheek look at recent Baton Rouge economic development efforts. Among the items he examines is the idea that gaining a Costco makes BR a "world-class city." (Really? All you need is a different brand of Sam's? MK!) This effort, and other recent ones, are all built on the taxpayer's back, with tax zones, tax incentives and tax rebates, Ball writes.
MAY 17 Blogger CB Forgotston is critical of the legislature's reliance on a revenue-estimating committee's decision to include projected tax amnesty income in this year's forecast. That's a problem, CB posts, because the deadline for these people to pay their taxes is June 30, 2014. So when do you think these people who haven't paid taxes in years are going to pay their taxes? Surely not before June 30, and that means the money won't be there for this year's budget, he argues.
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MAY 17 Blogger Robert Mann writes about the LSU Board's refusal to allow Dr. Fred Cerise to testify before the legislature about Gov. Jindal's plan to close down all the state's charity hospitals and dump the poor on the private system. It's hard to imagine anyone more qualified than Cerise to testify about that, so why would anyone try to prevent him doing so? Mann thinks it is because the powers that be aren't interested in hearing any truth about the plan.
MAY 17 This post on the Louisiana Sinkhole Bugle, a blog that notes developments in the Bayou Corne and Jefferson Island salt domes, talks about a proposed expansion of the salt dome storage under Lake Peigneur in Iberia Parish. Residents are working against it for several reasons, including two biggies: the sinkhole disaster in Bayou Corne and the continuing, unexplained bubbling on the surface of the Lake.
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