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SAVING THE GIANT GARTER SNAKE

SAVING THE GIANT GARTER SNAKE

The giant garter snake is one of North America's largest native snakes, reaching up to 64 inches in length and endemic to California's Central Valley, where it originally inhabited natural wetlands. Unfortunately, wetland destruction for agricultural, urban, and industrial development has eliminated more than 90 percent of suitable habitat for the species, forcing snakes to rely heavily on rice fields and managed marsh areas.

The giant garter snake could be left high and dry by proposed water transfers and the rapid conversion of rice fields and associated wetlands habitats to dryland farming. Accordingly, the Center is making sure that comprehensive surveys for garter snakes are conducted before water transfers are approved, and we've warned federal agencies that they must properly evaluate the impacts, limit the allowable "take" (harming or killing) of these rare snakes, and ensure that suitable habitat creation and mitigation measures take place before large-scale changes occur in rice farming that could eliminate remaining garter snake habitat.

Heavy use of toxic pesticides in the Central Valley is also a contributing factor in the decline of this once-abundant garter snake. Center reports in 2004 and 2006 detailed the risk pesticides pose to the giant garter snake and the Environmental Protection Agency's failure to regulate pesticides harmful to endangered species. We continue to monitor and oppose harmful chemical pesticide use in California through our Pesticides Reduction Campaign.

SAVING THE MEXICAN GARTER SNAKE

Oases in the desert, Southwestern streams are among the most delicate ecosystems on the planet. In these shallow, ephemeral waters, species like the Mexican garter snake once carved out a precarious existence. But these highly adapted, rare animals are no match for pumping, livestock grazing, and flood control, which have all but dried up most desert rivers. And voracious exotics like bullfrogs, which eat the snakes, have added to the species' woes.

The Center launched its campaign to protect Mexican garter snakes under the Endangered Species Act in 2003. After the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service failed to respond to our petition to add garter snakes to the endangered species list, we took the case to the courts and reached a settlement agreement requiring a decision from the agency. When the agency then ruled to deny the snake protection, the report accompanying the decision paradoxically recognized that the snake was declining, severely threatened, and extirpated from 85 to 90 percent of its U.S. Range. So in 2007 the Center filed suit against the Service to overturn the decision denying the snake protection. In 2008 the Service once again denied the species federal safeguards, making it a mere "candidate" for protection.

Fortunately, in 2011 the Center reached a landmark agreement with the Service compelling it to move forward on protections for this snake, plus 756 other species that couldn't wait for protection decisions much longer. And in 2014, Mexican garter snakes were finally listed as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act.

And finally, after almost two decades of Center advocacy, in 2021 the Service granted northern Mexican garter snakes 20,326 acres of protected critical habitat in Arizona and New Mexico.

We're still fighting on behalf of these rare snakes from threats like development, groundwater withdrawal and grazing.

Snake Game

It's said that good things come in small packages, which is hard to deny when we look at all the nifty projects out there that were built into an Altoids tin. Now, if that's already true for the regular sized box, we can be doubly excited for anything crammed into their Smalls variety ones, which is what [Kayden Kehe] decided to use as housing for his mintyPico, a tiny gaming console running homebrew versions of Snake, Breakout, Pong, and a few more.

As the "Pico" might have already given away, the project is built around a Raspberry Pi Pico board, and being intended as portable device, [Kayden] went with a version that also houses LiPo battery charging circuitry. A set of 3d-printed parts pack the board along with a matching battery and a button panel neatly into the tin itself, while a size-appropriate SSH1106 OLED goes into the lid. All design files along with the MicroPython code of the games can be found on the project's GitHub page.

You may have felt this strange sense of familiarity when you read the project's name, and indeed, the mintyPi gaming console was a major inspiration for [Kayden] here, as was the Pico Snake project. Considering this was his junior year high school project, this is certainly an impressive and nice mash-up of those two projects.

Continue reading "A Breath Of Fresh Air For Some Arcade Classics" →

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