All our reptiles shed their skins (or “slough”, pronounced "sluff") several times a year and, usefully, the species the slough has come from can usually be identified by the markings on it. So we can tell if, for example, grass snakes occur in a given area without ever having seen a grass snake there!

For several years now, ARC has maintained a “bank” of reptile sloughs which are made available to researchers or universities investigating various aspects of reptile biology, conservation or taxonomy. By maintaining this resource, we can provide a “ready-to-go” batch of sloughs to support research which might otherwise require months or even years of slough collection before any study could usefully happen. There are currently over 1300 sloughs from all UK reptile species in the collection.

One way the collection has already been used was by researchers at the Zoological Society of London, who screened a large number of our grass snake sloughs for the presence of snake fungal disease. This is a worrying pathogen of snakes in North America and – because of the ready availability of sloughs from the UK – they were able to prove it is also present in the wild here, though the conservation implications of snake fungal disease are yet to be fully elaborated (Franklinos et al., 2017). We hope also to investigate this disease in adders and smooth snakes, and we’re working with ZSL on biosecurity advice for fieldworkers that will help minimise its spread.

Through the Natur am Byth (Nature Forever) partnership in Wales, where environmental NGOs have joined together with NRW to conserve 67 of Wales’ most threatened species, we are also now developing a productive research partnership with Bangor University. Our Adder Action project is part of Natur am Byth and we’re asking surveyors to collect adder sloughs from across Wales which will be used to investigate the genetic health of populations.

The latest genomics techniques will be used to compare the genetics of adders from large and small populations with the aim of identifying which might be suffering the effects of small population size or severe isolation – which we know are already a problem for some adders. The genomics approach provides a rapid, reproducible and accurate measurement of genetic health involving no disturbance to the population. And only a few sloughs are needed from each population to generate a lot of genetic information that (using other techniques) would require 20 or 30 samples (and smaller adder populations often consist of fewer individuals than that!). Once identified, these populations may be candidates for genetic rescue or targeted habitat creation to link them to other populations.

Bangor University are also now curating all of ARC’s sloughs from Wales so that they’ll be on hand for other conservation research on Welsh reptiles.

To submit a slough please follow the protocol or, if you find an adder slough anywhere in Wales, it can be sent direct to Bangor University, contact our project officer Matt Cooke for the address.

 

Photographs by Fred Holmes, Chris Gleed-Owen and Chris Dresh

 

Reference

Franklinos, L.H. et al., 2017. Emerging fungal pathogen Ophidiomyces ophiodiicola in wild European snakes. Scientific reports 7(1), p.3844.