At NAR (Native Animal Rescue), where our office is now located we have had some fun with their new wildlife arrivals, (I’m not just a snake enthusiast). There's "Hoover" the hilarious baby Seagull, well named as he just hoovers up a bowl of fish, funny to watch and so very efficient and fast I think we should rename him "Dyson".

Emus and joeys to feed, Kookaburras to listen to, even a Woylie to admire – a little 15 hectare haven in the midst of an industrial area - not a bad place to have for an office.

So welcome to 2016 and I hope it’s good for you.

The African Puff Adder (Bitis arietans) is a master of camouflage; it is able to blend in visually with its environment to great effect and is very hard to see. It appears that it is also a master at scent reduction and is able to elude detection even by trained snake sniffing dogs. If you can’t be seen or smelt it is very hard for a predator to locate you.

Dogs were trained to track down 5 species of 'active foraging' snakes. But when it came to looking for puff adders the dogs were unable to match the scents, often walking right over the snakes in the field. The trained dogs could with 80% accuracy find the other snakes but not the puff adders.

Surprised researchers then turned (believe it or not) to trained meerkats who also failed when it came to locating the puff adders.

I found this study from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg very interesting as we rely on our 'smelly' Tiger and Dugite snakes as part of our Snake Avoidance for Dogs training. I would not be at all surprised if our Australian Death Adders are also low odour reptiles, probably a very low metabolic rate means you smell less.

So, err, "chillax" as they say and may you smell better!

We are proud to annually train the Gnaraloo team (in snake handling) and have visited their study area at Gnaraloo Station located at the southern end of the Ningaloo Coast World Heritage Area.

To start the project the conservationists waited until the turtles had laid their eggs then the 10 female Loggerhead Turtles (Caretta caretta) chosen had a portion of their shell cleaned to enable the trackers attachment using high-strength epoxy. These trackers remain in place for several months and enable researchers to determine their migratory routes, feeding grounds and how often they return to the rookeries (nesting grounds).

At the same time the free "Turtle Tracker" App was created and allows anyone to follow the project.

You can find out more at www.facebook.com/gnaralooturtleconservationprogram

Now of course any snake on a work site is a potential hazard, especially a venomous one, but here the issue has escalated as the snake recently bit an employee. It is believed he trod on the snake and fortunately has fully recovered, as it did not envenomate.

So what’s to be done? A shipment has hastily been made of several funnel traps and some smelly mouse bedding from a local pet shop as "bait".

This live trapping technique will hopefully help the environment team catch the snake for relocation to a more suitable habitat some way outside the camp.

The lizards then had radio transmitters attached to them and were followed. Many of the 16 lizards who’d had the avoidance training did not make the mistake again and more than 50% survived during the 18 month study. Thirty-one untrained lizards were also followed but by the end of the study all the untrained lizards had died.

The bus-sized new species has been named Machimosaurus rex. "It was just massive" said Federico Fanti of the University of Bologna.

It’s iconic and yes one of the last few natural predators of humans left on the planet and the largest terrestrial predator in the world. Fossil records show this species has been around for at least 4.5 million years.

Most species rarely survive more that 1 million years, so in evolutionary terms it’s a survivor. One recently took a lady's arm in Wyndham, northern WA, where they are common. They may inhabit fresh or saltwater but more commonly inhabit brackish estuary waters across Northern Australia.

They have the greatest distribution of any living crocodilian and may be found from the eastern coast of India, throughout much of S.E Asia.

Salties are capable of taking huge Water buffalos as food, but prey is usually much smaller and fish, turtles, small mammals and birds are more commonly preyed upon.