Skip to main content Skip to main navigation menu Skip to site footer
Responsive image
Issue: Vol. 4276 No. 4: 14 Jun. 2017
Type: Article
Published: 2017-06-14
DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.4276.4.6
Page range: 539–553
Abstract views: 311
PDF downloaded: 7

A new species of Wolf Snake of the genus Lycodon H. Boie in Fitzinger (Squamata: Colubridae) from the Aceh Province of northern Sumatra, Indonesia

Amphibian and Reptile Diversity Research Center and Department of Biology, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas 76019, USA.
Laboratory of Herpetology, Museum Zoologicum Bogoriense, Research Center for Biology, Indonesian Institute of Sciences–LIPI, Cibinong, West Java 16911, Indonesia
Department of Biology, Universitas Brawijaya, East Java 65145, Indonesia
Amphibian and Reptile Diversity Research Center and Department of Biology, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas 76019, USA.
Reptilia Biodiversity molecular phylogeny Sunda Shelf systematics

Abstract

Herein we describe a new species of Lycodon H. Boie in Fitzinger (Squamata: Colubridae) from Aceh Province, Sumatra. This brings the number of species known to occur on the Sunda Shelf to seven. The new species is readily diagnosed from the other congeners in the region by the lack of a preocular scale, the presence of keeled dorsal scales and a banded venter. It is superficially similar to L. butleri from the Malaysian Peninsula in coloration and to L. subcinctus in head scalation. Genetically, the new species is most similar to a group of species from Mainland Southeast Asia and China. We also note the presence of several deeply divergent lineages within Lycodon that may warrant the recognition as distinct genera. The genus is in need of a comprehensive molecular and morphological review.

 

References

  1. Boulenger, G.A. (1890) The fauna of British India including Ceylon and Burma: Reptilia and Batrachia. Taylor and Francis, London, 541 pp.

    Boulenger, G.A. (1893) Catalogue of the snakes in the British Museum (Natural History) Vol. I. Taylor and Francis, London, 448 pp.

    Boulenger, G.A. (1900) Description of a new snake from the Perak Hills. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, 13, 336.

    Burbrink, F.T., Lawson, R. & Slowinski, J.B. (2000) Mitochondrial DNA phylogeny of the polytypic north american rat snake (Elaphe obsoleta): a critique of the subspecies concept. Evolution, 54 (6), 2107–2118.

    Daltry, J.C. & Wüster, W. (2002) A new species of wolf snake (Serpentes: Colubridae: Lycodon) from the Cardamom Mountains, Southwestern Cambodia. Herpetologica, 58 (4), 498–504.
    https://doi.org/10.1655/0018-0831(2002)058[0498:ANSOWS]2.0.CO;2

    Dowling, H.G. (1951) A proposed standard system of counting ventrals in snakes. British Journal of Herpetology, 1 (5), 97–99.

    Edgar, R.C. (2004) MUSCLE: multiple sequence alignment with high accuracy and high throughput. Nucleic Acid Research, 32 (5), 1792–1797.
    https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkh340

    Figueroa, A., McKelvey, A.D., Grismer, L.L., Bell, C.D. & Lailvaux, S.P. (2016) A species-level phylogeny of extant snakes with description of a new Colubrid subfamily and genus. PLoS ONE, 11 (9), e0161070.
    https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0161070

    Frost, D.R. (2016) Amphibian Species of the World 6.0. An Online Reference. American Museum of Natural History. Electronic Database. Available from: http://research.amnh.org/herpetology/amphibia/index.html (accessed 28 July 2016)

    Grismer, L.L., Quah, E.S.H., Anuar, M.S., Muin, M.A. , Wood, P.L. & Nor, S.A.M. (2014) A diminutive new species of cave-dwelling Wolf Snake (Colubridae: Lycodon Boie, 1826) from Peninsular Malaysia. Zootaxa, 3815 (1), 51–67.
    http://dx.doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.3815.1.3

    Günther, A. (1858) Catalogue of the Colubrine snakes in the collection of the British Museum. Taylor and Francis, London, 281 pp.

    Guo, P., Zhang, L., Liu, Q., Li, C., Pyron, R.A., Jiang, K. & Burbrink, F.T. (2013) Lycodon and Dinodon: One genus or two? Evidence from molecular phylogenetics and morphological comparisons. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 68 (1), 144–149.
    https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2013.03.008

    Koshikawa, A. (1982) Three new species of reptiles from Hainan Island, Guangdong Province (English translation of original paper by Hu et al. 1975). Smithsonian Herpetological Information Service, 53, 1–9.
    https://doi.org/10.5479/si.23317515.53.1

    Lanfear, R., Calcott, B., Ho, S. & Guindon, S. (2012) PartitionFinder: combined selection of partitioning schemes and substitution models for phylogenetic analyses. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 29 (6), 1695–1701.
    https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/mss020

    Lanza, B. (1999) A new species of Lycodon from the Philippines, with a key to the genus (Reptilia Serpentes Colubridae). Tropical Zoology, 12 (1), 89–104.

    Margono, B.A., Potapov, P.V., Turubanova, S., Stolle, F. & Hansen, M.C. (2014) Primary forest cover loss in Indonesia over 2000-2012. Nature Climate Change, 4, 730–735.
    https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2277

    Miller, M.A., Pfeiffer, W. & Schwartz, T. (2010) Creating the CIPRES Science Gateway for inference of large phylogenetic trees. Proceedings of the Gateway Computing Environments Workshop (GCE), 2010, 1–8.
    https://doi.org/10.1109/GCE.2010.5676129

    Myers, N., Mittermeier, R.A., Mittermeier, C.G., da Fonseca, G.A.B. & Kent, J. (2000) Biodiversity Hotspots for Conservation Priorities. Nature, 403, 853–858.
    https://doi.org/10.1038/35002501

    Orlov, N.L. & Ryabov, S.A. (2004) Revalidization and change of taxonomic status of Dinodon rufozonatum meridionale Bourret 1935 (Serpentes: Colubridae: Colubrinae). Russian Journal of Herpetology, 11 (3), 181–197.

    Pyron, R.A., Kandambi, H.K.D., Hendry, C.R., Pushpamal, V., Burbrink, F.T. & Somaweera, R. (2013a) Genus-level phylogeny of snakes reveals the origins of species richness in Sri Lanka. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 66 (3), 969–978.

    Pyron, R.A., Burbrink, F.T. & Weins, J.J. (2013b) A phylogeny and revised classification of Squamata, including 4161 species of lizards and snakes. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 13 (93), 1–53.

    Rambaut, A. (2012) FigTree version 1.4.0. Available from: http://treebioedacuk/software/figtree/ (accessed 22 May 2017)

    Rambaut, A., Suchard, M.A., Xie, D. & Drummond, A.J. (2014) Tracer version 1.6. Available from: http://beast.bio.ed.ac.uk/Tracer (accessed 22 May 2017)

    Rohland, N. & Reich, D. (2012) Cost-effective, high-throughput DNA sequencing libraries for multiplexed target capture. Genome Research, 22 (5), 939–946.
    https://doi.org/10.1101/gr.128124.111

    Ronquist, F., Teslenko, M., Van der Mark, P., Ayres, D.L., Darling, A., Hohna, S., Larget, B., Liu, L., Suchard, M.A. & Hulsenbeck, J.P. (2012) MRBAYES 3.2: Efficient Bayesian phylogenetic inference and model selection across a large model space. Systematic Biology, 61 (3), 539–542.

    Siler, C.D., Oliveros, C.H., Santanen, A. & Brown, R.M. (2013) Multilocus phylogeny reveals unexpected diversification patterns in Asian wolf snakes (genus Lycodon). Zoologica Scripta, 42 (3), 262–277.
    https://doi.org/10.1111/zsc.12007

    Silvestro, D. & Michalak, I. (2012) RaxmlGUI: a graphical front-end for RAxML. Organisms Diversty & Evolution, 12 (4), 335–337.
    https://doi.org/10.1007/s13127-011-0056-0

    Slowinski, J.B., Pawar, S.S., Win, H., Thin, T., Gyi, S.W., Oo, S.L. & Tun, H. (2001) A new Lycodon (Serpentes: Colubridae) from Northeast India and Myanmar (Burma). Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, 52 (20), 397–405.

    Smith, M.A. (1943) The fauna of British India, Ceylon, and Burma, including the whole of the Indo-Chinese sub-region. Reptilia and Amphibia Volume III–Serpentes. Taylor and Francis, London, 583 pp.

    Tamura, K., Stecher, G., Peterson, D., Filipski, A. & Kumar, S. (2013) MEGA 6: Molecular Evolutionary Genetic Analysis version 6.0. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 30 (12), 2725–2729.
    https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/mst197

    Uetz, P. & Hosek, J. (2017) The Reptile Database. Available from: http://www.reptile-database.org (accessed 13 January 2017)

    Vogel, G. & David, P. (2010) A new species of the genus Lycodon (Boie, 1826) from Yunnan Province, China (Serpentes: Colubridae). Bonn Zoological Bulletin, 57 (2), 289–296.

    Vogel, G., David, P., Pauwels, O.S.G., Sumontha, M., Norval, G., Hendrix, R., Vu, N.T. & Ziegler, T. (2009) A revision of Lycodon ruhstrati (Fischer 1886) auctorum (Squamata Colubridae), with the description of a new species from Thailand and a new subspecies from the Asian mainland. Tropical Zoology, 22, 131–182.

    Vogel, G. & Luo, J. (2011) A new species of the genus Lycodon (Boie, 1826) from the southwestern mountains of China (Squamata: Colubridae). Zootaxa, 2807, 29–40.

    Vogel, G., Nguyen, T.Q., Kingsada, P. & Ziegler, T. (2012) A new species of the genus Lycodon Boie, 1826 from Laos (Squamata: Colubridae). North-Western Journal of Zoology, 8 (5), 344–352.

    Wilgenbusch, J.C., Warren, D.L. & Swofford, D.L. (2004) AWTY: A system for graphical exploration of MCMC convergence in Bayesian phylogenetic inference. Available from: http://ceb.csit.fsu.edu/awty (accessed 22 May 2017)

    Zhang, J., Jiang, K., Vogel, G. & Rao, D. (2011) A new species of the genus Lycodon (Squamata, Colubridae) from Sichuan Province, China. Zootaxa, 2982, 59–68.