Abstract
Sinomicrurus macclellandi (Reinhardt, 1844) is a species of coral snakes distributed across the forests of Southeast Asia and the Himalayas. The species exhibits distinct forms across its range, and it has been classified into four subspecies. Calliophis macclellandi nigriventer Wall, 1908 a population from Western Himalayas, which was described as a variety, has not been attended to until now. Our study of a recently collected specimen from near Solan, Himachal Pradesh, India and existing museum material has allowed us to assess the validity of this population based on molecular and morphological data and has given us enough evidence to suggest its elevation to a species rank. Sinomicrurus nigriventer comb. nov. was found to be embedded within a clade comprising S. peinani, but not S. macclellandi s. l., with a genetic distance of 7–16% from its congeners. Morphologically, it differs from its congeners in having a reddish brown dorsum and a mid-dorsal black vertebral strip extending from the nape to the vent and with three thin bands on the tail, belly white with black smear up to the vent, tail dorsum with a few band-like blotches, and males with 230–235 ventral scales.
References
Van Denburgh, J. (1912) Concerning certain species of reptiles and amphibians from China, Japan, the Loo Choo Islands, and Formosa. Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, 3, 187–258.
Dowling, H. (1951) A proposed standard system of counting ventrals in snakes. British Journal of Herpetology, 11, 97–99.
Günther, A. (1858) Catalogue of Colubrine snakes of the British Museum. Printed by order of the Trustees, London, 281 pp.
Kaito, T., Ota, H. & Toda, M. (2017) The evolutionary history and taxonomic reevaluation of the Japanese coral snake, Sinomicrurus japonicus (Serpentes, Elapidae), endemic to the Ryukyu Archipelago, Japan, by use of molecular and morphological analyses. Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research, 55 (2), 156–166.
https://doi.org/10.1111/jzs.12162
Kumar, S., Stecher, G., Li, M., Knyaz, C. & Tamura, K. (2018) MEGA X: Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis across computing platforms. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 35, 1547–1549.
https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msy096
Lalremsanga, H.T. & Zothansiama (2015) Morphological variations in Sinomicrurus macclellandi macclellandi (Serpentes: Elapidae), the only coral snake species in northeast India. Science Vision, 15, 212–221.
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, 1695–1701.
https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/mss020
Liu, Q., Yan, J.-W., Hou, S.-B., Wang, P., Nguye, S.N., Murphy, R.W., Che, J. & Guo, P. (2020) A new species of the genus Sinomicrurus (Serpentes: Elapidae) from China and Vietnam. Zoological Research, 41, 2–6.
https://doi.org/10.24272/j.issn.2095-8137.2020.023
Maki, M. (1935) A new poisonous snake (Calliophis iwasakii) from Loo-Choo. Transactions of the Natural History Society of Formosa, Taihoku, 25, 216–219.
Mani, M. (1974) Ecology and biogeography in India. In: Mani, M. (Ed.), Monographiae Biologicae. Vol. 23. Dr. W. Junk b.v. Publishers, The Hague, pp. I–XIX + 1–773.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2331-3
Mirza, Z.A. & Patel, H. (2018) Back from the dead! Resurrection and revalidation of the Indian endemic snake genus Wallophis Werner, 1929 (Squamata: Colubridae) insights from molecular data. Mitochondrial DNA Part A: DNA Mapping, Sequencing, and Analysis, 29, 331–334.
https://doi.org/10.1080/24701394.2016.1278536
Mirza, Z.A., Vyas, R., Patel, H., Maheta, J. & Sanap, R.V. (2016) A new Miocene-divergent lineage of Old World racer snake from India. PloS one, 11 (3), e0154301, 1–17.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148380
Peng, L., Wang, L., Ding, L., Zhu, Y., Luo, J., Yang, D., Huang, R., Lu, S. & Huang, S. (2018) A new species of the genus Sinomicrurus Slowinski, Boundy and Lawson, 2001 (Squamata: Elapidae) from Hainan Province, China. Asian Herpetological Research, 9 (2), 65–73.
Reinhardt, J.T. (1884) Description of a new species of venomous snake, Elaps Macclellandi. Calcutta Journal of Natural History, 4, 532–534.
Ronquist, F. & Huelsenbeck, J. (2003) MrBayes 3: Bayesian phylogenetic inference under mixed models. Bioinformatics, 19, 1572–1574.
https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btg180
Schleich, H.H. & Kästle, W. (2002) Amphibians and reptiles of Nepal. Biology, Systematics, Field Guide. Koeltz Scientific Books, Koenigstein, 1201 pp.
Sharma, S.K., Pandey, D.P., Shah, K.B., Tillack, F., Chappuis, F., Thapa, C.L., Alirol, E. & Kuch, U. (2013) “Venomous snakes of Nepal.” A Photographic Guide. 1st Edition. B.P. Koirala Institute of Health Sciences, Dharan, 77 pp.
Silvestro, D. & Michalak, I. (2012) raxmlGUI: a graphical front-end for RAxML. Organisms Diversity & Evolution, 12, 335–337.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13127-011-0056-0
Slowinski, J.B., Boundy, J. & Lawson, R. (2001) The phylogenetic relationships of Asian coral snakes (Elapidae: Calliophis and Maticora) based on morphological and molecular characters. Herpetologica, 57, 233–245.
Smith, E.N., Ogale, H., Deepak, V. & Giri, V.V.B. (2012) A new species of coralsnake of the genus Calliophis (Squamata: Elapidae) from the west coast of peninsular India. Zootaxa, 3437 (1), 51–68.
https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.3437.1.5
Smith, M.A. (1943) Fauna of British India, Ceylon and Burma, including the whole of the Indo-Chinese Sub-region. Reptilia and Amphibia. Vol. 3. Serpentes. Taylor and Francis, London, 583 pp.
Srinivasan, U., Tamma, K. & Ramakrishnan, U. (2014) Past climate and species ecology drive nested species richness patterns along an east-west axis in the Himalaya. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 23, 52–60.
https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.12082
Thompson, J., Higgins, D. & Gibson, T. (1994) ClustalW: improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence weighting, position-specific gap penalties and weight matrix choice. Nucleic Acids Research, 22, 4673–4680.
https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/22.22.4673
Wall, F. (1908) A new colour variety of MacClelland’s coral snake (Calliophis macclellandi) and extension of the habitat of the species. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, 19, 266.
Wallach, V., Williams, K. & Boundy, J. (2014) Snakes of the World: A catalogue of living and extinct species. Taylor & Francis Group, London, 1237 pp.
Whitaker, R. & Captain, A. (2004) Snakes of India. The field guide. Draco Books, Chennai, xiv + 481 pp., 495 col. photos.