Abstract
We report the rediscovery of Oligodon melaneus 112 years after its original description and document the third, and only non-type, specimen for the species. The new specimen was found 267 km east of the type locality (Tindharia, West Bengal state) from Assam state, India. We designate a lectotype for the species, and provide an extended description of a freshly collected male specimen. Phylogenetic analyses of 16s and cytb mitochondrial genes provide support for O. melaneus being closely related to the widespread South Asian endemic O. arnensis.
References
Alencar, L.R., Quental, T.B., Grazziotin, F.G., Alfaro, M.L., Martins, M., Venzon, M. & Zaher, H. (2016) Diversification in vipers: Phylogenetic relationships, time of divergence and shifts in speciation rates. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 105, 50–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2016.07.029
Burbrink, F.T., Lawson, R. & Slowinski, J.B. (2000) Mitochondrial dna phylogeography of the polytypic north American rat snake (Elaphe obsoleta): A critique of the subspecies concept. Evolution, 54, 2107–2118. https://doi.org/10.1554/0014-3820(2000)054[2107:MDPOTP]2.0.CO;2
Das, A., Gower, D.J. & Deepak, V. (2020) Lost and found: rediscovery and systematics of the Northeast Indian snake Hebius pealii (Sclater, 1891). Vertebrate Zoology, 70(3), 305–318. https://doi.org/10.26049/VZ70-3-2020-04
Das, A., Smith, E.N., Sidik, I., Sarker, G.C., Boruah, B., Patel, N.G., Murthy, B.H.C.K. & Deepak, V. (2021) Hidden in the plain sight: a new species of Rhabdophis (Serpentes: Natricinae) from the Rhabdophis himalayanus complex. Zootaxa, 5020 (3), 401–433. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5020.3.1
David, P., Das, I. & Vogel, G. (2011) On some taxonomic and nomenclatural problems in Indian species of the genus Oligodon Fitzinger, 1826 (Squamata: Colubridae). Zootaxa, 2799 (1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.2799.1.1
Deepak, V., Cooper, N., Poyarkov, N.A., Kraus, F., Burin, G., Das, A., Narayanan, S., Streicher, J.W., Smith, S.J. & Gower, D.J. (2021) Multilocus phylogeny, natural history traits and classification of natricine snakes (Serpentes: Natricinae). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, zlab099. https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zlab099
Dowling, H.G. (1951a) A proposed standard system of counting ventrals in snakes. British Journal of Herpetology, 1 (5), 97–99.
Dowling, H.G. (1951b) A proposed method of expressing scale reductions in snakes. Copeia, 1951 (2), 131–134. https://doi.org/10.2307/1437542
Green, M.D., Orlov, N.L. & Murphy, R.W. (2010) Toward a phylogeny of the kukri snakes, genus Oligodon. Asian Herpetological Research, 1 (1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.3724/SP.J.1245.2010.00001
Grismer, J.L., Schulte, J.A., Alexander, A., Wagner, P., Travers, S.L., Buehler, M.D., Welton, L.J. & Brown, R.M. (2016) The Eurasian invasion: phylogenomic data reveal multiple southeast Asian origins for Indian dragon lizards. BMC Evolutionary Ecology, 16, 43. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-016-0611-6
Higgins, D., Thompson, J., Gibson, T., Thompson, J.D., Higgins, D.G. & Gibson, T.J. (1994) CLUSTAL W: improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence weighting, position-specific gap penalties and weight matrix choice. Nucleic Acids Research, 22 (22), 4673–4680. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/22.22.4673
Klaus, S., Morley, R.J., Plath, M., Zhang, Y.P. & Li, J.T. (2016) Biotic interchange between the Indian subcontinent and mainland Asia through time. Nature Communications 7, 12132. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12132
Klaus, S., Schubart, C.D., Streit, B. & Pfenninger, M. (2010) When Indian crabs were not yet Asian – biogeographic evidence for Eocene proximity of India and Southeast Asia. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 10, 287. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2148-10-287
Kumar, S., Stecher, G. & Tamura, K. (2016) MEGA7: Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis version 7.0 for bigger datasets. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 33, 1870–1874. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msw054
Lalbiakzuala & Lalremsanga, H.T. (2020) Rediscovery of Oligodon catenatus (Blyth, 1854) (Squamata: Colubridae) from India. Amphibian & Reptile Conservation, 14 (3), 226–230.
Lanfear, R., Frandsen, P.B., Wright, A.M., Senfeld, T. & Calcott, B. (2016) PartitionFinder 2: new methods for selecting partitioned models of evolution for molecular and morphological phylogenetic analyses. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 34 (3), 772–773. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msw260
Li, J.N., Liang, D., Wang, Y.Y., Guo, P., Huang, S. & Zhang, P. (2020) A large-scale systematic framework of Chinese snakes based on a unified multilocus marker system. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 148, 106807. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2020.106807
Nath, A., Sarkar, V., Saha, P., Goswami, P., Sutradhar, S., Ray, S., Chaudhuri, K.D., Chakdar, B. & Das, A. (2021) Connecting the dots: New distribution records of the rare Coral Red Kukri Snake, Oligodon kheriensis Acharjee and Ray 1936, in India. Reptiles & Amphibians, 28 (1), 91–93. https://doi.org/10.17161/randa.v28i1.15329
Nguyen, H.N., Van Tran, B., Nguyen, L.H., Neang, T., Yushchenko, P.V. & Poyarkov, N.A. (2020) A new species of Oligodon Fitzinger, 1826 from the Langbian Plateau, southern Vietnam, with additional information on Oligodon annamensis Leviton, 1953 (Squamata: Colubridae). PeerJ, 8, e8332. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.8332
Palumbi, S.R., Martin, A.P., Romano, S.L., McMillan W.O., Stice, L. & Grabowski, G. (1991) The Simple Fool’s Guide to PCR. Version 2. University of Hawaii, Honolulu, pp. 25–28.
Palumbi, S.R. (1996) The polymerase chain reaction. In: Hillis, D.M., Moritz, C. & Mable, B.K., (Eds.), Molecular systematics. 2nd Edition. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, Massachusetts, pp. 205–247.
Pauwels, O.S., Thongyai, K., Chantong, P. & Sumontha, M. (2021) Two new kukri snake species (Colubridae: Oligodon) from the Nakhon Si Thammarat Mountain Range, and addition of O. ocellatus to the fauna of Thailand. Zootaxa, 4908 (4), 537–557. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4908.4.7
Pyron, R.A., Kandambi, H.D., Hendry, C.R., Pushpamal, V., Burbrink, F.T. & Somaweera, R. (2013) Genus-level phylogeny of snakes reveals the origins of species richness in Sri Lanka. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 66 (3), 969–978. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2012.12.004
Qian, T., Qi, S., Shi, J., Lu, Y., Jenkins, R. W., Mo, Y. & Li, P. (2021) A new species of Oligodon H. Boie in Fitzinger, 1826 (Squamata: Colubridae) from Hainan Island, China. Zootaxa, 4933 (3), 403–421. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4933.3.7
Ronquist, F., Teslenko, M., van der Mark, P., Ayres, D., Darling, A., Höhna, S., Larget, B., Liu, L., Suchard, M.A. & Huelsenbeck, J.P. (2012) MrBayes 3.2: efficient Bayesian phylogenetic inference and model choice across a large model space. Systematic Biology, 61, 539–542. https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/sys029
Sclater, W.L. (1891) Notes on a collection of snakes in the Indian Museum, with descriptions of several new species. Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal, LX, 230–250. https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.8746
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
Smith, M.A. (1943) The fauna of British India, Ceylon and Burma including the whole of the Indo-Chinese sub-region. Reptilia and Amphibia. Vol. III. Serpentes. Taylor and Francis, London, xii + 583 pp.
Stamatakis, A. (2006) RAxML-VI-HPC: maximum likelihood-based phylogenetic analyses with thousands of taxa and mixed models. Bioinformatics, 22 (21), 2688–2690. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btl446
Stamatakis, A. (2014) RAxML version 8: a tool for phylogenetic analysis and post-analysis of large phylogenies. Bioinformatics, 30 (9), 1312–1313. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btu033
Uetz, P., Freed, P., Aguilar, R. & Hošek, J. (Eds.) (2022) The Reptile Database. Available from: http://www.reptile-database.org (accessed 13 April 2022)
Wall, F. (1909a) Notes on snakes from the neighbourhood of Darjeeling. The Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, 19, 337–357
Wall, F. (1909b) Notes on snakes collected in Upper Assam. Journal of Bombay Natural History Society, 19, 608–623.
Wall, F. (1910a) Notes on snakes collected in Upper Assam, Part 2. Journal of Bombay Natural History Society, 19 (4), 825–845.
Wall, F. (1910b) A new snake from Assam (Oligodon erythrorachis). Journal of Bombay Natural History Society, 19, 923–924.
Wall, F. (1924) A handlist of the snakes of the Indian empire. Journal of Bombay Natural History Society, 29 (3–4), 598-632.
Wallach, V., Williams, K.L. & Boundy, J. (2014) Snakes of the World: A catalogue of living and extinct Species. CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, London, xxvii + 1209 pp.
Whitaker, R. & Captain, A. (2004) Snakes of India. The field guide. Draco Books, Chennai, xiv + 481 pp.