Abstract
The secretive behavior and life history of snakes makes studying their biology, distribution, and the epidemiology of venomous snakebite challenging. One of the most useful, most versatile, and easiest to collect types of biological data are photographs, particularly those that are connected with geographic location and date-time metadata. Photos verify occurrence records, provide data on phenotypes and ecology, and are often used to illustrate new species descriptions, field guides and identification keys, as well as in training humans and computer vision algorithms to identify snakes. We scoured eleven online and two offline sources of snake photos in an attempt to collect as many photos of as many snake species as possible, and attempt to explain some of the inter-species variation in photograph quantity among global regions and taxonomic groups, and with regard to medical importance, human population density, and range size. We collected a total of 725,565 photos—between 1 and 48,696 photos of 3098 of the world's 3879 snake species (79.9%), leaving 781 “most wanted” species with no photos (20.1% of all currently-described species as of the December 2020 release of The Reptile Database). We provide a list of most wanted species sortable by family, continent, authority, and medical importance, and encourage snake photographers worldwide to submit photos and associated metadata, particularly of “missing” species, to the most permanent and useful online archives: The Reptile Database, iNaturalist, and HerpMapper.
Highlights
Our understanding of the global diversity and distribution of the nearly 3900 species of snakes remains incomplete (Bohm et al, 2013; Roll et al, 2017)
When combined with geographic location and date-time in formation, photos of snakes and other wild animals have a variety of po tential applications, including serving as a verifiable basis for mapping occurrence records, as data sources to answer ecological questions and to map and quantify gradients of phenotypic variation, as reference material for new species descriptions, for use in illustrating field guides and iden tification keys, as training material for improving identification skills, as training and testing material for computer vision algorithms, and as reference material for identifying snakes in snakebite cases
We review the status of online snake photos, assemble the largest data set to date covering nearly 80% of all species, and examine some of the biases and pathways to improvement
Summary
Our understanding of the global diversity and distribution of the nearly 3900 species of snakes remains incomplete (Bohm et al, 2013; Roll et al, 2017). This situation is partially attributable to the widespread fear of snakes (Tierney and Connolly, 2013), even among scientists and aca demics, but largely to the secretive behavior and life history of snakes (Steen, 2010), which limits sample sizes in ecological studies (Bonnet et al, 2002; Seigel, 1993) and hinders the assembly of country-level species checklists in some parts of the world (e.g., Bauer et al, 2017; Branch et al, 2019; Marques et al, 2018). When combined with geographic location and date-time in formation, photos of snakes and other wild animals have a variety of po tential applications, including serving as a verifiable basis for mapping occurrence records, as data sources to answer ecological questions and to map and quantify gradients of phenotypic variation, as reference material for new species descriptions, for use in illustrating field guides and iden tification keys, as training material for improving identification skills, as training and testing material for computer vision algorithms, and as reference material for identifying snakes in snakebite cases
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