Composition and natural history notes of the coastal snake assemblage from Northern Bahia, Brazil

Ricardo Marques,Érica Fonseca,Mirco Solé,Konrad Mebert,Moacir Santos Tinôco,Dennis Rödder

doi:10.3897/zookeys.611.9529

Abstract

Information about the snake diversity and their natural history from the Atlantic forest domain in Brazil refer mostly to inland forests than to coastal region. Within the state of Bahia, this knowledge is concentrated to the southeastern coastal stretch. Herein we report on the diversity of snakes from the restinga, ombrophilous forest and anthropogenic environment from the northern Atlantic coast of Bahia. We sampled nine sites for three years and visited four museum collections. Furthermore, we provide anecdotal natural history information, voucher analyses, literature complements, and a key to fascilitate species identification. We report a total of 774 snakes belonging to 50 species and 23 new distribution records for northeastern coast of Bahia, supplemented by new data on feeding and reproduction. The number of detected species is similar to numbers obtained in comparable studies from other Brazilian ecoregions. This study reports and focuses for the first time on all known species of snakes from the northeastern coast of Bahia.

Highlights

Studies on diversity inventories and natural history increase the knowledge of a regional fauna, its interaction with other organisms, and the environment in general (Greene 1994)
The absence of 17 species during our fieldwork, confirmed only from older museum specimens without new voucher deposits over at least ten years, suggests they have either become extinct in the region or our search method was insufficient or non-appropriate, since our larger effort were on restinga
We measured three specimens from Camaçari and Dias d’Ávila with ventral scale counts from 153–156, confirming Campbell and Lamar's (2004) findings that these are the lowest scale counts known for this species, which usually ranges from 161–179 ventral scales

Summary

Introduction

Studies on diversity inventories and natural history increase the knowledge of a regional fauna, its interaction with other organisms, and the environment in general (Greene 1994). Pertinent and relevant taxa-related information can be acquired through species inventories and studies describing aspects of natural history that increase our knowledge on the different habitats and habits of regional snakes (Greene 1997). These studies include biodiversity components in terms of richness, abundance, distribution, diet composition, activity periods, reproduction, morphological variation, parasitism, predators and other intrinsic data of the group (Martins and Oliveira 1998). Regarding the Atlantic forest, the snake fauna from the Southeast and South of Brazil is well represented (e.g. Marques et al 2001, Marques and Sazima 2004, Hartmann et al 2009a, b), but despite the increase of these studies in recent years, the natural history of these animals from most northeastern states of Brazil has remained poorly documented

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