Courtship and Mating Behavior in the Brown House Snake Lamprophis fulginosus

Abstract

Courtship behavior in snakes may serve several roles, including species identification, timing of gamete production, and evaluation of fitness of the partner (Ford and Burghardt, 1993). The behavioral acts involved in species identification could be of potential use in taxonomy and systematics (Secor, 1987). However, most accounts of mating in snakes are qualitative and lack descriptions that are sufficiently accurate to examine species specific traits. The most useful descriptions of courtship patterns for evolutionary comparisons utilize sequence analysis of the data (Gillingham, 1987) and for snakes those reports are limited to Elaphe (Gillingham, 1979), Lampropeltis (Secor, 1987), Agkistrodon (Schuett and Gillingham, 1988), and Thamnophis (Rossman et al., 1996). In this paper, we describe the courtship behavior of the brown house snake, Lamprophis fulginosus, a wide-spread south African colubrid snake of the subfamily Boodontinae and compare it to the courtship behavior described for other colubrids.