Abstract
Philodryas agassizii is an endangered snake of shrubland and grasslands well preserved in Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, and Uruguay. In the southeastern area of its range, this snake was only found associated with highland grassland of the Tandilia and Ventania mountain systems, Argentina. In this work, we described six new records of Philodryas agassizii from the Tandilia Mountain System, which represent four new localities for the species. These records extend the known range of Philodryas agassizii in the Tandilia mountain system, 100 km from the closest previously known site.
Highlights
In Buenos Aires province, Philodryas agassizii was only reported in highland grasslands of the two mountain systems of the Pampa ecoregion: Tandilia and Ventania (Viñas et al 1989; Vega and Bellagamba 1990; Di Pietro 2016)
We described six new records of Philodryas agassizii in the Tandilia mountain system
October 19th 2017 (13:27 h), we found one specimen of Philodryas agassizii (MLP, cf. 0053) in a highland grassland with bare soil patches at Estancia Ninonil, Partido de Tandil (37°37.6144'S, 59°13.9012'W; 342 masl; Fig. 1A)
Summary
Philodryas agassizii (Jan, 1863) is a habitat specialist snake occurring in Atlantic forest, Cerrado, Pampa and Pantanal biomes from the center of Argentina, through Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil (Peters and Orejas-Miranda 1970; Viñas 1985; Cei 1993; Carreira et al 2005; Marques et al 2006; Etchepare and Ingaramo 2008; Ghizoni et al 2009; Hamdan and Lira-da-Silva 2012; Di Pietro et al 2013; Smith and Clay 2015; Cacciali et al 2016; Costa and Bérnils 2018; Ríos et al 2020). Philodryas agassizii is prevalent in well preserved natural grasslands with dense coverage of native grass (Marques et al 2006; Etchepare et al 2012). Even when this snake had a large range, which includes many Argentine provinces, the current number of reported specimens remains low (Di Pietro et al 2013).
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