Notes on Mississippi Amphibians and Reptiles

Abstract

During most of July and August of 1951, while attending the summer session at the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory near Ocean Springs, Mississippi, approxinately 800 specimens of amphibians and reptiles were secured in the panhandle counties of southern Mississippi, on some of the offshore islands, and in short stops while en route to and from Ocean Springs. This material is deposited in the University of Illinois Museum of Natural History, the Illinois Natural Histoiy Survey collection, and in the private collection of the junior author. A second collection of approximately 200 specimens largely from the Delta region, deposited in the Delta State Teachers College Museum, has been made available to us through the courtesy of Dr. R. L. Caylor of that institution. These two collections contain 89 species and subspecies as follows: salamanders, 14; frogs and toads, 19; lizards, 8; snakes, 36; and turtles, 12. Inasmuch as the snakes and lizards of Mississippi have been treated by Miss Cook (1943a, b) and three shorter papers on the herpetofauna of the Gulf counties have appeared (Brimley, 1910;- Corrington, 1927; and Allen, 1932), only county records or specimens of special interest for other reasons are cited in the present paper. Thus the following list is not a complete list of species and specimens collected since the bulk of our material is from Harrison County, the county best known. Despite the several papers cited above, Mississippi remains one of the least known states herpetologically, and it is felt that the distributional records and other notes accumulated for the following 76 forms merit publication.