Vol. 5, p. 129-132. Septembeb 12, 1924. 



Occasional Papers 



OF THE 



Boston Society of Natural History. 



NOTES ON SOME CENTRAL AMERICAN SNAKES. 

 BY THOMAS BARBOUR AND AFRANIO DO AMARAL. 



Last winter the senior author spent several months in Central 

 America, largely in the Panama Canal Zone, being occupied there 

 with the building of the Barro Colorado Island Laboratory of the 

 Institute for Research in Tropical America. This left him but 

 little time for field work in herpetology. His two companions, 

 however, W. Sprague Brooks, Esq., and Dr. Edward Wiggles- 

 worth collected extensively and many amphibians especially 

 were gathered. The collection of snakes would not have been 

 large but for the assistance and zeal of Mr. J. B. Shropshire, Chief 

 Sanitary Inspector for the U. S. Army, who not only made all of 

 his own subordinates watch constantly for reptiles but secured 

 many specimens through the kind interest of his friends in the 

 Army Medical Corps. All of these various naturalists often 

 worked in more or less the same areas so that many individual 

 specimens do not bear the collector's name, having been put in 

 containers holding reptiles from a given locality. For this 

 reason it is particularly important to acknowledge with cordial 

 thanks Mr. Shropshire's aid, since the Museum record will not 

 emphasize this as it deserves to be. 



We have chosen only a few snakes to discuss in these short notes 

 since naturally a great number of specimens represent well- 

 defined species already recorded from the Panamanian area. A 

 single specimen from Venezuela is included which was found 

 among unidentified material in the Museum of Comparative 

 Zoology. 



Constrictor constrictor imperator (Daudin). 



It is probable that the Central American "boa constrictor" 

 should stand as a subspecies of the South American C. constrictor 

 and it is probably simply an intermediate between that species 

 and mexicana, the most northerly race. C. diviniloquus Laurenti 

 from the Lesser Antilles and C. occidentalis (Philippi) are appar- 

 ently full species well differentiated isolation. 



The Central American race is not uncommon in the forested 

 areas and adults as well as young are in the collection from the 

 Canal Zone. 



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