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

By

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

Type

Article

Date of Publication

2016

Original Publication

ZooKeys

Volume

611

Pages

93-142

Subjects

Atlantic forest , coastal sand dunes , Conservation , ombrophilous forest , restinga , Snakes

Contributed by

Pensoft Publishers

Language

English

Published by

Sofia, Bulgaria Pensoft Publishers

Identifiers

DOI: https://doi.org/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.