What's new? (September 2024)
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The original idea was to send this update before or during the World Congress of Herpetology (WCH) in early August, but alas, we didn�t quite make it (see more on the WCH below). But here it is, another new release of the Reptile Database with plenty of new data.
This update has 12,263 species (up from 12,162 reptile species in the March 2024 release) and 2,106 subspecies (excluding nominate subspecies), that is, a total of 14,369 taxa. 101 new entries have been added to the release, with a total of 160 species-level changes, including 94 new species and 2 new genera (Neopalaia, a skink, and Desertum, an anguid, the latter already erected in 2022, which we missed, uuhhh � !). Following the recent literature we synonymized 17 species, resurrected 7 species from synonymy, and elevated 17 subspecies to species level. As always, you can find a complete list of changes as part of our checklist, available at on our download page.
Help to make the database better. We are trying to get some funding for the database, so we can add more data and better features. To get some data for a grant application, please fill out this 1-min survey. Our excellent team manages to keep the data up-to-date, but we haven�t been able to add any new features in a long time. That said, we need some better data about how you use the database and how much time you save having it, so we made some (likely unpopular) changes to find out:
Species descriptions: We like to encourage users to help us improve the database, so we have shortened the descriptions in the database to contain diagnoses only (currently available for 6,923 species). In fact, we do have additional information beyond the diagnosis for 57% of these species and we even have descriptions for an additional 3,222 species. Eventually we will release those descriptions in the database, but first, we would like to know how much time it would take you to find the information currently NOT shown (for an example see here) � the survey mentioned above will ask this question. If you are willing to volunteer and help us fill the gaps, you will get access to the information we have (e.g. all species in a genus or family). Let us know if you are interested in a small collaboration with the name of your favorite genus or other taxon and we will send you further details. See our checklist with an indication of what is needed.
Literature database. We have added 555 references to the database since March, which now stands at 67,742 references, 55,516 of which have links to online (or sometimes other) sources (such as publisher websites). 546 papers have been added to the database that have been published this year, that is, we have added 2 or 3 papers per day.
Photos. This release contains 21,765 photos of 6,541 species, representing 53% of all species (previous release: 6,473 species, plus 68 new species). 38 photographers have sent us 735 photos of 259 species since the last release, although just 4 people sent us more than 50 photos each and a total of 499 photos.
The Photographers are Abdellah Bouazza (12 photos), Alberto S�nchez-Vialas (13), Amit Sayyed (6), Ari Flagle (3), Ashok Captain (6), Brian Bush (10), Carey Knox (143), Cesar Barrio Amoros (7), C�sar Luis Barrio Amor�s (21), Daniel Kane (11), Ed Galoyan (1), Esther Dondorp (5), Gunther K�hler (3), Gustavo Blanco Vale (1), H.T. Lalremsanga (4), Hanh T. Ngo (2), Harald Nicolay (7), Henrik Brings�e (231), Jakob Hallermann (3), John Murphy (4), Luciano Javier Avila (31), Marcio Borges-Martins (2), Michael Cota (4), Michael Franzen (4), Natthaphat Chotjuckdikul (3), Nicholas Parry (1), Parag Shinde (1), Paul Freed (51), Peter Janzen (30), Peter Uetz (74), Pradeep Kulkarni (1), Pratik Pradhan (2), Przemyslaw Zdunek (21), Roberto Langstroth (1), Samuel Garcia (6), Takaki Kurita (1), Vladimir Dinets (2), and William W. Lamar (7). As always, thank you all!
Post-WCH thoughts: The Reptile Database was present at WCH with 2 people, Peter and Ro. WCH was quite a success with more than 1000 people attending. Many attendees certainly also exploited the fact that the meeting was in a biodiversity hotspot (with Borneo hosting about 320 reptile species!) and reportedly hundreds of people swarmed out into the Bornean jungle to go herping. These herpers may know that Malaysia and Indonesia have lost about a third of their pristine forest within the past 20 years or so (Economist). Just Indonesia has lost 45% of its intact, undisturbed forest since 1990. Not surprisingly, more than 90 of recent deforestation across the tropics was driven by agriculture and that, of course, is driven by human overpopulation and overconsumption around the world (palm oil is now the commodity consumed by Americans that contributes most to the loss of tropical forests, according to the New York Times). We should all keep that in mind when we buy our next jar of Nutella (or whatever contains palm oil).
Books received
Jolly, C., Schembri, B., & Macdonald, S. (2023) Field Guide to the Reptiles of the Northern Territory. CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne, 400 pp. Australia�s Northern Territory has more reptile species than most countries in the world, and Jolly et al. describe all 388 species of the area in this book. The 400 pages are arranged in a similar way to Cogger�s 2014 book with 1 or 2 photos per species, a map, and well-illustrated keys and detailed descriptions which highlight key characters. The drawings of scale characters are especially useful and set this book apart from many others that only have photos (which often do not show critical diagnostic characters). Overall a must-have for Australian herpers and everyboy who wants to know more about Australian�s herpetofauna.
Stander, R.I. (2023) The Reptiles of the Limpopo Province and Kruger National Park. Herp Nomad, Polokwane, South Africa, 367 pp. The Kruger National Park is home to 125 of South Africa�s 434 species. All except six of these living gems also occur in the Limpopo Province, from which a staggering total of 204 species are known. The region boasts the highest reptile diversity in South Africa � half of the country�s herpetofauna occurs here and more than 40 species are endemic. Several are newly described and have never been pictured in a popular field guide, while many have undergone significant taxonomic revision. This volume is packed with first-hand information and brings the region�s 210 species and their habitats to life with more than 600 photographs. This book is an indispensable resource for any serious African herpetologist, ecologist, nature guide, game ranger and hunter. Nevertheless, it is purposefully crafted to offer a gateway into the fascinating world of reptiles for enthusiasts, budding naturalists and the youth. It includes a foreword by Johan Marais, a detailed overview of the region's biogeography and provides common names in the Sepedi, Xitsonga, Tshivenda and Afrikaans languages.
The species of both books will be indexed in the next release of the database, so you can find citations to them in each species entry.
As always, if you have any corrections or additions, please email us.
Next database release: scheduled for December 2024.
This update has 12,162 species (up from 12,060 reptile species in the October 2023 release), plus another 2,118 subspecies (excluding nominate subspecies), that is, a total of 14,280 taxa. 102 new entries have been added to the release, as well as a total of 123 species-level changes, with 79 new species and 2 new genera (Dravidoseps, and Pseudoindotyphlops). We also synonymized or downgraded 5 species (to subspecies). 28 species were elevated from subspecies or resurrected from synonymy. As always, you can find a complete list of changes as part of our checklist, available at on our download page. The checklist also contains 22 new species that were added after our deadline and thus did not make it into the web database).
Literature database. We have added 695 references to the database since October, which now stands at 67,187 references, 55,113 of which have links to online (or sometimes other) sources (such as publisher websites).
Photos. This release contains 21,041 photos of 6,473 species (previous release: 6,388 species, plus 85 species), or 53% of all species. 50 photographers have sent us 350 photos since the last release (almost the same number as in the last release, so the stream of submitted photos is fairly constant). The new photos represent 143 species. These photographers are as follows (people with more than 10 photos in bold): Ali Gholamifard (1), Apostolos Christopoulos (20), Boris Tuniyev (6), César Luis Barrio Amorós (32), Crispian Emberson (1), Daniel Kane (1), Ely D. Gomez (1), Fred Kraus (8), Gabriel Martínez (1), Gernot Vogel (6), H. T. Lalmuansanga (3), Henrik Bringsøe (4), Hossein Nabizadeh (7), Jakob Hallermann (3), Javier Lobon-Rovira (1), Joachim Sameit (4), John Lyakurwa (8), John Sullivan (92), Kurtulu? Olgun (8), Lal Biakzuala (1), Larry Powell (4), Luhur Septiadi (1), Luis Ceriaco (3), Melissa Bruton (27), Mendis Wickramasinghe (2), Michael Cota (33), Miguel Trefault Rodrigues (2), Myke Clarkson (5), Nathanaël Maury (1), Paul Freed (3), Pedro Ivo Simões (1), Pedro Peloso (1), Peng Guo (3), Peter Janzen (1), Peter Uetz (5), Przemys?aw Zdunek (9), Ralf Hörold (6), Renato Recoder (1), Ricardo Kawashita-Ribeiro (1), Richo Firmansyah (6), Robert Gundy (4), Robin Gloor (2), Seyed Mahdi Kazemi (2), Torsten Blanck (5), Vinícius Carvalho (1), Weverton dos Santos Azevedo (3), William W. Lamar (8), and Yuliya Krasylenko (2). As always, thank you for your invaluable contributions!
Reference image library. It’s great to have photos of live reptiles, but it’s often necessary to have standardized images of preserved museum specimens in order to compare them or to see specific details, often not visible in live photos (e.g. the ventral side of an animal). We started to create a reference database of images to make such comparisons possible, based on more than 14,000 photos of more than 1,000 species from 20 collections. We will integrate that material into the Reptile Database over the next few months, but for now, you can read about and access these images through this preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.08.584020v1 . High-resolution images will be available from Morphobank shortly.
Snake types on Facebook. Complementary to the aforementioned effort, Masud Salimian has created about 1,300 Facebook pages dedicated to type specimens of snakes. We have cross-referenced these pages through the Reptile Database. If there is a Facebook page, you can find the link at the bottom of our species pages, e.g. for Leptodeira bakeri RUTHVEN, 1936. We do not have a photo of this species, but the Facebook page does: https://www.facebook.com/groups/stshc/posts/413363397554931/.
Etymologies: with etymologies for 9,631 species, we are approaching the magic 10,000 species mark. Glenn Shea helped to reach the current level (from 9,057 in the last release) by contributing etymologies for those Australian species for which we did not have any. If you have an interest in names, please let us know, we have about 2,500 species to go, including some quite mysterious ones. For example, only recently did Charles Klaver (likely) solve the mystery of the African species names Congolacerta vauereselli and Buhoma vauerocegae whose etymology was not explained by their author, Gustav Tornier. Klaver argued that they are wordplays on the letters V, R, S, L (or O and C, apparently standing for Vertebrata, Reptilia, Sauria, Lacertidae and Ophidia, Colubridae) as pronounced in German (Klaver 2022). Who would have thought!?
Descriptions. Given our ongoing lack of funding, we had to cut down on our efforts to provide species descriptions. Hence we will only provide short diagnoses until the situation improves, currently 6,821 species (56.1% of all species). We are happy to provide more data for collaborators though. Please contact us for details.
More trait databases. On top of our own efforts to collect images and species descriptions, there are several new projects and datasets describing ecological and other traits, including SquamBase and ReptTraits created by Shai Meiri and colleagues. They should nicely complement each other and the Reptile Database.
Maps. If you ever wondered why we do not have maps, you simply missed them! If you need a range map of a species, just click the link to the IUCN Red List — the linked pages have maps for about 10,000 species. Here is an example for Compsophis laphystius, with the map on this page:
https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/172862/6931512 (it may take a few seconds for the polygon to load).
New checklists: This release integrates recently published checklists about Nicaragua (Sunyer et al. 2023) and the Mexican states of Nayarit (Loc-Barragán et al. 2024), and Querétaro (Tepos-Ramírez et al. 2023).
Climate change and reptile extinctions. There has been a flurry of studies on the impact of climate change on reptile populations world-wide. For instance, Biber et al. 2023 project a 9% decrease of species richness per grid cell globally (equivalent to 5 species) until 2080. Murali et al. 2023 evaluated the impact of climate change on land vertebrates but it remains unclear how that will affect their survival. Etard & Newbold 2024 presented a similar analysis and found that narrower ranges, narrower habitat breadth, and inability to exploit artificial habitats, unsurprisingly, were associated with more negative land-use responses and with higher climate-change sensitivity. Wiens & Zelinka 2024 presented another, more global analysis, and predict climate-related extinction of 14%– 32% of macroscopic species in the next ~50 years. Given the uncertainties about the human impact on nature, we are organizing two zoom meetings to discuss exactly this topic. Please join us next week on
Thu, Apr 4, 7 pm EDT (UTC -4): https://vcu.zoom.us/j/83636474633, or
Sun, Apr 7, 11 am EDT (UTC -4), https://vcu.zoom.us/j/83061396121
WCH and (Bio-) Diversity meetings. We will be at the World Conference of Herpetology this coming August, in case you want to meet or collaborate. In fact, we are planning to organize some herping trips on Borneo and elsewhere in Indonesia in the weeks before the meeting, so let us know if you want to join us. One such trip is co-organized by Andrew Durso (amdurso@gmail.com). Indonesians and Malaysians are especially invited to join, of course.
If Borneo is too far or WCH too expensive, please consider to attend the electronic (Bio-) Diversity meeting (organized by MDPI and its Diversity journal) in October 2024. The meeting is organized by Michael Wink, completely online and completely free for both presenters and attendees! Not traveling will save a ton of CO2 too :)
Books received
Spawls, Stephen; Tomáš Mazuch & Abubakr Mohammad (2023) Handbook of Amphibians and Reptiles of North-east Africa. Bloomsbury, 640 pp. This is yet another monumental effort by Steve Spawls and co-authors to cover the herpetofauna of a huge African region, this time ranging from Egypt to Somalia. Spawls et al. cover 461 species of reptiles with detailed descriptions, color photos and maps for almost all species, as well as keys to those species. Given the vast coverage, the photos and maps are relatively small, but usually sufficient to see enough details. For a subset of species such as blindsnakes, they also provide drawings of the head scalation as this is usually impossible to see on photos of whole animals. If you are interested in the herpetofauna of Eastern North Africa, this is a must-have.
Lillywhite, H.B & Martins, M. (eds.) (2023) Islands and Snakes. Vol. II. Oxford University Press, ca. 340 pp. According to Martins & Lillywhite there are 1,300 species of snakes inhabiting more than 1,000 islands worldwide. Many of those were covered in their first volume in this series and volume II adds another 15 chapers on the topic. Eight chapters focus on certain islands, including giants like Borneo and New Guinea, but also smaller islands such as Trinidad and Tobago, the Izu islands of Japan, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, islands in the Gulf of Mexico, Galapagos, and tiny ones such as Golem Grad (North Macedonia). Five chapters focus on certain species or taxonomic groups, such as lanceheads (Bothrops), cottonmouths (Agkistrodon conanti), the Viperine Snake (Natrix maura) or Garter snakes (Thamnophis). Finally, two chapters are about more general topics, including invasive snakes on islands and conservation of snakes on islands more generally. Just the aforementioned islands have about 400 species (!) and the more general topics cover many more, making this book (and its predecessor) a must-read for everybody interested in snakes on islands.
Next database release: scheduled for August 2024.
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