Flag for Taxon: White-spotted slug snake (Pareas margaritophorus)
| Flagger | Content Author | Content | Reason | Flag Created | Resolved by | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| jonhakim | White-spotted slug snake (Pareas margaritophorus) |
according to the reptile database, Pareas macularius is again a valid species based on both morphological and genetic evidence and thus has been resurrected from Pareas margaritophorus. |
Sep. 21, 2019 12:58:20 +0000 | loarie |
see comments |
Comments
Hauser's paper focused on 61 specimens from 10 provinces in northern Thailand. There he found them distributed by elevation, margaritophorus only occurring below 800m ASL and macularius only found above 800m ASL. Of course, it's hard to know how much of their range that would hold over, but the fact that margaritophorus ranges further south (into malaysia) while margaritophorus ranges further north (into SC China) is also suggestive of some difference in habitat requirements.
The map showing his tentative identification of museum specimens shows a very broad contact zone including penninsular through northern Thailand, northern Laos, north and central Vietnam, and Hainan Island. And due to insufficient sampling it likely is even broader than that.
Sounds like the data is there to make the maps and make the correct IDs for the records in the area of overlap.
I think this change should be made.
looks like distribution data won't be much use in separating these - so ok to split even if it means having to kick all these back to Genus and reID them manually?
I think we should go to the new taxonomy if possible.
I don't really like the idea of the genus level assignment. If they are sister species (?), I think we should put them all in a species group as we have with some other taxa. So they would be Pareas margaritiphorus / macularius until someone steps in and IDs them down further.
We could do that if they are really sister species and form a clade. It does look like most of our 81 obs are in Hong Kong and Peninsular Malaysia. Am I reading it right that all of those would be P. margaritiphorus?
Looking at this paper revision of the Pareas (Guo, Yuhong & Wu, Yunke & He, Shunping & Shi, Haitao & Zhao, Ermi. (2011). Systematics and molecular of Asian snail-eating snakes (Pareatidae). Zootaxa. 3001. 57-64. 10.11646/zootaxa.3001.1.4. -
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272488384_Systematics_and_molecular_of_Asian_snail-eating_snakes_Pareatidae)
Figure 1 shows a phylogeny of the genus. They include macularius as a junior synonym of margaritiphorus but all their margaritiphorus cluster together as a single clade (100% support in the maximum likelihood tree).
However, their samples were three snakes from Hainan, one from Myanmar and one from GenBank. With only 5 samples it is possible that they were all five of the same species although the map above may indicate that the snake from Myanmar would be macularius?
If that is the case, the one from Myanmar does fall in a fairly distinct grouping with one of the Hainan snakes maybe indicating those two were macularius and the other grouping is the margaritiphorus?
ButcI think we can safely infer they are sisters from this data.
Chris
Yes, I agree with the idea of putting them into a species group. Morphologically it should be possible to ID them from photos most of the time, Sjon Hauser makes a good case for the distinctions. I could try to go through and ID a lot of them, here is the starting point:
https://bangkokherps.wordpress.com/snakes/spotted-slug-snake/
https://bangkokherps.wordpress.com/snakes/white-spotted-slug-snake/
For the record, here's how we're deviating from RD at the moment by lumping Pareas macularius
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_framework_relationships/15000
So what will it take to actually get them split out in iNat?
ok I added a complex and split it https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes/90399 so everything is now at the complex node and needs to be refined with new IDs to the species level
Great!
Is there a map in the Hauser paper showing the contact zone between the species. I assume it is in Thailand somewhere?