Discovery of the Black-headed Ground Snake Rhynchocalamus melanocephalus (Jan, 1862) in Cyprus (Reptilia: Colubridae)

Abstract

We identified two snakes from Paphos district in south-western Cyprus as belonging to the secretive genus Rhynchocalamus. They represent the first record of these snakes in Cyprus. Morphological features and mitochondrial 16S DNA sequences suggest that these specimens belong to R. melanocephalus, a species widely distributed in the Eastern Mediterranean region. The genetic similarity to a specimen from northern Israel may imply either a human-mediated dispersal or a natural colonization. These observations thus raise the number of snake species known to occur in Cyprus to 12.

Keywords:

• Distribution
• range extension
• mitochondrial DNA sequences
• Middle East

Supplementary Material

Supplementary material (Table S1) is given as a Supplementary Annex, which is available via the “Supplementary” tab on the article’s online page (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09397140.2020.1757914).

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Tamar Feldstein-Farkash for her help in the molecular lab and to Alex Slavenko for the photographs, both from the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, Tel-Aviv University, Israel. DJ thanks to D. Grula and Riyad A. Sadek for their assistance during visiting Lebanon. We wish to thank the two reviewers and Dr M. Kasparek (Heidelberg, Germany) for their comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

DJ was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under contract no. APVV-15-0147.