Posted by:
Jeff Clark
at Mon Apr 7 19:25:49 2008 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by Jeff Clark ]
basinboa,
...Again, thanks for posting. The first and most glaring thing I notice on that map is that the snake we know as the Guyana Rainbow Boa is not addressed. There have been thousands of these snakes exported out of Guyana over the last few decades and they are very different than Brazilian and Colombian Rainbow Boas. At first I was very perplexed about the color of the maurus dots. The map legend says yellow and the dots looked very green to me. I saw the verde (green) for asissi and thought they were trying to depict asissi as having a range up into Central America. Upon further examination I see that maurus is depicted with the yellow dot which actually does look yellow green to me LOL. It seems strange to me that the hygrophilus subspecies was addressed and lumped in with the Brazilian Rainbow but the gaigei subspecies was not addressed. Hmmmm??? I see species dwelling in Brazil being fully addressed and two other Rainbow Boas from outside Brazil not being addressed. I do have a question about the use of dots on the map? Typically range maps use shading to represent the range of different taxa. Using those dots I am not sure whther the clumps of same colored dots in a few areas represent the main range of a taxa and the disconnected dots represent seperate noncontiguous ranges of the same taxa. Or, should we "connect the dots) to represent the entire range? Any help you can give with this stuff would be appreciated. BTW, I have had a map for quite some time (from a confidential source in Brazil) which looks like this map but has different taxanomic information in the legend. Any idea if Mr. Passos went through a major change in his thinking on this subject in the last 18 months?
Thanks again,
Jeff
>>OK guys..
>>
>>Some of these rainbows are mine, and others are from friends. All have locality specific data yes.
>>
>>My Marajó rainbows were taken to Butantan (I live just across the street from Butantan) for identification, as I was really curious whether they were barbouri or not. They were identified as cenchria.
>>According to what they said, the snake formerly known as barbouri has those eyespots in the neck all fused forming a stripe, as you see in the assisi.
>>
>>As for the work from Paulo Passos about Epicrates. He separated all subspecies to the status of full species. barbouri and hygrophilus are no longer valid subspecies.
>>
>>The most curious thing is that barbouri was united with maurus. Whitch means that Marajó island has in fact 2 different rainbows.
>>
>>I have seen 30 or so rainbow boas from Marajó because I have a very good connection there, and they were all cenchria cenchria, including my newest rainbow that arrived just last week. Rainbows from that area tend to be dark, some being very unnatractive.
>>
>>The new species are:
>>Epicrates alvarezi
>>Epicrates maurus (maurus and old barbouri)
>>Epicrates cenchria (old cenchria and hygrophilus)
>>Epicrates assisi
>>Epicrates crassus
>>
>>Down here is the actual Epicrates map in Passos´s work:
>>
>>
>>As for your question, Jeff, if we accept Paulo´s work, then there is no difference between the old hygrophilus and cenchria because they are now the same species.
>>
>>Im no taxonomist and really dont understand well their criteria to separate and unite species, but I like to keep the old subspecies, especially considering hygrophilus and cenchria.
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RE: Rainbows from brazilian localities - Jeff Clark, Mon Apr 7 19:25:49 2008