Reptile & Amphibian Forums

here is a link to an important new mtDNA study of the mexicana complex.

It really raises more questions than it answers.
Based on the limited data, it would appear that the Davis Mts. king is quite distinct from other alterna.
And thayeri is not a mexicana at all.

I don't see the link can you please send it to me.
thanks
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Michelle
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful:
The Lord God made them all.

I'm very interested in this, too.

Michelle:

I've had a link to the "in press" version on the website for some time. Just scroll down to Bryson et al. 2007, then click on the link to download the pdf file.

http://www.sierraherps.com/bibliography.htm

Cheers,

Bob

www.SierraHerps.com

np
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Michelle
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful:
The Lord God made them all.

http://www.naherpetology.org/pdf_files/711.pdf

You are right, very interesting article, thanks for sharing.

Very interesting paper, however, I see one potential flaw in the study. All the snakes they used were from private collections. This presents two possible problems:

1. That the owners of the snakes were correct for the locality of each snake (knowingly or unknowingly), and that the snakes had been born from purebred snakes from the same locality and there had been no hybridization or mixing of localities somewhere in the bloodline of the animal.

2. That the snakes were within only a few generations of wild snakes (if the snakes were the offspring of snakes that had been in captivity many generations, you start to get a bottleneck effect and you lose the genetic variability within the species that you see in the wild).

I think the study could be considered more conclusive if the mDNA collected was from wild snakes. However, it is still a very important and interesting study and a great read. One of the important conclusions is that it is not always reliable to delineate species and relationships between species based on color patterns alone.

Actually, all samples were taken from known-locality animals. While a few were obtained from private collections, these were wild-caught snakes. For example, Tim Gebhard is cited (see Table 1) as having provided one of the samples for a Nuevo Leon specimen. This was a wild-caught female collected illegally and confiscated by US authorities; its origin is well established. The same goes for the other samples. There might by problems with this study, but questionable source material is not one of them.

Cheers,

Bob