Menorca Oktober 2010

[Bobby Bok]

Just got back from the island of Menorca and made a report of this trip. It's in Dutch but the pictures will speak for themselves

-> http://www.herpet.mysites.nl/mypages/herpet/504445.html

[Rok Grzelj]

Nice report Bobby....but the pics are also in Dutch

[Bobby Bok]

Luckily you can see the pictures on Faecesbook as well

[Peter Oefinger]

Great pictures - maybe you like to post some of them also in this forum...

[Bobby Bok]

Especially for Peter

[Jeroen Speybroeck]

Humbled by Bobby's hi-fi pics, I'd still like to mention my little story too =>
http://www.hylawerkgroep.be/jeroen/index.php?id=54
g's,
J.

[Gabriel Martínez]

Hi guys!! Macroproton of Balearic islands were introduced from Tunissia or east Algeria and they are the subspecies mauritanicus (no cucullatus)!

Gabri

[Jeroen Speybroeck]

Hi guys!! Macroproton of Balearic islands were introduced from Tunissia or east Algeria and they are the subspecies mauritanicus (no cucullatus)!

I assume you mean 'species'? Well, doesn't really matter actually, because as already argued by Crochet & Dubois (2004) and adopted by Speybroeck & Crochet (2007) (and implicitly also by Speybroeck et al., 2010), this seems rather incorrect. Wade (2001) assigned the different species based on morphology. To put it short, imho, he more or less went too far with splitting. This seems to be confirmed by molecular work from 2004. Considering the phylogeny of Carranza et al. (2004), it is clear that (their) cucullatus cucullatus is placed in the same clade as mauritanicus (see tree on p. 527).
To treat mauritanicus as a distinct species, textilis would have to be redefined. Taking into account the polyphyletic nature of cucullatus textilis (note also nomenclatural issues with this name!), it seems at least premature to distinguish between mauritanicus and cucullatus at the species level, but in my opinion at any level at all. Surprisingly, Carranza et al. (2004) seemed to maintain the -imho- by their work (partially) rejected species of Wade (2001), treating the single cucullatus cucullatus sample as a species different of mauritanicus. Unfortunately, this has been copied without question.

http://molevol.cmima.csic.es/carranza/pdf/Macroprotodon.pdf
Quote: "As noted, mitochondrial DNA strongly supports three monophyletic units within Macroprotodon: the newly described M. abubakeri and clades consisting largely of M. mauritanicus and M. brevis. In contrast, individuals assigned to M. cucullatus on the basis of morphology are associated with either M. mauritanicus or M. brevis, making these paraphyletic and indicating
that the M. cucullatus specimens cannot be regarded as belonging to a single monophyletic species."

Please read the first sentence. Since the only available cucullatus cucullatus sample nests with mauritanicus, this group has to be called cucullatus in total.

Since
(a) cucullatus as a name has clear priority over mauritanicus,
(b) nuclear evidence is lacking, as well as study of introgression levels and samples of the 'cucullatus' near the range of abudakeri,
(c) textilis is polyphetically scattered in the tree and
(d) splitting between mauritanicus and cucullatus seems at the moment quite clearly a bridge too far + discordant with not splitting between brevis and ibericus at species level,
it seems most sensible to accept only three species: brevis, abudakeri and cucullatus.

This has been -at least to me opinion- properly adopted by the IUCN reviewers =>
http://www.iucnredlist.org/apps/redlist/details/61533/0

EDIT:

Therefore, I call the Balearic populations Macroprotodon cucullatus. Maybe Macroprotodon cucullatus mauritanicus but quite surely not (yet) Macroprotodon mauritanicus. As such, the vernacular name "Algerian False Smooth Snake" becomes a bit 'narrow', but that's not that big a problem, of course.

[Gabriel Martínez]

Wowwww this is a good answer!!! oK! I read some months ago about the similar genetic between Tunissia and Balearic Macroprotodon and in many articles: (Carranza 2004 based in Wade 2001) http://molevol.cmima.csic.es/carranza/p ... otodon.pdf
http://researcharchive.calacademy.org/r ... %20Mellado%
20reprint%20LR.pdf (based in Carranza study respect the M.mauritanicus)
even in http://mwilsonherps.wordpress.com/page/2/

So I supposed this classification should be the last!!! but in your answer and work I can read you have been studying this area very hard I didn´t know you had made articles about this... It´s good to get new info about Spanish and Morocco snakes Jeroen!

[Jeroen Speybroeck]

So I supposed this classification should be the last!!!

Well, all we did was just (albeit critically) review these matters. Carranza et al. (2004) is indeed the last analysis, but in our opinion not the final one. It is stated in the paper itself that there is need for more data (as well as per snake specimen as more specimens).