Skip to main content Skip to main navigation menu Skip to site footer
Type: Article
Published: 2020-05-01
Page range: 193–200
Abstract views: 159
PDF downloaded: 5

A multilocus molecular perspective on the systematics of the poorly known Northeast Indian colubrid snakes Blythia reticulata (Blyth, 1854), B. hmuifang Vogel, Lalremsanga & Vanlalhrima, 2017, and Hebius xenura (Wall, 1907)

1Systematics and Toxicology Laboratory, Department of Zoology, Mizoram University, Aizawl, 796004, India.
Holy Child School, Nalkata, Dhalai, Tripura 799263, India.
Department of Zoology, Pachhunga University College, Aizawl, 796001, India.
Wildlife Institute of India, Chandrabani, P.O. 18, Dehradun, India.
Department of Life Sciences, The Natural History Museum, London SW7 5BD, UK.
Reptilia Colubridae DNA Natricinae phylogeny taxonomy Trachischium

Abstract

We provide the first molecular phylogenetic data for the following poorly known Northeast Indian snakes: Blythia reticulata and B. hmuifang, Hebius xenura, and Trachischium spp. Based on 1071 bp of cytb, 578 bp of nd4, 509 bp of 16s, 1000 bp of rag1 and 672 bp of cmos, we found support for a monophyletic Blythia being a member of Natricinae, most closely related to Trachischium. Hebius xenura is recovered as nested within species of the recently resurrected genus Herpetoreas, to which we transfer it.

 

References

  1. Arévalo, E., Davis, S.K. & Sites, J.W. (1994) Mitochondrial DNA sequence divergence and phylogenetic relationships among eight chromosome races of Sceloporus grammicus complex (Phrynosomatidae) in central Mexico. Systematic Biology, 43, 387–418. https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/43.3.387

    Altschul, S.F., Gish, W., Miller, W., Myers, E.W. & Lipman, D.J. (1990) Basic local alignment search tool. Journal of Molecular Biology, 215, 403–410.

    https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-2836(05)80360-2

    Biju, S.D. & Bossuyt, F. (2003) New frog family from India reveals an ancient biogeographical link with the Seychelles. Nature, 425 (6959), 711.

    https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02019

    Blyth, E. (1855) Notices and descriptions of various reptiles, new or little known [part 2]. Journal of Asiatic Society, 23 (3), 287–302. [1854]

    Boulenger, G.A. (1890) The Fauna of British India, Including Ceylon and Burma. Reptilia and Batrachia. Taylor & Francis, London, xviii + 541 pp.

    Burbrink, F.T., Lawson, R. & Slowinski, J.B. (2000) Mitochondrial DNA phylogeography of the polytypic North American rat snake (Elaphe obsoleta): a critique of the subspecies concept. Evolution, 54 (6), 2107–2118.

    https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0014-3820.2000.tb01253.x

    Cantor, T.E. (1839) Spicilegium serpentium indicorum [part 1]. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 1839, 31–34.

    Das, I. (2010) A field guide to the reptiles of South-east Asia. New Holland Publishers (UK) Ltd., London, 376 pp.

    Das, I. (2012) A Naturalist’s Guide to the Snakes of South-East Asia: Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Myanmar, Borneo, Sumatra, Java and Bali. Oxford John Beaufoy Publishing, Oxford, 160 pp.

    Deepak, V., Ruane, S. & Gower, D.J. (2018) A new subfamily of fossorial colubroid snakes from the Western Ghats of peninsular India. Journal of Natural History, 52(45-46), 2919–2934.

    https://doi.org/10.1080/00222933.2018.1557756

    Felsenstein, J. (1981) Evolutionary trees from DNA sequences: a maximum likelihood approach. Journal of molecular evolution, 17, 368–376.

    https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01734359

    Figueroa, A., McKelvy, A.D., Grismer, L.L., Bell, C.D. & Lailvaux, S.P. (2016) A species-level phylogeny of extant snakes with description of a new colubrid subfamily and genus. PLoS One, 11(9), p.e0161070.

    https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0161070

    Giri, V.B., Deepak, V., Captain, A., Das, A., Das, S., Rajkumar, K.P., Rathish, R.L. & Gower, D.J. (2017) A new species of Rhabdops Boulenger, 1893 (Serpentes: Natricinae) from the northern Western Ghats region of India. Zootaxa, 4319 (1), 27–52. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4319.1.2

    Giri, V.B., Gower, D.J., Das, A., Lalremsanga, H.T., Lalronunga, S., Captain, A. & Deepak, V. (2019) A new genus and species of natricine snake from northeast India. Zootaxa, 4603 (2), 241–264.

    https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4603.2.2

    Groth, J.G. & Barrowclough, G.F. (1999) Basal divergences in birds and the phylogenetic utility of the nuclear RAG-1 Gene. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 12, 115–123.

    https://doi.org/10.1006/mpev.1998.0603

    Guo, P., Zhu, F., Liu, Q., Zhang, L., Li, J.X., Huang, Y.Y. & Pyron, R.A. (2014) A taxonomic revision of the Asian keelback snakes, genus Amphiesma (Serpentes: Colubridae: Natricinae), with description of a new species. Zootaxa, 3873 (4), 425–440. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.3873.4.5

    Huelsenbeck, J.P., Ronquist, F., Nielsen, R. & Bollback, J.P. (2001) Bayesian inference of phylogeny and its impact on evolutionary biology. Science, 294, 2310–2314.

    https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1065889

    Kamei, R.G., San Mauro, D., Gower, D.J., Van Bocxlaer, I., Sherratt, E., Thomas, A., Babu, S., Bossuyt, F., Wilkinson, M. & Biju, S.D. (2012) Discovery of a new family of amphibians from northeast India with ancient links to Africa. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 279 (1737), 20120150. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2012.0150

    Lanfear. R., Calcott, B., Ho, S.Y.W. & Guindon, S. (2012) Partitionfinder: combined selection of partitioning schemes and substitution models for phylogenetic analyses. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 29, 1695–1701.

    https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/mss020

    Lawson, R., Slowinski, J.B., Crother, B.I. & Burbrink, F.T. (2005) Phylogeny of the Colubroidea (Serpentes): new evidence from mitochondrial and nuclear genes. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 37 (2), 581–601.

    https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2005.07.016

    Li, P., Zhao, E. & Dong, B. (2010) Amphibians and Reptiles of Tibet. Science Press, Beijing. 251 pp.

    Meetei, A.B., Das, S., Campbell, P.D., Raha, S. & Bag, P. (2018) A study on Ptyas doriae (Boulenger, 1888) with comments on the status of Ptyas hamptoni (Boulenger, 1900)(Squamata: Colubridae: Colubrinae). Zootaxa, 4457 (4), 537–548.

    https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4457.4.3

    Miller, M.A., Pfeiffer, W. & Schwartz, T. (2010) Creating the CIPRES Science Gateway for inference of large phylogenetic trees. In: Proceedings of the Gateway Computing Environments Workshop (GCE), New Orleans, Louisiana, 14 November 2010, pp. 1–8.

    https://doi.org/10.1109/GCE.2010.5676129

    Miralles, A., Marin, J., Markus, D., Herrel, A., Hedges, S.B. & Vidal, N. (2018) Molecular evidence for the paraphyly of Scolecophidia and its evolutionary implications. Journal of evolutionary biology, 31 (12), 1782–1793.

    https://doi.org/10.1111/jeb.13373

    Palumbi, S.R., Martin, A.P., Romano, S.L., McMillan, W.O., Stice, L. & Grabowski, G. (1991) The Simple Fool’s Guide to PCR Version 2. University of Hawaii, Honolulu, 15 pp.

    Palumbi, S.R. (1996) The polymerase chain reaction. In: Hillis, D.M., Moritz, C. & Mable, B.K. (Eds.), Molecular systematics. 2nd Edition. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, Massachusetts, pp. 205–247.

    Peracca, M.G. (1904) Nouvelles espèces d’Ophidiens d’Asie et d’Amerique, faisant partie de la collection du Museum d’histoire naturelle de Genève. Revue Suisse de Zoologie, 12, 663–668.

    https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.part.10151

    Purkayastha, J. & David, P. (2019) A new species of the snake genus Hebius Thompson from Northeast India (Squamata: Natricidae). Zootaxa, 4555 (1), 79–90.

    https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4555.1.6

    Rambaut, A., Suchard, M.A., Xie, D. & Drummond, A.J. (2014) Tracer. Version 1.6. Available from: http://beast.bio.ed.ac.uk.Tracer (accessed 27 July 2014)

    Ronquist, F., Teslenko, M., van der Mark, P., Ayres, D., Darling, A., Höhna, S., Larget B., Liu L., Suchard, M.A. & Huelsenbeck, J.P. (2012) MrBayes 3.2: efficient Bayesian phylogenetic inference and model choice across a large model space. Systematic Biology, 61, 539–542.

    https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/sys029

    Smith, M.A. (1943) The fauna of British India, Ceylon and Burma including the whole of the Indo-Chinese sub-region. Reptilia and Amphibia. Vol. III. Serpentes. Taylor and Francis, London, xii + 583 pp.

    Stamatakis, A., Ludwig, T. & Meier, H. (2005) RAxML-III: a fast program for maximum likelihood-based inference of large phylogenetic trees. Bioinformatics, 21, 456–463.

    https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/bti191

    Takeuchi, H., Savitzky, A.H., Ding, L., de Silva, A., Das, I., Nguyen, T.T., Tsai, T.S., Jono, T., Zhu, G.X., Mahaulpatha, D. & Tang, Y. (2018) Evolution of nuchal glands, unusual defensive organs of Asian natricine snakes (Serpentes: Colubridae), inferred from a molecular phylogeny. Ecology and evolution, 8 (20), 10219–10232.

    https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.4497

    Tamura, K., Peterson, D., Peterson, N., Stecher, G., Nei, M. & Kumar, S. (2011) MEGA 5: Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis version 5.1. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 30, 2725–2729.

    https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/mst197

    Theobald, W. (1868) Catalogue of reptiles in the Museum of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Journal of Asiatic Society, 37 (2), i–vi + 7–88

    Thompson, J.D., Higgins, D.G. & Gibson, T.J. (1994) ClustalW: improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence weighting, position-specific gap penalties and weight matrix choice. Nucleic Acids Research, 22, 4673–4680.

    https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/22.22.4673

    Uetz, P., Freed, P. & Hošek, J. (Eds.) (2019) The Reptile Database. Available from: http://www.reptile-database.org (accessed 24 April 2019)

    Vogel, G., Lalremsanga, H.T. & Vanlalhrima (2017) A second species of the genus Blythia Theobald, 1868 (Squamata: Colubridae) from Mizoram, India. Zootaxa, 4276 (4), 569–581.

    https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4276.4.8

    Wall, F. (1907) Some new Asian snakes. Journal of Bombay Natural History Society, 17, 612–618.

    Wallach, V., Williams, K.L. & Boundy, J. (2014) Snakes of the World: A catalogue of living and extinct species. CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, London, 1227 pp.

    https://doi.org/10.1201/b16901

    Weinell, J.L. & Brown, R.M. (2018) Discovery of an old, archipelago-wide, endemic radiation of Philippine. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 119, 144–150.

    https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2017.11.004

    Whitaker, R. & Captain, A. (2006) Snakes of India: the field guide. Draco Books, Chennai. xiv + 481 pp.

    Ye, J., McGinnis, S. & Madden, T.L. (2006) BLAST: improvements for better sequence analysis. Nucleic Acids Research, 34, W6–W9.

    https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkl164

    Zaher, H. (1999) Hemipenal morphology of the South American xenodontine snakes, with a proposal for a monophyletic Xenodontinae and a reappraisal of colubroid hemipenes. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, 240, 1–168.

    Zaher, H., Murphy, R.W., Arredondo, J.C., Graboski, R., Machado-Filho, P.R., Mahlow, K., Montingelli, G.G. & Zhang, Y.P. (2019) Large-scale molecular phylogeny, morphology, divergence-time estimation, and the fossil record of advanced caenophidian snakes (Squamata: Serpentes). PloS one, 14 (5), e0216148.

    https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0216148

    Zhao, E.M. (2006) Snakes of China. Anhui Science and Technology Publishing House, Hefei, 279 pp.