Pareas macularius Blyth, 1868

Ziegler, Thomas, Hendrix, Ralf, Thanh, Vu Ngoc, Vogt, Martina, Forster, Bernhard & Kien, Dang Ngoc, 2007, The diversity of a snake community in a karst forest ecosystem in the central Truong Son, Vietnam, with an identification key, Zootaxa 1493, pp. 1-40 : 15

Pareas macularius Blyth, 1868 : Spotted slug snake / Ran ho may dom

A single adult female specimen (ZFMK 86446, SVL 371, TaL 74, TL 445 mm) was discovered, that had folded oviducts and oviduct eggs with a maximum diameter of 10.1 mm. The specimen was found during the dry season, at night of 21 June 2006, between the leaves of a small tree in about 1.5 m height in the Cha Noi region at an altitude of about 350–400 m above sea level. Scalation features are as follows: seven supralabials, separated from eye by a longish subocular; seven (right) and eight (left) infralabials; three pairs of chin shields; one large and elongated loreal, on the right side in contact with eye; one preocular; one subocular; two postoculars; prefrontals in contact with the eye; two anterior temporals, followed by three posterior temporals; 15 (keeled) dorsal scale rows at midbody; 158 ventrals; anal plate entire; 45 divided subcaudals. The specimen keys out under Amblycephalus tamdaoensis in Bourret (1936). The coloration and pattern of our specimen (see Figure 15 ) correspond to the description given in Bourret (1936), however, the only difference we could observe is the presence of only a single postocular (see Bourret 1936). Orlov et al. (2000) treated tamdaoensis as subspecies of Pareas macularius and Nguyen et al. (2005) list Amblycephalus tamdaoensis Bourret as synonym of Pareas macularius . As distribution of the latter, Nguyen et al. (2005) list some northern Vietnamese provinces southwards to Nghe An Province, from where another specimen (ZFMK 82925) of the species was available to us. Thus, our recent finding represents not only the first record for the Quang Binh Province and for Phong Nha - Ke Bang National Park in particular, but also the southernmost record known from Vietnam.

Figures

FIGURE 15. Spotted slug snake (Pareas macularius) in its habitat in Phong Nha - Ke Bang (ZFMK 86446). Photo: Thomas Ziegler