Herpele squalostoma (Stutchbury, 1836)

Sánchez-Vialas, Alberto, Calvo-Revuelta, Marta, Castroviejo-Fisher, Santiago & De, Ignacio, 2020, Synopsis of the Amphibians of Equatorial Guinea based upon the Authors’ Field Work and Spanish Natural History Collections, Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences 66 (8), pp. 137-230 : 172-173

Herpele squalostoma (Stutchbury, 1836)

TYPE LOCALITY.— “Gaboon, Africa” .

DISTRIBUTION.— This species is distributed from Nigeria to eastern of Central African Republic and southwards to Democratic Republic of Congo. In Equatorial Guinea, it has been recorded from Bioko (Martínez and Sáez 1886; Mertens 1941, 1965), and Río Muni (Nussbaum and Pfrender 1998; Lasso et al. 2002) ( Map 28B ). Furthermore, Taylor and Salvador (1978) mentioned the species on Elobey Island.

COMMENTS.— In a similar way to the argument presented about the reliability of the Geotrypetes seraphini record from Bioko, Nussbaum and Pfrender (1998) raised the question of whether the locality of the specimen MNCN 1232 (collected from Bioko by Amado Osorio in 1865; see Bueno and Blanco 2002) is reliable. Even if the locality of this specimen represents a cataloguing error, there is another record of this species from the island between Musola and San Carlos ( Mertens 1941, 1965). Wilkinson et al. (2003) provided a revision of the genus.

SPECIMENS EXAMINED.— Three specimens. Equatorial Guinea, Fernando Poo ( =Bioko ), <1885 ( MNCN 1232 ) ; Equatorial Guinea, Río Muni <1885 ( MNCN 1238 ) ; Bata , Litoral, <1885 ( MNCN 1741 ) .

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are indebted to Victoria González Cascón, of Laboratorio de Biogeografía Informática of the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, who made the species distribution maps. We give thanks to María Tirante, who kindly made available the vertebrate collection facilities of Estación Biológica de Doñana, Sevilla. We are also grateful to Ignacio Martín and Twan Leenders, for kindly providing some pictures of amphibians from Equatorial Guinea. Mary Gonder, Patrick McLaughlin, and Jessica Weinberg, from the Bioko Biodiversity Protection Program ; Rayna Bell, from the California Academy of Sciences; and Bryan Stuart, from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, helped us with information on new records and photographs. This paper was partially funded by projects CGL2014-56160-P and PGC2018-097421-B-100 of the Spanish Government (PI: I. De la Riva). The authors wish to express their appreciation to Dr. Aaron Bauer, who reviewed the paper and offered many suggestions and grammatical edits for its improvement, as did Dr. Rayna Bell, and to Dr. Alan Leviton for his invaluable editorial advice.

Figures

MAPS 28A–C. Distribution maps for Equatorial Guinean records of (A) Geotripetes seraphini; (B) Herpele squalostoma (the insular record of Elobey Island is not showed).