Boiga flaviviridis Vogel & Ganesh, 2013

Ganesh, S. R., Mallik, Ashok Kumar, Achyuthan, N. S., Shanker, Kartik & Vogel, Gernot, 2021, A new species of Boiga (Serpentes: Colubridae) from the Southern Western Ghats of India with a molecular phylogeny and expanded characterisation of related species, Zootaxa 4981 (3), pp. 449-468 : 460

Boiga flaviviridis Vogel & Ganesh, 2013

( Fig. 1–2 ; Table 1 )

Suggested common name: Yellow-green cat snake.

Boiga beddomei (non Wall, 1909)—Chaitanya et al. 2019

Boiga cf. flaviviridis — Giri et al. 2019

Additional specimens examined. (n=1). INDIA. CESS 529 , an adult female from Horsley Hills, Chittoor dt., Andhra Pradesh, Eastern Ghats .

Complementary Diagnosis. Boiga flaviviridis is phylogenetically sister (node support 100%) to the Sri Lankan Boiga cf. ranawanei . These two taxa are closely related to B. thackerayi (node support 100%). Boiga flaviviridis is 9.1–9.5% genetically divergent from its sister species B. cf. ranawanei and has 2.2% intraspecific divergence between specimens from Horsley hills and Meghamalai at cyt b.

Comments. Boiga flaviviridis is a poorly known species for which phylogenetic data of well-identified vouchers are provided herein for the first time. The Giri et al. (2019) sequence represented as B. cf. flaviviridis is from leeward slopes of Western Ghats, a region not previously known to harbor this species (see Vogel & Ganesh, 2013). The present sequence from Horsley Hills is close to the referred material’s locality: Kaigal, both situated in Chittoor hills of the Eastern Ghats.

Figures

FIGURE 1. Maximum likelihood (ML) tree of the Boiga ceylonensis group inhabiting peninsular India and Sri Lanka. Photographs on the right depict the following species: A: B. nuchalis, B: B. ceylonensis, C: B. beddomei; D: B. trigonata; E: B. barnesii; F: B. thackerayi; G: B. flaviviridis; H: B. westermanni; I: B. siamensis; J: B. forsteni; K: B. cyanea; L: Telescopus dhara).

FIGURE 2. Map of the Indian Peninsula showing the distribution records of Boiga whitakeri sp. nov. (blue) type locality with black center, B. beddomei (red), B. nuchalis (black), B. thackerayi (green) and B. flaviviridis (pink).