I would like to obtain information on the habitat use (terrestrial, arboreal, etc) and activity patterns (nocturnal, diurnal, etc) of all snake species. Does such a dataset already exist somewhere? I haven't been very successful in finding papers or databases with such comprehensive information so any suggestions are more than welcome!
I have been struggling with that for years... In the past, I used habitat from the IUCN redlist but the categories were not well defined for the study I was doing and some were not super accurate but for habitat in a large sense (i.e. arboreal, terrestrial etc) you can use this info.
Regarding the activity patterns, it's way more complicated as it as not been characterized for a lot of species as they were sometimes only seen 1 in the field. Also, I think there is a sampling bias in the activity pattern as some people tend to go to the field by night and some other during daytime... it is always more complicated than it seems.
I can give you the info for about 36 species. I agree with you that if someone is willing to do this tedious bibliographical work, it would be very helpful!
Let me know if you find any other source!
Good luck
Hi Marion, I agree the data are highly biased and for many species there is barely any information available, or limited to that of one specimen (holotype).
Apparently such a data set does indeed not exist yet - so I spend a few weeks building one from scratch for all species. My use for it is merely to build a snake predation risk model for lizards so it did not have to be super accurate (that being said I'm sure it can be reliably used for any comparative study on snakes).
I'll see if I can upload it somewhere :)
Hi Chris,
I know a couple of resources regarding squamate traits that you might find useful:
1) https://europepmc.org/article/med/32269478
2) https://academic.oup.com/biolinnean/article-abstract/125/1/61/5056838
3) https://scholarworks.uno.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?filename=2&article=3344&context=td&type=additional (the supplementary tables)
4) http://www.stevenpoe.net/uploads/3/7/3/4/37343605/feldmanetal.2015snakeviviparity.pdf
I could send you the .pdfs of those papers if you can´t get access to them.
Juan
I don't know of a comprehensive source for all snakes, but Reptile Database (http://reptile-database.reptarium.cz) has a useful list of references from which those data may be gleaned for each species. At the end of the day, most species have little natural history data available, particularly in the tropics, so many authors have based diel activity and habitat use on stomach contents (e.g., predated arboreal lizards) and morphological form (e.g., eye, skull, and teeth morphology; relative tail length or prehensile abilities; etc.).
As a supplement, you could also consider using SquamataBase (https://europepmc.org/article/med/32269478), the most comprehensive data repository for snake diet records available.
If those avenues aren't productive, you may just have to look at more specific or local comprehensive books like Campbell and Lamar's 'Venomous Reptiles of the Western Hemisphere' or Ernst and Ernst's 'Snakes of the United States and Canada', etc. I have a good number of PDFs I could share if you have trouble acquiring these kinds of sources.
Andrew Michael Durso may have some additional recommendations.
Anat Feldman has published data on the reproductive mode of all snakes and much about life history traits. Rachel Schwarz then added some more
see their publications here: http://www.gardinitiative.org/publications.html
and data here: http://www.gardinitiative.org/data.html
In addition to what the colleagues have mentioned, there is also: http://snakedatabase.org/ Where you can find information on toxicity, teething types and size of the world's snake species.
The snake database http://snakedatabase.org/, has migrated to http://snakedb.org/.
Ultimately though, the truth is that we do not have that kind of information (or at least it would have to be filled in by making inferences from closely-related species) for probably 30-40% of snake species.
There is no such a data-set. I would go to national atlases and guides, and be ready to deal with a variety of habitat classifications, lack of standardization and related biases for many species.
You can find data on snake traits in the supplementary material of these papers:
Meiri, S., Feldman, A., & Kratochvíl, L. (2015). Squamate hatchling size and the evolutionary causes of negative offspring size allometry. Journal of evolutionary biology, 28(2), 438-446.
Feldman, A., Bauer, A. M., Castro‐Herrera, F., Chirio, L., Das, I., Doan, T. M., ... & Torres‐Carvajal, O. (2015). The geography of snake reproductive mode: a global analysis of the evolution of snake viviparity. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 24(12), 1433-1442.
Harrington, S. M., De Haan, J. M., Shapiro, L., & Ruane, S. (2018). Habits and characteristics of arboreal snakes worldwide: arboreality constrains body size but does not affect lineage diversification. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 125(1), 61-71.
and Figueroa`s Dissertation:
https://scholarworks.uno.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?filename=2&article=3344&context=td&type=additional
And on this website:
http://www.gardinitiative.org/data.html
You could also look at scientific journals that publish data papers such as some from Pensoft
This might be useful: Article An amniote life-history database to perform comparative anal...
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Data Mining
- Classification