'Invasive' snake was a unique species all along

• Autores: Sean Mowbray
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3146, 2017, pág. 12
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • On an island off West Africa lives a venomous snake. It was thought to be an introduced species and plans were afoot to wipe it out. Now it turns out to be a species unique to the island, one that should be conserved. Known as the cobra-preta, the snake is found on São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea. Local people have a saying about it: homem mordido, homem perdido, or "man bitten, man lost". Luis Ceríaco of Villanova University in Pennsylvania found this odd. Ceriaco found an account of a 1506 visit to São Tome by a Portuguese explorer, who wrote of a black snake "50 venomous that when it bites a man, his eyes will explode out of the head and he will die". That was clearly the cobra-preta, Ceriaco says, albeit depicted with eye-popping hyperbole. Ceríaco found that cobra-pretas were often larger than forest cobras and that scales on their underside had less white. Genetic analysis confirmed the cobra-preta as a new species, Naja peroescobari