A worldwide community photographing and learning about wildlife
Project Noah Nature School
Here is the story: It don't look like an amphibian but it surely is. It is a caecilian, one of the stranger life forms on Earth. The pictures were taken very fast because the caecilian was drying out by the side of the road, where it was lying after a huge landslide. The burning sun was drying the animal so fast that I had to run to the closest water stream and let it stay there. The first think the animal did, was drink and drink and drink. Then it escaped. Sometimes as a biologist you are tempted to collect the animal, but looking at such a miracle of nature, is so overwhelming that I decided to let nature find its way, and I let the animal free. Obviously, now depend only on this pictures to identify it.
High montane very humid tropical forest.
The Rhinatrematidae, the family of neotropical tailed caecilians or beaked caecilians, are found in the equatorial countries of South America. They are usually regarded as the most primitive of the caecilian families, with numerous characteristics lacking in the other groups. For example, they still possess tails, and their mouths are not recessed on the underside of their heads. They lay their eggs in cavities in the soil. The larvae have external gills, and live in seepage areas until they metamorphose. The adults live in moist soil and leaf litter. (http://www.scoopweb.com/Rhinatrematidae)
Spotted on Nov 11, 2010
Submitted on Apr 24, 2013
7 Comments
Sounds great, I hope someone is able to find it again! And no problem, I learned a lot more about caecilians in the process, so it helped me too :)
Thank you AshleyT. I will send the pictures to my friend which is an herpetologist with experience on caecilians. I honestly hope that they can find a new specimen in the zone and describe it. Thank you very much for your help, I really appreciate it.
Well that is exciting still! No wonder I was getting so frustrated when I couldn't find an ID. At least you got it down to Genus, and it's good you talked to a Caecilian specialist about it. I would also suggest trying to find some amphibian specialist in Ecuador to submit the information to, so maybe they can go out and try and find it, or at least have the information if someone else finds it.
Congrats on your new find :)
From the caecilian specialist group : It sure belong to the genus Epicrionops, of which, for Ecuador, only .Epicrionops marmoratus, E. bicolor and E. petersi have been reported. It is none of them, but sure it is Epicrionops.
Thank you AshleyT.
I just talked to a friend in France which is an specialist on Caecilians and lived in Ecuador for a while. He told me that definitively this is a new specie. Unfortunately, my conservationist heart pushed me to not to collect the animal, so this is going to be an impossible task. In order to identify it correctly, I need to look closely to some details and it is not possible without the actual specimen. The only thing that we know for sure is that somewhere in the Sangay National Park, there is a new specie of caecilian surviving the advance of civilization. We will have to live with it. The closer genus is Ichthyophis, but it is native from India and China ( http://novataxa.blogspot.com/2012/02/201... )
Well Gustavo, I have been looking for an ID for this for almost two hours now. Unfortunately, not much is known about caecilians so it was hard to findd information. But in case you really want to know the ID, I will give you what I figured out:
Only 5 families occur in South America. Caeciliidae, Dermophiidae, Rhinatrematidae, Siphonopidae, and Typhlonectidae.
Of these 5 families, only 4 genera are known to occur in Ecuador: Epicrionops(3 species), Chthonerpeton(1 species), Oscaecilia(1 species), and Caecilia(6 species).
Yours looks nothing like these, and it's very possible it is a new species known to occur in Ecuador since they aren't studied well. I did not look at all the caecilians in South America (I don't have time for that), but it did not match anything found so far in Ecuador. Hope this helps!