Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T15:55:38.589Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Variable detectability and El-Niño associations with riparian snakes in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2021

Sami Asad Open the ORCID record for Sami Asad [Opens in a new window] ,
Shi Teng Ng ,
Julsun Sikui  and
Mark-Oliver Rödel
Sami Asad*
Affiliation:
Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Berlin, Germany Institute of Biology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Shi Teng Ng
Affiliation:
Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia
Julsun Sikui
Affiliation:
Forest Research Centre, Sabah Forestry Department, Sandakan, Sabah, Malaysia
Mark-Oliver Rödel
Affiliation:
Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Berlin, Germany Berlin-Brandenburg Institute of Advanced Biodiversity Research (BBIB), Berlin, Germany
*
Author for correspondence: Sami Asad, Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Although snake populations are suffering numerous local declines, determining the scale of these declines is problematic due to the elusive nature of snakes. Determining the factors associated with species detection is therefore essential for quantifying disturbance effects on populations. From 2017 to 2019, we assessed the detectability associations of five river-associated snake species and all snake detections in general within two logging concessions in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. Data collected from both stream transects and visual encounter surveys at 47 stream sites were incorporated into an occupancy-modelling framework to determine the climatological, temporal and survey distance associations with species detection probability. Detection probability of riparian snake species was significantly associated with humidity, month (2 spp. each), survey distance and total rainfall over 60 days (1 spp. each). Pooled snake species detectability was significantly positively associated with transect distance and the 2019 El-Niño year, whilst yearly pooled snake species detections in stream transects spiked during El-Niño (2017 = 2.05, 2018 = 2.47, 2019 = 4.5 snakes per km). This study provides new insights into the detectability of riparian rainforest snakes and suggests that future studies should account for short-term (climatological and temporal) and long-term (El-Niño) factors associated with detection probability when surveying and assessing snake populations.

Keywords

climatic/temporal covariatesdetection probabilityMast yearreptilesurvey distance
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Tropical Ecology , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , January 2022 , pp. 25 - 30
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Literature cited

Asad, S, Abrams, JF, Guharajan, R, Lagan, P, Kissing, J, Sikui, J, Wilting, A and Rödel, MO (2021) Amphibian responses to conventional and reduced impact logging. Forest Ecology and Management 484, 118949.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Asad, S, Abrams, JF, Guharajan, R, Sikui, J, Wilting, A and Rödel, MO (2020a) Stream amphibian detectability and habitat associations in a reduced impact logging concession in Malaysian Borneo. Journal of Herpetology 54, 385–392.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Asad, S, Wilting, A, Siku, J and Rödel, MO (2020b). Possible spatial separation at macro-habitat scales between two congeneric Psammodynastes species, including observations of fishing behaviour in Psammodynastes pictus . Salamandra 56, 411–415.Google Scholar
Brown, GP and Shine, R (2002) Influence of weather conditions on activity of tropical snakes. Austral Ecology 27, 596–605.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burnham, KP and Anderson, DR (2004) Multimodel inference: understanding AIC and BIC in model selection. Sociological Methods & Research 33, 261–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlson, BE, Williams, J and Langshaw, J (2014) Is synchronized ecdysis in wild ratsnakes (Pantherophis alleghaniensis) linked to humidity. Herpetology Notes 7, 471–473.Google Scholar
Charlton, T (2020) A Guide to the Snakes of Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore. Kota Kinabalu: Natural History Publications (Borneo), 300 pp.Google Scholar
Chaves, LF, Chuang, TW, Sasa, M and Gutierrez, JM (2015) Snakebites are associated with poverty, weather fluctuations, and El-Niño. Science Advances 1, e1500249.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Curran, LM, Trigg, SN, McDonald, AK, Astiani, D, Hardiono, YM, Siregar, P, Caniago, I and Kasischke, E (2004) Lowland forest loss in protected areas of Indonesian Borneo. Science 303, 1000–1003.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Daltry, JC, Ross, T, Thorpe, RS, Wüster, W (1998) Evidence that humidity influences snake activity patterns: a field study of the Malayan pit viper Calloselasma rhodostoma . Ecography 21, 25–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dormann, CF, Elith, J, Bacher, S, Buchmann, C, Carl, G, Carre, G, Marquez, JRG, Gruber, B, Lafourcade, B, Leitao, PJ, Munkemuller, T, McClean, C, Osborne, PE, Reineking, B, Schroder, B, Skidmore, AK, Zurell, D and Lautenbach, S (2013) Collinearity: a review of methods to deal with it and a simulation study evaluating their performance. Ecography 36, 27–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Durso, AM, Seigel, RA (2015) A snake in the hand is worth 10,000 in the bush. Journal of Herpetology 49, 503–506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Durso, AM, Willson, JD, Winne, CT (2011) Needles in haystacks: estimating detection probability and occupancy of rare and cryptic snakes. Biological Conservation 144, 1508–1515.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fiske, IJ and Chandler, RB (2011) Unmarked: an R package for fitting hierarchical models of wildlife occurrence and abundance. Journal of Statistical Software 43, 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibbons, JW, Scott, DE, Ryan, TJ, Buhlmann, KA, Tuberville, TD, Metts, BS, Greene, JL, Mills, T, Leiden, Y, Poppy, S (2000) The global decline of reptiles, déjà vu amphibians. Bioscience 50, 653–666.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gonzalez-Andrade, F, Chippaux, JP (2010) Snake bite envenomation in Ecuador. Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 104, 588–591.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Headland, TN and Greene, HW (2011) Hunter-gatherers and other primates as prey, predators, and competitors of snakes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108, E1470–E1474.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jolley, DB, Ditchkoff, SS, Sparklin, BD, Hanson, LB, Mitchell, MS and Grand, JB (2010) Estimate of herpetofauna depredation by a population of wild pigs. Journal of Mammalogy 91, 519–524.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kitayama, K, Ushio, M and Aiba, SI (2021) Temperature is a dominant driver of distinct annual seasonality of leaf litter production of equatorial tropical rain forests. Journal of Ecology 109, 727–736.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lardner, B, Yackel Adams, AA, Savidge, JA and Reed, RN (2019) Optimizing walking pace to maximize snake detection rate: a visual encounter survey experiment. Herpetologica 75, 218–223.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lind, AJ, Welsh, HH and Tallmon, DA (2005) Garter snake population dynamics from a 16-year study: considerations for ecological monitoring. Ecological Applications 15, 294–303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacKenzie, DI, Nichols, JD, Lachman, GB, Droege, S, Royle, JA and Langtimm, CA (2002) Estimating site occupancy rates when detection probabilities are less than one. Ecology 83, 2248–2255.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacKenzie, DI and Royle, JA (2005) Designing occupancy studies: general advice and allocating survey effort. Journal of Applied Ecology 42, 1105–1114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDiarmid, RW, Foster, MS, Guyer, C, Chernoff, N and Gibbons, JW (2012) Reptile Biodiversity: Standard Methods for Inventory and Monitoring. California: University of California Press, 424 pp.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moreno-Rueda, G and Pleguezuelos, JM (2007) Long-term and short-term effects of temperature on snake detectability in the wild: a case study with Malpolon monspessulanus . Herpetological Journal 17, 204–207.Google Scholar
Mullin, SJ and Seigel, RA (2011) Snakes: Ecology and Conservation. New York: Cornell University Press, 384 pp.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nakagawa, M, Miguchi, H, Sato, K, Shoko, S and Nakashizuka, T (2007) Population dynamics of arboreal and terrestrial small mammals in a tropical rainforest, Sarawak, Malaysia. Raffles Bulletin of Zoology 55, 389–395.Google Scholar
Oliveira, ME and Martins, M (2001) When and where to find a pitviper: activity patterns and habitat use of the lancehead, Bothrops atrox, in central Amazonia, Brazil. Herpetological Natural History 8, 101–110.Google Scholar
Payus, C, Huey, LA, Adnan, F, Rimba, AB, Mohan, G, Chapagain, SK, Roder, G, Gasparatos, A and Fukushi, K (2020) Impact of extreme drought climate on water security in north Borneo: case study of Sabah. Water 12, 1135.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
R Core Team (2019) R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Reading, CJ, Luiselli, LM, Akani, GC, Bonnet, X, Amori, G, Ballouard, JM, Filippi, E, Naulleau, G, Pearson, D and Rugiero, L (2010) Are snake populations in widespread decline? Biology Letters 6, 777–780.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rödel, MO and Ernst, R (2004) Measuring and monitoring amphibian diversity in tropical forests. I. An evaluation of methods with recommendations for standardization. Ecotropica 10, 1–14.Google Scholar
Sewell, D, Guillera-Arroita, G, Griffiths, RA and Beebee, TJ (2012) When is a species declining? Optimizing survey effort to detect population changes in reptiles. PLoS ONE 7, e43387.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shine, R and Madsen, T (1996) Is thermoregulation unimportant for most reptiles? An example using water pythons (Liasis fuscus) in tropical Australia. Physiological Zoology 69, 252–269.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperry, JH and Weatherhead, PJ (2008) Prey-mediated effects of drought on condition and survival of a terrestrial snake. Ecology 89, 2770–2776.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stuebing, RB, Inger, RF and Lardner, B (2014) A Field Guide to the Snakes of Borneo. 2nd Edn, Kota Kinabalu: Natural History Publications (Borneo), 310 pp.Google Scholar
Ward, RJ, Griffiths, RA, Wilkinson, JW and Cornish, N (2017) Optimising monitoring efforts for secretive snakes: a comparison of occupancy and N-mixture models for assessment of population status. Scientific Reports 7, 18074.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Weatherhead, PJ, Blouin-Demers, G and Prior, KA (2002). Synchronous variation and long-term trends in two populations of black rat snakes. Conservation Biology 16, 1602–1608.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wells, K, Kalko, EKV, Lakim, MB and Pfeiffer, M (2007) Effects of rain forest logging on species richness and assemblage composition of small mammals in Southeast Asia. Journal of Biogeography 34, 1087–1099.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winne, CT, Willson, JD, Todd, BD, Andrews, KM and Gibbons, JW (2007). Enigmatic decline of a protected population of Eastern Kingsnakes, Lampropeltis getula, in South Carolina. Copeia 2007, 507–519.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zamora-Camacho, FJ, Moreno-Rueda, G and Pleguezuelos, JM (2010). Long- and short-term impact of temperature on snake detection in the wild: further evidence from the snake Hemorrhois hippocrepis . Acta Herpetologica 5, 143–150.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Image

Asad et al. supplementary material

Asad et al. supplementary material

Download Asad et al. supplementary material(Image)
Image 243.3 KB