Amphibian and reptilian records from south-central Mali and western Burkina Faso

While the forests of the Upper Guinean region of West Africa have been the focus of much herpetofaunal attention in recent decades (e.g., Penner et al. 2011), many areas of landlocked West Africa remain under-surveyed. Some work has been done on a number of these countries, for example, Guinea-Bissau (Auliya et al. 2012), Senegal (Joger & Lambert 2002), Guinea (Böhme 2000, Rödel et al. 2004, Greenbaum & Carr 2005, Hillers et al. 2008, Böhme et al. 2011); relatively little, however, has been published on the herpetofauna of Mali and Burkina Faso when compared with their southern neighbours. For Mali, Joger & Lambert (1996, 1997) provided an annotated checklist and analysis of the diversity and biogeography of the herpetofauna, while Böhme et al. (1996) provided some additional records for both countries. Rödel (2000) described the West African frog fauna and listed country records for each species, including Mali and Burkina Faso. Chirio (2009) gave records for the geographic triangle formed by Niger, Benin and Burkina Faso where the border-crossing “W Transfrontier Biosphere Reserve” (“Réserve de Biosphère Transfrontalière du W”, RBTW) is situated. More recently, Trape & Mané (2006) and Trape et al. (2012) provided updated distribution maps at a one-degree scale for snakes and other reptiles respectively, for all West African countries. Mediannikov et al. (2012) revised the genus Agama all over West Africa with an integrative approach which is, however, partly in conflict with the results of Wagner et al. (2009) and Leaché et al. (2014). Finally, Trape & Mané (2017) published a summarising paper on the snake fauna of Mali. Here, we report on some herpetological voucher material from Mali and Burkina Faso (Fig. 1) that has entered the Zoologisches Forschungsmuseum Alexander Koenig (ZFMK) in Bonn after 1996, since the publication of a first note on this topic happened 22 years ago (Böhme et al. 1996). Our Malian records were made by Jeffrey Heath and two native collaborators (Seydou Moro and Oumar Pergourou, see below) in September 2009, July 2010 and on various occasions in 2011 and 2012 in the Dogon Province, southern Mali, at Sévaré near Mopti (14°32’N, 04°06’W) and in the following villages of the area between Douentza and Bandiagara: – Anda near Douentza (14°49’N, 03°01’W) is nested at the base of a small rocky hill (inselberg). Between the inselbergs are sandy fields, but there are also some creeks and waterholes so that there are several microenvironments (Fig. 2). – between Douentza (15°00’N, 01°22’W) and Boni (15°07’N, 01°22’W) on pasture ground with wetlands; – Pergué (14°85’N, 03°02’W) near Douentza (Fig. 3) which is on a rocky shelf forming part of an inselberg. In the outskirts of the village, to the south of the inselberg, there are sandy plains. – Kikara (15°12’N, 02°44’W) near Douentza, on the northern slope of Gandamia inselberg (750 m a.s.l.), mountain top. – Koporo-Pen (14°08’N, 03°11’W), sandy plains east of Bandiagara. Abstract. Some amphibians and reptiles from southern Mali and southwestern Burkina Faso have been deposited in the Zoologisches Forschungsmuseum Alexander Koenig (ZFMK) since the year 2000. Supplemented by some photographic voucher material they contain several remarkable, in some cases even new records for the two respective countries. Malian specimens were collected mainly in the region between Douentza and Bandiagara in the south-central part of the country, while those from Burkina Faso are from the Bobo Dioulasso area in the southwestern part of the country. Three amphibian species are new for Mali’s faunal list (Leptopelis bufonides, Ptychadena trinodis, Pyxicephalus sp. as the first representative of its genus). Two specimens of a small-sized Agama species cannot yet be assigned to a described species with certainty but are in any case of zoogeographical interest. A specimen of Chamaeleo gracilis documents the second record of this species for Burkina Faso, the first one in the western part of the country. The slender blind snake Leptotyphlops albiventer is recorded for the first time for this country.