Slender snake
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Slender snake ( Platyceps najadum ) |
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| Platyceps najadum | ||||||||||||
| ( Eichwald , 1831) |
The slender snake ( Platyceps najadum , Syn . : Coluber najadum ) is an average about one meter long, quite slender snake belonging to the genus Platyceps within the family of the adder .
features
The snake is usually about one meter long, but specimens with a length of up to 140 cm are also known. The head is clearly separated from the body and the eyes with their round pupils are quite large. It can move fairly quickly and has a number of dark, round spots on the sides of the neck that are believed to protect the animal.
distribution and habitat
The slender snake can be found in Croatia , Bosnia and Herzegovina , Montenegro , Macedonia , Albania , Serbia , Greece , southern Bulgaria , Transcaucasia and the southwestern Middle East . The natural habitat is very diverse, it includes river valleys, vineyards, slopes with appropriate vegetation, forest clearings, ruins, sometimes also the edges of cattle pastures, if these are sufficiently overgrown. It rises in the mountains to up to 2000 m, but can also be found in the lowlands.
Way of life
The slender snake is a diurnal ground snake that hibernates for five to six months and is active from March to October at the earliest. Like most angry snakes, the slender snake is quite aggressive and tends to have strong defensive behavior in the form that it bites violently when grasped. Your bites can cause swelling around the bite site, light sweats, restlessness, and increased heart rate.
Nutrition and reproduction
The animal feeds on lizards hunting, which it pursues very quickly, only in times of need does it fall back on large insects and nesting mice. The snake lays three to five elongated eggs in burrows or under stones, from which the young hatch in late August to September.
Systematics
Until genetic analyzes had shown otherwise, the slender snake, like many other snakes that specialize in hunting nimble prey such as lizards, was placed in the genus of the furious snake ( Coluber ). After it had been shown that the species of the genus Coluber did not have a common ancestral form, the species of the ancient world were moved to the genera Dolichophis , Hierophis , Hemerophis , Hemorrhois and Platyceps , among others . Like many other genera in the Colubridae family, the systematics of Platyceps is still under discussion and is the subject of current research.
Hazard and protection
The slender snake is not threatened , apart from a few local populations (for example in the western pre-Caucasus ). On the Red List of IUCN it is classified as uncritical ( "Least Concern", LC).
literature
- Ulrich Gruber: The snakes in Europe and around the Mediterranean. Franckh-Kosmos Verlag, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-440-05753-4 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Dieter Glandt: Pocket dictionary of the amphibians and reptiles of Europe. All types from the Canary Islands to the Urals. Quelle and Meyer, Wiebelsheim 2010, ISBN 978-3-494-01470-8 .
- ↑ ZT Nagy, R. Lawson, U. Joger, M. Wink: Molecular systematics of racers, whipsnakes and relatives (Reptilia: Colubridae) using mitochondrial and nuclear markers . In: Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research . tape 42 , no. 3 . Blackwell Verlag, 2004, ISSN 0947-5745 , p. 223-233 , doi : 10.1111 / j.1439-0469.2004.00249.x ( PDF, 0.2 MB ). PDF, 0.2 MB ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Petros Lymberakis, Rastko Ajtic, Varol Tok, Ismail H. Ugurtas, Murat Sevinç, Pierre-André Crochet, Ahmad Mohammed Mousa Disi, Souad Hraoui-Bloquet, Riyad Sadek, Idriz Haxhiu, Wolfgang Böhme, Aram Agasyan, Boris Tuniyev, Natalia Ananjeva , Nikolai Orlov: Platyceps najadum . In: IUCN Red List of Threatened Species . Version 2010.2, 2008 ( iucnredlist.org [accessed August 22, 2010]).
