Ichthyophis beddomei Peters, 1880

Class: Amphibia > Order: Gymnophiona > Family: Ichthyophiidae > Genus: Ichthyophis > Species: Ichthyophis beddomei

Ichthyophis Beddomei Peters, 1880 "1879", Monatsber. Preuss. Akad. Wiss. Berlin, 1879: 932. Holotype: ZMB 5545 according to the original publication; lost according to Bauer, Good, and Günther, 1993, Mitt. Zool. Mus. Berlin, 69: 298. Type locality: "Nilgherries" (= Nilgiri), State of Tamil Nadu, India.

English Names

Nilgherries Caecilian (Frank and Ramus, 1995, Compl. Guide Scient. Common Names Amph. Rept. World: 25).

Beddome's Caecilian (Das and Dutta, 1998, Hamadryad, 23: 67; Dinesh, Radhakrishnan, Gururaja, and Bhatta, 2009, Rec. Zool. Surv. India, Occas. Pap., 302: 128).

Yellow-striped Caecilian (Daniels, 2005, Amph. Peninsular India: 77).

Nilgiri Striped Caecilian (Dinesh, Radhakrishnan, Deepak, and Kulkarni, 2023, Fauna India Checklist, vers. 5.0 : 16).

Distribution

Western Ghats of southern India (Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Kerala).

Geographic Occurrence

Natural Resident: India

Endemic: India

Comment

According to Taylor, 1968, Caecilians of the World: 59, many references to Ichthyophis glutinosus in India refer to this species. See accounts by Inger, Shaffer, Koshy, and Bakde, 1984, J. Bombay Nat. Hist. Soc., 81: 408, Bhatta, 1998, J. Biosciences, Bangalore, 23: 73–85, and Pillai and Ravichandran, 1999, Rec. Zool. Surv. India, Occas. Pap., 172: 22–25. Dutta, 1997, Amph. India Sri Lanka: 21, and Chanda, 2002, Handb. Indian Amph.: 187, provided brief accounts. Ravichandran, 2004, Hamadryad, 28: 98–104, summarized range. Gower, Bahir, Mapatuna, Pethiyagoda, Raheem, and Wilkinson, 2005, Raffles Bull. Zool., Suppl., 12: 153–161, noted that the nominal species may be composite. Daniels, 2005, Amph. Peninsular India: 77–79, provided an account. Das and Dutta, 2007, Hamadryad, 31: 154–181, noted three larval descriptions in the literature. A brief characterization, photograph, and dot map for the southern Western Ghats provided by Subramanian, Dinesh, and Radhakrishnan, 2013, Atlas of Endemic Amph. W. Ghats: 178. See comments by Kotharambath, Wilkinson, and Gower, 2024, J. Vert. Biol., Prague, 73: 1-12, regarding systematics and range. 

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