Diet of the Semiaquatic Snake Erythrolamprus miliaris (Dipsadidae, Xenodontinae) in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest

A water snake uses the tail and body to scan for fish prey in tide pools

“…From our first sighting of the snake in the tide pool, the above-described event lasted about 1 min 15 s. This is the first report of tail and body scanning behaviour for E. miliaris and, to our knowledge, the first one by any Scanning flushed a frillfin goby Bathygobius soporator (red asterisk) from its shelter -note the snake's tail position while moving it in the crevice, C. Further scanning caused the goby to move towards the snake, which quickly caught the prey underwater, D. The snake moves to higher ground on a rock and swallows the prey tail first snake. Our record adds to the already known variable feeding tactics of this water snake, which forages in diverse microhabitats and preys on a wide array of vertebrates (Sazima & Haddad, 1992;Marques & Souza, 1993;Duarte et al, 2014, Rocha-Lima et al, 2018Van der Burg, 2020;Eisfeld et al, 2021).…”

Heavy, Bulky, or Both: What Does “Large Prey” Mean to Snakes?

“…At constant RPM, however, items that are fusiform, ovoid, or asymmetric in cross-section (III and IV, Figs. 1, 6), rather than uniform and elongate (II), require increased gapes—so generalists should drop these from their diet at lower RPM than type II prey (potentially testable, e.g., with a South American Watersnake [ Erythrolamprus miliaris ] eating fishes, frogs, and caecilians, Eisfeld et al, 2021; see next section on colubrids).…”

“…References on snake taxa that do not mention RPM or RPB include López Jurado and Caballero (1981), Bea and Braña (1988), Bhupathy and Vijayan (1989), Jones and Whitford (1989), Zug and Ineich (1993), Revault (1996), Shine and Keogh (1996), Luiselli and Akani (1998), Luiselli and Angelici (1998), Rodríguez and Drummond (2000), Hill et al (2001), Holycross et al (2001), Platt et al (2001), Shewchuk and Austin (2001), Clark (2002), Holycross et al (2002), Gardner and Mendelson (2003), Monteiro et al (2006), Machio et al (2010), Gaiarsa et al (2013), Prudente et al (2014), Sparks et al (2015), Carbajal-Márquez et al (2016, 2020), Platt et al (2016), Layloo et al (2017), Prötzel et al (2018), Bringsøe (2019), Berg et al (2020), Bringsøe et al (2020), Cabral et al (2020), Escalante and Acuña (2020), Feldman et al (2020), R. Maritz et al (2020), Vela et al (2020), Vásquez-Cruz (2020), Cochran et al (2021), Conradie and Pinto (2021), Eisfeld et al (2021), Faraone et al (2021), Hoefer et al (2021), Maritz et al (2021a), Mebarki et al (2021), and Thomas and Allain (2021).…”

NECROPHAGY BY Erythrolamprus poecilogyrus (WIED, 1824) (REPTILIA: DIPSADIDAE) IN PARAGUAY

“…Necrophagy has only been documented in the scientific literature in very few Neotropical snake species: Boiruna sertaneja Zaher, 1996, Bothrops jararaca (Wied, 1824), Erythrolamprus miliaris (Linnaeus, 1758), Helicops modestus Günther, 1861, Hydrodynastes gigas (Duméril, Bibron & Duméril, 1854), Leptodeira annulata (Linnaeus, 1758), L. ashmeadii (Hallowell, 1845), Micrurus surinamensis (Cuvier, 1817), Micrurus frontalis (Duméril, Bibron and Duméril, 1854), and Philodryas patagoniensis (Girard, 1858) (Sazima & Strüssmann, 1990;Mora-Benavides, 1999;Gomes et al, 2017;Marques et al, 2017;Ucha & dos Santos, 2017;Sales et al, 2019;Eisfeld et al, 2021;Oliveira et al, 2023). In this note, we add Erythrolamprus poecilogyrus to this list.…”