Preliminary Checklist of Amphibians and Reptiles from Baramita , Guyana

well as to a large swampy area that had once been a manmade lake for landing sea planes that serviced the mining operations. The immediate area around Baramita is primarily disturbed, low-canopy secondary forest. Away from the village, moist, lowland, non-flooded primary forest with tall canopy becomes dominant and is present on trails to the east and south and along the Baramita and Barama Rivers.


Introduction
In our first paper (MacCulloch and Reynolds 2012) we briefly review some recent pertinent literature on the amphibians and reptiles of the Guiana Shield Region (Starace 1998;Gorzula and Señaris 1999; Lescure and Marty 2000;Reynolds et al. 2001;Avila-Pires 2005;Donnelly et al. 2005, McDiarmid andDonnelly 2005;Señaris and MacCulloch 2005;MacCulloch et al. 2007, Kok and Kalamandeen 2008, MacCulloch and Lathrop 2009, Cole et al. in press) and report on the herpetofauna at two upland sites in the southern foothills of the Pakaraima Mountains in west-central Guyana.In this companion paper, we report the results from two separate collecting trips to the lowland forests near Baramita.There is relatively little recent literature on the herpetofaunas at specific lowland sites in Guyana.Donnelly et al. (2005) reported on the herpetofauna of the Iwokrama lowland tropical rainforest in central Guyana, and Ernst et al. (2005) reviewed the anuran fauna of the Mabura Hill Forest Reserve, also in central Guyana.This paper provides the first report on the herpetofauna from a tropical lowland rainforest site in north western Guyana.

Study area
Baramita (07°22'14" N, 60°29'28" W, elevation ca.120 m, Figure 1) is an Amerindian village located near the eastern Venezuela border in the Northwest Region of Guyana within an extensive area of continuous tall, evergreen, non-flooded rainforest (Huber et al. 1995).The Northwest Region is sparsely inhabited by primarily Carib and Arawak Amerindians, but Baramita is one of the largest Amerindian communities in Guyana (Adams 1982).The airstrip at Baramita (Figure 2) is flanked by several large, sturdy, single-level wooden houses built upon 2 m tall pilings.Baramita is an old mining community with numerous trails leading off to abandoned mines (e.g., Golden City, Millionaire, and Old World, among others), as Abstract: We provide an initial checklist of the herpetofauna of Baramita, a lowland rainforest site in the Northwest Region of Guyana.Twenty-five amphibian and 28 reptile species were collected during two separate dry-season visits.New country records for two species of snakes are documented, contributing to the knowledge on the incompletely known herpetofauna of Guyana.Natural History (USNM).

Results and Discussion
Our surveys of the herpetofauna at Baramita produced a total of 53 species of anurans, lizards, snakes, and turtles.Caecilians, crocodilians, and amphisbaenians were not recorded but are expected to be present.Salamanders do not occur in the Guiana Shield.
Amphibians were collected in greater numbers than reptiles, although reptile diversity was higher (25 amphibian species in nine families vs. 28 reptile species in 13 families).
The majority of all specimens were collected along forest trails from the forest floor, from trail-side vegetation, at stream crossings and pools, and from riparian habitat along the Barama and Baramita Rivers.Rhinella marina, Scinax ruber, Ameiva ameiva, Kentropyx calcarata, Plica plica, Leptophis ahaetulla and Siphlophis compressus were also found in the cleared area around the air field and in the vicinity of dwellings.Larvae of Ameerega trivittata were collected from the backs of three adult males.
We collected two species of snakes that have not been reported previously from Guyana; Rhinobothryum lentiginosum, and Imantodes lentiferus.Both species have a widespread distribution in western South America from Colombia and Venezuela south to Bolivia (I.lentiferus) or Paraguay (R. lentiginosum) and are also recorded from French Guiana.The previously known distributions, however, all had an apparent gap between eastern Venezuela and French Guiana (Avila-Pires 2005, Starace 1998).Our collection of these species from Baramita partially fills this gap in their distributions.
Species collected and specimen catalog numbers are in Table 1.Photographs of some species are in Figure 3.
Like other South American lowland herpetofaunas, the amphibians at Baramita are dominated by frogs and toads, and the reptiles by lizards and snakes.Among the anurans, Hylidae (10 spp.) are most diverse followed by Leptodactylidae (five spp.).Similarly, hylids were more diverse than leptodactylids in the central Guyana lowland anuran faunas reported for Iwokrama (Donnelly et al. 2005) and Mabura Hill (Ernst et al. 2005).For the squamates at Baramita, lizards and snakes are each represented by six families, but the snakes are considerably more speciose with 17 species vs. 10 species for the lizards.A similar squamate pattern was reported for Iwokrama (Donnelly et al. 2005, appendix 17.1); seven families and 41 species of snakes vs. six families and 23 species of lizards.
Not surprisingly, the lowland herpetofauna at Baramita is somewhat more diverse than the herpetofauna we recorded at the west-central Guyana upland sites of Paramakatoi and Kato (MacCulloch and Reynolds 2012).At Baramita, 25 anurans, 27 squamates and one turtle species were found, whereas the combined herpetofauna we recorded at Paramakatoi and Kato was 20 anurans, 22 squamates and two turtle species.The herpetofaunal composition we recorded for Baramita is not directly comparable to the more rigorously sampled lowland central Guyana sites at the Iwokrama Forest or at the Mabura Hill Forest Reserve.A number of factors limit comparisons of the Baramita herpetofauna with these other sites, including the habitat disturbance surrounding Baramita due to long-term mining practices and human habitation, as well as our sampling effort that was of limited duration and conducted only during the dry seasons.Despite this, our species list for Baramita offers the best currently available information for a disturbed lowland forest site in northwestern Guyana, and provides a solid start to documenting the herpetofaunal composition in this region.In addition, the fact that we were able to document two snake taxa that were not previously reported from Guyana during our limited collecting emphasizes the need for continued sampling of the herpetofauna in the Northwest Region of Guyana.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Map of Guyana showing location of Baramita.

Table 1 .
Amphibians and reptiles collected at Baramita.