On the presence of the endemic skink Chalcides simonyi Steind., 1891 in Lanzarote (Canary Islands)

The Canarian herpetofauna is characterized by a high number of endemic species (Machado et al., 1985). Reptiles in this archipelago are exclusively represented by tyhree families: Lacertidae, Gekkonidae and Scincidae, Chalcides being the only genus of the family Scincidae in the Canary Islands. This genus includes three endemic species, C. viridanus from Tenerife, La Gomera and El Hierro, C. sexlineatus from Gran Canaria, and C. simonyi up to now only known for the island of Fuerteventura. Therefore, skinks were present in fgive of the seven main islands, except Lanzarote and La Palma (Bischoff, 1985). Despite Lanzarote being only 10 km away from Fuerteventura, the other semidesertic island of the Canaries (100 km distant from the African continent at the closet point), at the moment, the presence of C. simonyi has not been reported on this island. Nevertheless, Klemmer (1976) in a general overview of the reptiles of the Canries, mentioned the presence of C. simonyi on this island, although no pertinent data were available (Martín et al., 1990). Apart from this information, we knew of the existence of several dubious observations cafried out by some local paeople. Thus we visited Lanzarote from 22-27 February 1997 with the aim of confirming the presence of the genus Chalcides on that island. We covered the whole north massif (Macizo de Haría), gathering information from a total of 34 local inhabitants. The majority of zones where the animals had been reported were propescted and all data were recorded on a map (scale: 1.50.000). While the local name for this species in Fuerteventura is "lisneja", in Lanzarote it is named "lagartija lisa" or "lisa".

Bibliographic Details

Main Authors:	Nogales, Manuel, León, Leandro de, Gómez, Rafael
Format:	artículo biblioteca
Language:	English
Published:	Societas Europaea Herpetologica 1998
Online Access:	http://hdl.handle.net/10261/23659
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