A Contribution to the Herpetology of Northern Pakistan

Abstract

The technical contents of the work are preceded by the dedication, foreword, acknowledgments, and an introduction (including location, climate, and conservation aspects of Pakistan's natural resources, a listing of 26 national parks, details of the author's primary study site, the Margalla Hills, and an enumeration of previous studies), scope of the present study, and methods employed. Taxonomic judgments are sound (with perhaps the exception of the choice of Boidae for Pakistan's sole species of Python, rather than Pythonidae; the usage of the catchall family name Colubridae for a number of genera now allocated to other families; and the recognition of Hydrophiidae as a family distinct from Elapidae).

A Contribution to the Herpetology of Northern Pakistan. R. Masroor. 2012. Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles/Chimaira Buchhandelsgesellschaft mbH. ISBN 9780916984830. 217 p. $45.00 (hardcover).- "Pakistan covers the desert frontier of the Subcontinent. British civilian administration extended only to Lahore, in the fertile Punjab, near Pakistan's eastern border with India. But the rest of Pakistan - the rugged border regions of Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province, the alkaline wastes of Sindh away from the Indus, and the Hindu Rush and Karakorum Mountains embracing Kashmir - has never really been subdued by the British or anyone else." Robert D. Kaplan, 2011.

Following the departure of the British and the resultant political upheaval, biotic diversity surveys have not been a top priority for countries of the Indian subcontinent, and perhaps as a result of this and the troubled history of the land, conducting biological inventories in this vast region continue to prove challenging.

The herpetofauna of Pakistan has had its local as well as foreign scholars, following independence from British rule in 1947. The latter include Germans (notably, Robert Mertens), as well as Americans (Sherman Minton and Walter Auffenberg). Several volumes published in the second half of last century are testimony to their efforts (e.g., Minton, 1966; Mertens, 1969). Among the local herpetologists of the contemporary era, mention must be made of Mohammed Sharief Khan, formerly of the Herpetology Laboratory, Rabwah, Pakistan, and now a resident of the U.S. He has published extensively on the herpetology of his native country, including several book-length manuscripts (see Khan, 1993, 2006). Another significant contemporary was Khalid Javed Baig (1956-2006) of the Pakistan Museum of Natural History, who received his doctorate in zoology for his work on the systematics of the genus Laudakia jointly from the Quaid-e-Azam University of his native country and University of Bonn (under the supervision of Wolfgang Böhme). Baig, together with his wife and mother, tragically passed away in an auto accident in 2006 (see Masroor, 2007, for an obituary), leaving the substantial collections he had amassed in Islamabad to the care of his former assistant/ mentee, Rafaqat Masroor (born 1978). The volume being reviewed is the work of Masroor and his colleagues, based on their long-term (2003-09) observations and opportunistic sampling of the herpetofauna of the Margalla Hills National Park (MHNP) in northern Pakistan. Masroor is a Research Associate with the Pakistan Museum of Natural History, and is currently working on his M.Phil./Ph.D. at the Department of Zoology, University of Peshawar. During this period, a project titled "Faunal diversity of Margalla Hills National Park, Islamabad," funded by Pakistan Science Foundation provided Masroor the opportunity to survey the MHNP in the summer of 2005. Both the title of the book and format appear inspired by Minton's (1966) classic (which covered the entire contemporary state of Pakistan, which, at that time, included the eastern sector of Bangladesh). The volume is dedicated to Baig, and contains a foreword by Böhme.

The volume is intended as a guide to the relatively small herpetofauna of the MHNP, a part of the lesser Himalayas, situated on the outskirts of Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, within which lies Masroor's host institution. The etymology of the park's name is worthy of remark, one explanation being Persian for "Mar" (=snake) and "Galla" (=herd), implying a site where snakes are abundant. The total area of the park, whose limestone-sandstone rocks date to the Miocene, is 12,605 ha, and the maximum elevation is Tilla Charouni, a 1604 m snow-clad peak. The total species counts are nine for amphibians and 32 for reptiles (Masroor, 2011), and comprise elements from Eurasia and the Indian subregions, such as Daboia russelii, an image of which adorns the dust jacket over the front cover.

The technical contents of the work are preceded by the dedication, foreword, acknowledgments, and an introduction (including location, climate, and conservation aspects of Pakistan's natural resources, a listing of 26 national parks, details of the author's primary study site, the Margalla Hills, and an enumeration of previous studies), scope of the present study, and methods employed. These preliminaries are followed by checklists of the amphibians and reptiles recorded (Chapter 1), as well as illustrated keys to the fauna (Chapter 2). Well-reproduced images of different habitats present in Pakistan are presented, which range from the starkly arid lower ranges of Margalla to the subtropical regions at its higher elevations.

Chapter 3 deals with the amphibians of the study site (exclusively anuras), including accounts for nine species. Chapter 4 describes the three species of turtles known from Margalla Hills. Chapter 5 covers the 13 lizard species, including three that the author adds to the known fauna (Asymblepharus himalayanus, Laudakia agrorensis, and Ophisops jerdonii). Chapter 6 completes the herpetofaunal inventory, with 17 snakes recorded from Margalla. None are endemic to Margalla or Pakistan, and most can be characterized as either the easternmost representatives of Palearctic, or westernmost representatives of Oriental, lineages. The last two chapters deal with the distribution of amphibians and reptiles as classified by habitat types and site-specific threats to the local herpetofauna arising from human activities. A glossary of technical terms and a bibliography rounds out the volume. An appendix presents a checklist of the herpetofauna of Pakistan. A listing of vernacular names (in Pakistan's state language, Urdu, and perhaps others) would have been a nice addition here: currently, indigenous names appear for some species in the Remarks section under the respective species accounts.

As expected of a marriage of Europe's premier publisher of herpetological books (Chimaira Buchhandelsgesellschaft mbH) and one of America's oldest herpetological societies (Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles, founded in 1958), the work is produced to the highest technical quality, hardbound with dust jacket, printed on art paper, and with color images throughout the text. The images of Naja oxiana alone are worth the price of the book, especially what must be rare images of their attractive, banded hatchlings emerging from eggs (fig. 101A-B).

A pleasing aspect of the work is the up-to-the minute (generic) taxonomy, including Saara for Uromastyx hardwickii, Eurylepis for Eumeces taeniolatus, Eutropis for Mabuya dissimilis, Myriopholis for Leptotyphlops macrorhynchus, and Platyceps for both Coluber rhodorachis and C. ventromaculatus. The text has been read well for typos, and the only ones I found were a lower case "r" in the first word of the locality name Rahim Yar Khan (p. 128) and a missing letter "c" in the species name Bungarus caeruleus (p. 148). Taxonomic judgments are sound (with perhaps the exception of the choice of Boidae for Pakistan's sole species of Python, rather than Pythonidae; the usage of the catchall family name Colubridae for a number of genera now allocated to other families; and the recognition of Hydrophiidae as a family distinct from Elapidae). Perhaps some of these taxonomic revisions were too recent for the author to consider while finalizing the book, or were deemed radical.

To me, this is a fine checklist and field guide, specific for the site, rather than the whole of northern Pakistan, which should have been reflected in the book's title. The often great detail provided in the species accounts make the work more suitable for comparison with faunal monographs, approaching the celebrated series, Handbuch der Reptilien und Amphibien Europas, edited by Böhme. This likeness may be indicative of the influence of Böhme, via Baig, to the young author of this volume.

If there are any criticisms, it is the insufficient citations to the relatively better-known fauna of western India. This shortcoming may be attributable to the rather poor interpersonal linkages between these two countries, and is a grim reminder of political realities.

Young Rafaqat Masroor stands on the shoulders of giants, such as his departed mentor, and we can expect substantial work on Pakistan's unusual herpetofauna by him in the years to come.

References

LITERATURE CITED

Kaplan, R. D. 2011. Monsoon. The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power. Random House, New York.

Khan, M. S. 1993. Sar Zameen-a-Pakistan Kay Saamp. Urdu Science Board, Lahore, Pakistan, [in Urdu]

Khan, M. S. 2006. Amphibians and Reptiles of Pakistan. Krieger Publishing, Malabar, Florida.

Masroor, R. 2007. Obituary. Khalid Javed Baig (1956-2006). Russian Journal of Herpetology 14:78-79.

Masroor, R. 2011. An annotated checklist of amphibians and reptiles of Margalla Hills National Park, Pakistan. Pakistan Journal of Zoology 43:1041-1048.

Mertens, R. 1969. Die Amphibien und Reptilien WestPakistans. Stuttgarter Beiträge zur Naturkunde 197:1-96.

Minton, S. A. 1966. A contribution to the herpetology of West Pakistan. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 134:27-184.