Lepidodactylus cf. novaeguineae Brown & Parker, 1977

Karin, Benjamin R., Stubbs, Alexander L., Arifin, Umilaela, Bloch, Luke M., Ramadhan, G., Iskandar, Djoko T., Arida, Evy, Reilly, Sean B., Kusnadi, Agus & Mcguire, Jimmy A., 2018, The herpetofauna of the Kei Islands (Maluku, Indonesia): Comprehensive report on new and historical collections, biogeographic patterns, conservation concerns, and an annotated checklist of species from Kei Kecil, Kei Besar, Tam, and Kur, Raffles Bulletin of Zoology 66, pp. 704-738 : 720

Lepidodactylus cf. novaeguineae Brown & Parker, 1977

— New Record

(Fig. 14)

Type locality. Lake Sentani , Papua, Indonesia .

Distribution in the Kei Islands. So far, only known from a single specimen on Kei Kecil.

Natural history. We collected a single specimen from a small twig approximately 2 m off the ground and 20 m inland from the high tide in secondary-growth forest on Kei Kecil.

Field identification. The single specimen collected from the Kei Kecil has undivided terminal scansors followed by two divided terminal scansors, placing it in Group II of Brown & Parker (1977). Colour pale grey, with seven pairs of small brown spots along dorsum.

Remarks. The specimen is very similar to Lepidodactylus novaeguineae sensu stricto in all morphological features assessed, so we include L. novaeguineae ’s measurements in parenthesis for comparison: 37.4 mm snout-vent length (vs. 36.7–41.0 mm), 14 lamellae under toe IV (vs. 11–14), 7 lamellae under toe I (vs. 8–11), 17 preanal pores (vs. 12–18), 2 divided scansors on the 4th toe (vs. 1–3). However, genetically it is quite distinct, as it shows substantial divergence (18.7% raw pairwise distance in ND2) from putative L. novaeguineae from Papua New Guinea ( Stubbs et al., 2017). This specimen may therefore represent a distinct species.