Lepidochelys olivacea (Eschscholtz, 1829)

Páez, Vivian P., Bock, Brian C., Alzate-Estrada, Diego A., Barrientos-Muñoz, Karla G., Cartagena-Otálvaro, Viviana M., Echeverry-Alcendra, Andrea, Gómez-Rincón, Marley T., Ramírez-Gallego, Cristian, Sofía, Jennifer & Vallejo-Betancur, Margarita M., 2022, Turtles of Colombia: an annotated analysis of their diversity, distribution, and conservation status, Amphibian & Reptile Conservation (e 306) 16 (1), pp. 106-135 : 111-116

Lepidochelys olivacea (Eschscholtz, 1829) . Ceballos-Fonseca (2000) reported that this species occurs and nests on both the Pacific and Caribbean coasts of Colombia, describing the Caribbean presence as “accidental” ( Ceballos-Fonseca 2004). However, this species has only been documented to occur and nest along the Pacific coast of Colombia thus far ( Barrientos-Muñoz et al. 2014; Barrientos-Muñoz et al. 2015b), with no documentation of the species occurring or nesting on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. It is possible that individuals may occasionally traverse the Caribbean waters of Colombia, as sightings in the Caribbean and sporadic nesting on Caribbean islands have been reported ( Eckert and Eckert 2019; Moncada and Romero 2015), but the principal nesting colonies of this species in the western Atlantic Ocean occur in Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana ( Eckert and Eckert 2019; Márquez 1990).

Phrynops tuberosus (Peters, 1870) . Historically, the most widespread chelid species in SouthAmerica was considered to be Phrynops geoffroanus ,with the morphological variation throughout its range leading some authors to consider it as comprised of different subspecies, including P. g. tuberosus ( Müller 1939; Wermuth and Mertens 1961; Duellman 1978). The taxonomic revision of Phrynops by McCord et al. (2001) elevated P. tuberosus to the species level, and it is currently considered to be restricted to northeastern South America in Venezuela, Guyana, and Brazil (TTWG 2021). However, Ferrara, et al. (2017) claimed that P. tuberosus occurs throughout the northern Amazon of Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and Venezuela, based upon the results of a molecular analysis in the thesis of Carvalho (2016). While recent publications from Brazil have shown that the Phrynops complex is comprised of several cryptic species, or at least evolutionarily significant units ( Friol 2014; Carvalho et al. 2016), the molecular evidence arguing that Colombian populations should be considered P. tuberosus rather than P. geoffroanus has yet to be published, so we therefore do not replace P. geoffroanus with P. tuberosus in this checklist.

Podocnemis lewyana (Duméril, 1852) . Castaño-Mora and Medem (2002a) reported that this species had been extirpated from the Río Ranchería (La Guajira Department) based on a mention of this conclusion in a non-peer reviewed document by Hurtado-Sepúlveda (1973), and this claim was perpetuated in later literature (i.e., Páez et al. 2012a, 2013). However, a niche modeling analysis to predict potential habitat for this species both now and under different scenarios of future global climate change ( Ortíz-Yusty et al. 2014) failed to predict the presence of P. lewyana in the Río Ranchería, and the visits to this drainage that were part of the ground-confirmation effort in this analysis also failed to detect this species or any indications that local people recognized it from photographs. They concluded that the report by Hurtado-Sepúlveda (1973) of its extirpation from Río Ranchería was questionable, and for this reason we do not include the La Guajira Department in the distribution of this species.

Recent taxonomic changes