New prey records for the Atlantic Central American Milksnake Lampropeltis polyzona (Serpentes: Colubridae)

Abstract

The Atlantic Central American Milksnake (also known as the Mexican false coral snake), Lampropeltis polyzona Cope, 1860, is a New World taxon with a complicated taxonomic history. Formerly, it was considered a subspecies of the widespread and polytypic Lampropeltis triangulum (Lacépède, 1789), but recent phylogenetic analyses by Ruane et al. (2014) and Chambers and Hillis (2020) indicate that the taxon likely warrants species-level recognition. Although these two works differ in the geographic ranges they ascribe to L. polyzona, both indicate that the snake ranges widely along both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of Mexico, from southern Sonora and northern Veracruz south to at least northern Guerrero and northern Oaxaca. Across this range, L. polyzona occurs in a wide array of vegetation types including spiny subtropical forest, seasonal evergreen forest, cloud forest, pine-oak forest and tropical