Recent additions to the herpetofauna of Little St. James, US Virgin Islands

Abstract

The herpetofauna of the US Virgin Islands (USVI) has been described by several authors (MacLean, 1982; Schwartz and Henderson, 1991), but some islands are privately owned and seldom surveyed. Most of the smaller cays are uninhabited, the exceptions being Little St. James (LSJ) and Lovango, and most are inhospitable to amphibians because they are characterized by scrub and absence of permanent water bodies. Of the two, LSJ is the more developed, with regular shipments of plants and building materials supporting the ongoing modifications. Two visits to LSJ, one in 2005 and one in 2006, revealed the presence of several new species on the island and allowed us to document reports of others. The Cuban treefrog has been spreading in the Caribbean in recent decades. It is now common in the USVI (Platenberg and Boulon, 2006) and nearby British Virgin Islands (BVI; Perry and Gerber, 2006). Remarkably, the USVI Division of Fish and Wildlife previously made the following suggestion about the species (Anonymous, 1991): “Cuban tree frogs [were] introduced to the Virgin Islands in the 1970s as hitch-hikers in potted plants. The only cure for the noise is to capture the frogs and release them in some uninhabited area.” This doubtlessly has exacerbated the spread of this damaging invasive. The species has not previously been collected on LSJ.