Malagasy Boa Expedition 2024

Now back in Chicago, Sara has been expanding on the broader boa reconnaissance. Sara and Arianna’s goal was to collect genetic samples from the island’s four species of boas: the tree boas Sanzinia madagascariensis and S. volotany and the ground boas Acrantophis madagascariensis and A. dumerilli. Despite being large conspicuous snakes—primarily a Neotropical group but with scattered representatives in other parts of the world—there has not been much work done on this group since the advent of advanced high-throughput genetic techniques that would allow a better understanding of both boa biogeography and dispersal, as well as population and species diversity. Sara and Arianna flew to Madagascar where they met up with Fandresena Rakotoarimalala, a doctoral student at the University of Antananarivo co-advised by Sara and Professor Achille Raselimanana. Fandresena was a recipient of an African Visiting Scholar Fellowship from the Museum’s Science and Scholarship Funding Committee last year, and spent six weeks here learning molecular techniques for her dissertation work. Fandresena works on chameleons of Madagascar’s Central Highlands, examining populations in fragmented habitats with respect to usage and gene flow, but for this field trip, the focus was on boas. The trip started out with a stay at Mantadia, where the trio joined up with the aforementioned field school. Sara reports thatit rained for what seemed like all day every day. But the boas were plentiful. By putting out the word locally, Fandresena’s phone was ringing every day with calls from people finding boas. With each find, we jumped into our field car (Nissan SUV) and were off with a tissue kit to get samples for DNA extraction. Boas were also found by hiking the region, especially at night.After five days working at and around the field school, Sara, Fandresena and Arianna, along with their driver Ange, set off north, heading towards the city of Tomatave. The drive there and back produced eight more boas, including tissues collected from those found dead on the road, as well as babies of both Sanzia and Acrantophis. Says Sara, “boas give birth to live young and this was the season for it!” After long hours in the car, the next stop was Ranomafana, the first national park of Madagascar. This was a short visit (less than two days) but produced another boa so was well worth it, as there are no tissue samples from that locality in any searchable database. After the long drive back to Tana, the last of the trip was spent working with Fandresena’s chameleon dataset and planning further on the next steps with the boa project.
April 26. 2024