Critically Endangered
Antiguan racer
Alsophis antiguae
The Antiguan racer is a harmless rear-fanged (opisthoglyphous) grey-brown snake that was until recently found only on Great Bird Island off the coast of Antigua, in the eastern Caribbean.
Appearance
Young adult males are usually dark brown with light creamy markings, while young females are silvery-gray with pale brown patches and markings. Even so, older individuals of both sexes can be highly variable in colour hue and pattern, and are frequently heavily speckled or blotched in a range of hues, among them white, taupe, reddish brown, brown, and black. The Antiguan racer is a harmless rear-fanged (opisthoglyphous) grey-brown snake that was until recently found only on Great Bird Island off the coast of Antigua, in the eastern Caribbean.
Range and habitat
The Antiguan racer originally inhabited Antigua and Barbuda and probably all of the islands on the Antigua Bank. By 1995, the species was found only on Great Bird Island, a small island 2.5 km off of the northeast coast of Antigua. The island is extremely small at only 8.4 hectares.
In the year 1995 researchers estimated that only 51 Antiguan racer snakes were alive on the Great Bird Island. Even so, in the last 20 years, conservation efforts have boosted numbers from an estimated 50 to over 1,100 individuals by eradicating non-native predators and reintroducing the snake to other Antiguan islands in its original range.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
It is diurnal, being active from dawn to dusk. The Antiguan racer appears to have poor resistance to common snake mites, that are not naturally found in Antigua, that has ended some attempts at captive breeding.
The racer primarily eats a diet of lizards, among them the local Antiguan ground lizard. While the species sometimes hunts for its food, it is typically an ambush predator, waiting for prey with most of its body buried beneath leaves.
In crisis
Antiguan racer is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Antiguan racer, Wikidata item Q575632. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
