Ichthyophis Fitzinger, 1826

English Names

Asian Caecilians (Frank and Ramus, 1995, Compl. Guide Scient. Common Names Amph. Rept. World: 25).

Tailed Caecilians ([Caudacaecilia: no longer recognized]: Frank and Ramus, 1995, Compl. Guide Scient. Common Names Amph. Rept. World: 26).

Striped Caecilians (Dinesh, Radhakrishnan, Deepak, and Kulkarni, 2023, Fauna India Checklist, vers. 5.0 : 16).

Distribution

Southern Asia to the western part of the Indo-Australian Archipelago; Philippines.

Comment

Pillai and Ravichandran, 1999, Rec. Zool. Surv. India, Occas. Pap., 172: 21–58, provided a key and accounts to the species of India. Gower, Kupfer, Oommen, Himstedt, Nussbaum, Loader, Presswell, Müller, Krishna, Boistel, and Wilkinson, 2002, Proc. R. Soc. London, Ser. B, Biol. Sci., 269: 1563–1569, provided a phylogeny of several species in the genus and suggested that the Uraeotyphlidae is imbedded within this nominal genus. Wilkinson and Nussbaum, 2006, In Exbrayat (ed.), Reprod. Biol. Phylog. Gymnophiona: 39–78, discussed evidence for this taxon. See comment under Caudacaecilia. Wollenberg and Measey, 2009, J. Evol. Biol., 22: 1046–1056, provided evidence that "Ichthyophis" is paraphyletic with respect to Caudacaecilia and Uraeotyphlus, with, among their sampled terminals, Ichthyophis bannanicus being more closely related to Caudacaecilia asplenia than to other nominal Ichthyophis, and Ichthyophis bombayensis (as Ichthyophis cf. malabarensis and Ichthyophis cf. peninsularis) being more closely related to Uraeotyphlus than to other nominal Ichthyophis. Venu, Rajendran, Venkatachalaiah, and Gower, 2011, Cytogenet. Genome Res., 132: 182–187, also suggested that Ichthyophis bombayensis is the sister taxon of Uraeotyphlus. Bhatta, Dinesh, Prashanth, Kulkarni, and Radhakrishnan, 2011, Curr. Sci., Bangalore, 101: 1015–1019, discussed the species of the Western Ghats, southern India, and provided an identification key. Roelants, Gower, Wilkinson, Loader, Biju, Guillaume, Moriau, and Bossuyt, 2007, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 104: 887–892, presented evidence that Caudacaecilia is phylogenetically imbedded within Ichthyophis, thereby rendering Ichthyophis paraphyletic. Nussbaum and Wilkinson, 1989, Herpetol. Monogr., 3: 31, suggested that Caudacaecilia and Ichthyophis might both be polyphyletic inasmuch as these taxa are based solely on single characters of known variability. Matsui, Nishikawa, Sudin, and Mohamed, 2006, Copeia, 2006: 256–260, discussed the dubious distinction of Caudacaecilia and Ichthyophis as well. The synonymy was finally made by Nishikawa, Matsui, Yong, Ahmad, Yambun Imbun, Belabut, Sudin, Hamidy, Orlov, Ota, Yoshikawa, Tominaga, and Shimada, 2012, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 63: 714–723, reported on the molecular phylogenetics and species taxonomy of species from the Sundas, with considerable discussion of identifiation of unnamed lineages. They also noted at least five unnamed species in Vietnam, peninsular Malaysia, and the Great Sunda islands. See brief account of an unnamed species by Grismer, 2012, Field Guide Amph. Rept. Seribuat Arch.: 82, on Pulau Tioman, West Malaysia. Geissler, Poyarkov, Grismer, Nguyen, An, Neang, Kupfer, Ziegler, Böhme, and Müller, 2015, Organisms Divers. Evol., 15: 143–174, reported on the molecular phylogenetics of exemplar species of Ichthyophis. Dubois, Ohler, and Pyron, 2021, Megataxa, 5: 1–738, provided a molecular tree and recommended an alternate generic taxonomy with Epicrium recognized as a genus. Zug, 2022, Smithson. Contrib. Zool., 653: 5, provided a key to the species of Myanmar. Herlambang, Riyanto, Munir, Hamidy, Kimura, Eto, and Mumpuni, 2022, Treubia, 49: 74, reported an unidentified species from Bunguran I., Natuna Is., Indonesia.

Contained taxa (49 sp.):

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