Home-range and behaviour of four female Garden Treeboas, Corallus hortulana (Linnaeus, 1758), in French Guiana

Abstract

Understanding the home range and behaviour of snakes provides valuable insights into their ecological roles, territorial behaviours, and the impacts of environmental changes on their populations but our knowledge of behaviour and preferred habitat characteristics of arboreal snakes in tropical forests remains largely unclear. Corallus hortulana (Linnaeus, 1758), commonly known as the Garden Treeboa, is fairly easy to observe in the field, but no long-term monitoring has been carried out on it to date, even though it could make an ideal study model. The primary goal of this study was to investigate the home range size and movement behaviour of Corallus hortulana within its natural habitat by using telemetry and field-based observations. Four adult females were equipped with radio-transmitters and tracked over 15 months between 30 March 2022 and 9 July 2023. Of the four females tracked, only two showed a stable and well-defined home range which were estimated at 18 ha and 4.6 ha with a core area of respectively of 3.6 ha and 0.9 ha. Our observation confirmed that this is an exclusively arboreal species but with good swimming abilities allowing them to cross wide streams. Finally, we showed a strong link between animal locations and the edge of the stream indicating a possible preference for edge habitats.