Understanding the movement of Peringuey's adder in the Namib Sand Sea. With the use of radio telemetry and temperature data.

Sammanfattning

This study aimed to increase the knowledge of the viperid Peringuey’s adders (Bitis peringueyi) movement by examining if there is a connection between minimum nightly temperature, length of an individual and distance travelled in a straight line. Understanding movement of a species is important since it both describes current behavior and aids in understanding how changes to the environment affect the species. The adder is highly specialized to the extreme environments of the sand dunes in the Gobabeb area in the northernmost part of the Namib sand sea. Establishing a baseline of knowledge is very important as both increasing temperatures from climate change could impact the health of either or both the species and the ecosystem in the future. Data was gathered by tracking, capturing and tagging individuals then using radio telemetry to track their movements through the environment once per day as well as collecting weather data from Gobabeb weather station. The data was then put through a generalized linear mixed model with different environmental and individual variables in order to assess how they impacted the snake's movements. Results gained from the study were not statistically significant, but there were weak negative associations between distance travelled (straight line distance) and both minimum nightly temperature and individual length. There is a high probability this is a result of the limited number of individuals that could be tagged due to logistic constraints. If a suggestion of a conclusion is to be drawn from the data, it is that there is an adaptation for using hotter nights to hunt for more active ectothermic prey, that would result in a lesser movement as the species is a sit and wait predator. However expanding the study with more individuals and over a larger timeframe is necessary to confirm or deny these findings.