Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia Author(S): Juan D
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Reptile Remains from Tiga (Tokanod), Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia Author(s): Juan D. Daza, Aaron M. Bauer, Christophe Sand, Ian Lilley, Thomas A. Wake and Frédérique Valentin Source: Pacific Science, 69(4):531-557. Published By: University of Hawai'i Press DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2984/69.4.8 URL: http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.2984/69.4.8 BioOne (www.bioone.org) is a nonprofit, online aggregation of core research in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences. BioOne provides a sustainable online platform for over 170 journals and books published by nonprofit societies, associations, museums, institutions, and presses. Your use of this PDF, the BioOne Web site, and all posted and associated content indicates your acceptance of BioOne’s Terms of Use, available at www.bioone.org/page/ terms_of_use. Usage of BioOne content is strictly limited to personal, educational, and non-commercial use. Commercial inquiries or rights and permissions requests should be directed to the individual publisher as copyright holder. BioOne sees sustainable scholarly publishing as an inherently collaborative enterprise connecting authors, nonprofit publishers, academic institutions, research libraries, and research funders in the common goal of maximizing access to critical research. Reptile Remains from Tiga (Tokanod), Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia 1 Juan D. Daza , 2,3 Aaron M. Bauer , 2,8 Christophe Sand , 4 Ian Lilley ,5 Thomas A. Wake , 6 and Fr é d é rique Valentin 7 Abstract: Archaeological ex ca va tions on Tiga provide the fi rst vouchered her- pe to log i cal re cords for this small island be tween Lifou and Mar é in the Loyalty Islands. Eighty - three skel e tal el e ments from four sites yielded mate rial assign - able to skinks (Emoia loyaltiensis, Lioscincus nigrofasciolatus ), geckos (Bavayia crassi- collis, B . sp., Gehyra georgpotthasti, Nactus pelagicus ), and a boid snake (Candoia bibroni ) all known from else where in the Loyalties, as well as un de ter mined ma te rial consis tent with these and other Loyalties liz ards. Diagnostic fea tures of geckos ver sus skinks for el e ments commonly re cov ered from ar chae o log i cal sites and from owl pellets are discussed. Gehyra georgpotthasti has a lim ited dis tri bu- tion in the Loyalties and its occur rence on Tiga clarifi es its range. The boid snake is the only rep tile likely to have been harvested by hu man in hab i tants of Tiga. The presence of gekkonid geckos in pre - Eu ro pean times is con fi rmed and con trasts with the sit u a tion of Grande Terre fos sil sites, where only diplodac- tylid geckos have been recov ered. Although it is antic ipated that all spe cies re- cov ered from archae o log i cal sites are still present on the island, a modern herpetofaunal sur vey is need ed. T he Loyalty Islands lie on the Norfolk Rise (2 km 2 ), ap prox i ma tely 160 km southeast of the in a line roughly par al lel to the long axis of the main chain. All of the is lands are rela tively low Grande Terre of New Caledonia, sepa rated ly ing. Their raised rims are uplifted coral from it by about 110 km across the Loyalty reefs, whereas the lower el e va tion in te rior re- Basin, which has a max i mum depth of approx- gions are uplifted la goons or reef fl ats, prob a- i ma tely 2,000 m. The Loyalties ( Figure 1) ex- bly emer gent only since the Pleis to cene (Paris tend from Ouv é a (160 km 2 ), at the northwest 1981). The highest point (138 m) in the chain is ex tent of the chain, through Lifou (1,150 km 2 ), on Mar é , where basal tic out crops rep re sent the Tiga (10 km2 ), and a se ries of smaller islands, emergent por tions of the vol ca nic base un der- Mar é (650 km 2 ), and on to Ile Walpole ly ing the Mio cene reef (Paris 1981, Kroenke 1 Funding for this re search was pro vided by the Loy- 3 Current address: Department of Biological Sciences, alty Islands Province, the Government of New Caledo- Sam Houston State University , Huntsville, Texas 77341. nia, the University of Queensland (Australia), the Centre 4 Institut d ’ arch é ologie de la Nouvelle - Cal é donie et National de la Recherche Scientifi que (CNRS), the Ger- du Pacifi que , 65, Rue Teyssandier de Laubar è de, BP: ald M. Lemole Endowed Chair funds (Villanova Uni- 11423, 98802 Noum é a Cedex, Nouvelle - Cal é donie, versity), and Grant Nos. DEB 0844523 and DEB 1019443 New Caledonia. from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Manuscript 5 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit, ac cepted 31 March 2015. The University of Queensland, Q 4072, Brisbane, Aus- 2 Department of Biology, Villanova University , tralia. 800 Lancaster Avenue, Villanova, Pennsylvania 19085. 6 University of California — Los Angeles Cotsen In- stitute of Archaeology , Box 951510, A210 Fowler, Los Angeles, California 90095 - 1510. 7 UMR 7041 – ArScAn, CNRS, Maison de Pacifi c Science (2015), vol. 69, no. 4:531–557 l ’ Arch é ologie et de l ’ Ethnologie, 21 all é e de l ’ Universit é , doi:10.2984/69.4.8 F - 92023 Nanterre cedex, France. © 2015 by University of Hawai‘i Press 8 Corresponding au thor (e - mail: aaron.bauer @ All rights re served villanova.edu). 531 532 PACIFIC SCIENCE · Oc to ber 2015 Figure 1. Location of Tiga Island in the Loyalty Islands archi pel a go. 1984). Rainfall is rel a tively low on the Loy- Grande Terre, vis ited Mar é and north ern alties, rang ing from 1,700 mm per annum in Lifou, and stopped briefl y on Ouvé a. Roux’ s north ern Lifou to un der 1,300 mm on Ouvé a (1913) resulting mono graph summa rized the (Sautter 1981), and the vege ta tion is highly de- en tire ter res trial and ma rine herpetofauna of pau per ate rel a tive to mainland New Caledo- New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands. Sub- nia, with < 400 plant spe cies (Jaffr é 1993), sequently, very little her pe to log i cal re search consisting largely of coastal strand veg e ta tion has been conducted (ma te rial evalu ated by sim i lar to that on the main land and in land Sadlier and Bauer [1997]). Virtually all re- hu mid for ests (D ä niker 1931, Schmid 1981). search has been conducted on the three main The herpetofauna of the Loyalties has been is lands of the group. Very recent ly, the larg- rel a tively lit tle - stud ied, al though its over all est gecko in the Loyalties, long con sid ered spe cies com po si tion is be lieved to be well con spe cifi c with Gehyra vorax Girard, 1858, of known (Sadlier and Bauer 1997, Bauer and Fiji, has been de scribed as new based partly on Sadlier 2000). The nineteenth - cen tury Mar- ma te rial from Î le Dudun, a small sat el lite off ist mis sion ary Xavier Montrouzier (1820– of north ern Mar é (Flecks et al. 2012), but 1897) fi rst noted the pres ence of the Loyalty other small is lands, most no ta bly Tiga, have Island boa, which he re ferred to as Boa austra- not been ex plored herpetologically and are lis (Montrouzier 1860). Bavay (1869), who represented by no mate rial in mu seum col lec- cata logued the fauna of New Caledonia, de- tions. Interestingly, how ev er, both Tiga and scrib ing many of the endemic species, was re mote Walpole have been sites of some paleo- based on the Grande Terre, but he did ob tain herpetological work on the ex tinct meiola- snakes from E. Dubois, who collected in the niid tur tles (Gaffney et al. 1984, Balouet 1991). Loyalty Islands. In 1911 – 1912, Fritz Sarasin Although the herpetofaunal tally of the and Jean Roux trav eled through much of the Grande Terre con tin ues to grow as more and Reptile Remains from Tiga, Loyalty Islands · Daza et al. 533 more microendemic geckos and skinks are larg est island in the Loyalties, but it also lies dis cov ered, chiefl y at higher el e va tions (Bauer im me di ately north of Mar é and may be ex- and Sadlier 2000, Bauer and Jackman 2006, pected to help re solve the distri bu tional lim- Sadlier 2010), the herpetofaunal inven tory of its of the Mar é area en dem ics. the Loyalty Islands has remained quite sta ble We here re port on the her pe to log i cal fi nd- and has ac tu ally de creased. Sadlier and Bauer ings of an archeological study on Tiga car- (1997) and Bauer and Sadlier (2000) reported ried out by the Institut d ’ arch é ologie de la 20 ter res trial squa mates. One of these has Nouvelle - Cal é donie et du Pacifi que in col lab- since been recog nized as syn on y mous with o ra tion with the University of Queensland an other on the list, leaving only 19 spe cies. Six and the Centre National de la Recherche Sci- of these are wide spread through out much of entifi que in Par is. The study fo cused on the the Pacifi c, in clud ing New Caledonia, and in te gra tion be tween in dig e nous Ka nak sev eral of these are known or suspected to knowl edge about Tiga ’ s past and clas sic sur- have reached the re gion through hu man vey / ex ca va tion stud ies around the island.