Mehelya poensis (Smith, 1849)

Lobón-Rovira, Javier, Lobón-Rovira, Baptista, Ninda L, Clark, Tyron, Verburgt, Luke, Jongsma, Gregory Fm, Conradie, Werner, and, Luis Veríssimo, Vaz, Pedro & Pinto, 2025, Filling the gaps: herpetological checklist of Mayombe National Park and Cabinda Province (Angola) shed light on one of the most unexplored corners of tropical Central Africa, African Journal of Herpetology 74 (1), pp. 1-59 : 1-59

Mehelya poensis (Smith, 1849)

Material. ANGOLA – Cabinda Province • Nganzi ; –5.4730, 12.3832; 129 m a.s.l.; EI 813 (roadkill); GenBank: PQ456006 .

Identification. A file snake with weak to smoothly developed secondary keels on the dorsal scales, 15 scale rows across the midbody and>84 subcaudal scales ( Chippaux and Jackson 2019). The Cabinda Province material is identical (16S p -distance) to material from DRC (GenBank: MF680168 ) and Gabon (GenBank: AY611863 ) and differs very little across its distribution range (<1% 16S p -distance) ( Trape et al. 2018).

Biology and distribution. This species is widely distributed from Sierra Leone to Uganda in the east and Angola in the south ( Chippaux and Jackson 2019), being frequently found in forest patches ( Spawls et al. 2018). In Angola, the species in known to occur in the northern half of the country ( Branch 2018). The specimen from Cabinda Province was found killed on the road in the Littoral Peneplain, and additional information about its biology cannot be provided.