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The present research and development work focuses on ophidism or ophidic accident, a forgotten public health problem normally treated with antiophidic serum application. Complications are sometimes caused by the patients' delay to go to a medical centre and the health professionals' lack of knowledge on the ophidism treatment. In this work, we design, under the canvas model, a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) called Introduction to ophidic accident in order to offer a new accessible, massive and dynamic training strategy. It is nourished by the students' contribution, unlike traditional training programmes. For this reason, it is intended to promote other forms of training on prevention and knowledge of the ophidic accident, which constitute a priority in the Colombian territory. To conclude, we highlight that there is a considerable number of underestimated cases due to the inadequate registration in the notification forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Objective. Preliminary identification of the ophidians of the municipality of Tamalameque, department of Cesar Colombia. Materials and methods. Between January and lay of 2009, by means of free search and manual capture snake samplings were taken, with two samplings per month and a capture effort of four man-hour. Results. The presence of three snake families is reported for this locality, distributed in 12 genera and 13 species. The Colubridae family was the best represented one with the 76.93% of the reported species, followed by 15.38% Boidae and 7.69% Anomalepidae families. Conclusions. The results allow to deduce that the family Colubridae is an important herpetological component of the "Cienaga del Cristo" and that anthropic threats for ophidians in this locality are habitat destruction and lack of ecological and ethological knowledge by the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diversity is a property of community that can described, characterized, and understood according to the functioning of ecosystems. To study the richness and local abundance and species replacement between habitats around the Zapatosa's wetland complex (El Cesar Department), I carried out four field trips between November of 2006 and October of 2007. A total of 640 sampling hours/man analyzed five habitat types chasmophyte forest, dry forest, riparian forest, palm-grove and tree-lined savanna; with the exception of the palm-grove sampled at its 75%, the others were sampled up to their 80%. I found 847 reptiles that were distributed in 48 species. The group with the highest number of species was Colubridae with 14, followed by Gekkonidae with five. Five endemic species and eight with some conservation threat grade at a national level are reported. The riparian forest was the richest and most abundant habitat with 34 species and 196 individuals. For each habitat, Colubridae had the highest number of species, followed by the families Polychrotidae, Gekkonidae and Teiidae, in that order. The reptile species composition was not different between the tree-lined savanna and the chasmophyte forest, but differed among the tree-lined savanna and the riparian forest, palm-grove and dry forest habitats. The most important differences in the species composition among almost all the habitats were influenced by the species Anolis tropidogaster and Gonatodes albogularis, and the higher occurrence of Stenocercus erythrogaster in the chasmophyte forest. The species replacement had an average value of 50%; the biggest amounts of shared species were the lizards, while the snake Leptodeira septentrionalis was the only one present in all habitat types. The forest grows-among-rocks showed the biggest complementarity and number of unique species compared to the other habitats. The wetland complex provides two thirds of the reptile's species reported until now for the Caribbean region, and more than 80% of those reported for the El Cesar department. This wetland complex seems to behave as a center for low land species concentration as it hosts a high proportion of species from those places. Rev. Biol. Trop. 59 (2): 935-968. Epub 2011 June 01. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]