Regina grahamii
Graham's Crayfish Snake

Rare. Aquatic. Plain brown with a faint middorsal stripe and thick lateral stripes. Belly usually uniform cream. Species account on iNaturalist

Arkansas Game & Fish Commission
Species of Greatest Conservation Need

Arkansas Herpetological Atlas 2019

This species is represented by 111 records from 19 sources: 92 museum (), 4 literature (), 0 research (), and 11 observation (), with 4 additional Trauth et al. (2004) locality points remaining unsourced (). It has been museum vouchered for 16 of 75 counties (), with 6 additional counties having other forms of reported occurrence (). Years of collection range from 1935 to 2017.

This species has a spotty, widely disjunct, distribution in Arkansas. Most records come from the Mississippi Alluvial Plain along Bayou Bartholomew, the Grand Prairie region, and within the lower Arkansas and White river basins. A cluster of records comes from northeast Arkansas that extends into the Missouri Bootheel (Daniel and Edmond, 2020). In the western South Central Plains, records come from within the Red and Little river basins. Records from the Arkansas Valley come from west of Conway, Conway County, and Fort Smith, Sebastian County (unnumbered WCC from 1974; albeit misidentified as Liodytes rigida). More contemporary anecdotal photographic observations corroborate occurrence of this species in the Fort Smith area from both sides of the Arkansas River (A. Deshwal, D. Fairweather, R. Sanders, and A. Shaffer, pers. comm. and obs.). A concentrated, but thriving, population exists in northwest Arkansas near Fayetteville, Washington County (Baecher et al., 2018; J. D. Willson, pers. comm). Isolated localities plotted by Trauth et al. (2004) in northeastern Randolph County and northeastern Bradley County remain unsourced. It is likely this species has a much broader range in Arkansas than is currently established.