A decade after tour guide Basil P. Das stumbled upon a small black-and-beige snake while working on his coffee farm in southern India, researchers have described it as a new-to-science species.
They’ve named it Rhinophis siruvaniensis, the species name referring to the Siruvani Hills, the only place the snake is currently known from, according to a recent study, Mongabay India contributor Vandana K. reports. The hills lie in the Western Ghats, at the border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu states.
“When I learnt it’s a new species, I was very happy because now I am a part of its history,” Das said.
While R. siruvaniensis is new to the scientific literature, it isn’t new to local cardamom and coffee farmers who have long known of its behavior and seasonal patterns. “When I told my neighbors that I had found this new snake, they told me they had seen it many times before,” Das told Vandana.
The newly described snake belongs to a group of nonvenomous snakes called shieldtail snakes, which burrow and live underground. About 20 species of Rhinophis shieldtails are found in Sri Lanka, while six species are known from India so far.
Vivek Philip Cyriac, study co-author and a herpetologist who has been researching shieldtails for more than a decade, told Mongabay India that shieldtail snakes aren’t very well understood. “There is limited information about what they do underground, how they reproduce, when they come above ground, and their overall behaviour, which makes it difficult to assess threat levels and their conservation status,” he said.
Cyriac added that their past research on shieldtails “has been focused on high elevation forests in the Western Ghats, reserved forests and protected areas.” Discovering R. siruvaniensis in plantations indicates there could be unknown shieldtail species outside protected forests.
Several species have recently been described from Siruvani Hills, where R. siruvaniensis was found. These include another shieldtail snake, Uropeltis bhupathyi, three species of frogs, and two lizards.
Since the current known range of R. siruvaniensis in the Siruvani Hills is dominated by monoculture coffee and spice plantations, “there is a strong need to conserve the forests there,” the researchers write.
Read the full story by Vandana K. here.
Banner image: Newly described Rhinophis siruvaniensis. Image courtesy of Umesh P.K.
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