Updated: October 15, 2020 7:01:45 pm
A fine print photograph of the 2005 Arunachal rain snake. (Photo courtesy: Abhijit Das)
A damaged specimen beyond repair, just a surviving color-printed photograph, and a 15-year pass – the clues were far more challenging than the researchers would have wanted them to be.
However, after scouting museums around the world for similar specimens, getting an octogenarian British gentleman to reconstruct the damaged, and long years of cross-referencing and research, the beautiful yellow and black stamped snake, which the Institute researcher Indian Wildlife Abhijit Das had seen as a young graduate student on a field trip to Arunachal Pradesh’s Dibang Valley in 2005, finally having a name: Smithophis arunachalensis, or the Arunachal rain snake.
“When I first saw the snake, I mistook it for a krait because it looked similar. Still, I was curious and clicked on a photo. It wasn’t great because I didn’t have a digital camera, ”recalled Dehradun-based Das.
Since that single sighting, it took 15 years to scientifically describe the snake. “A single specimen was not sufficient to determine its taxonomic status, as it looked similar to the Meghalaya and Mizoram snakes,” Das said, “so we started exploring museum collections for similar snakes.”
Over the years, Das, along with fellow researchers Deepak Veerappan, Edward OZ Wade, and David J Gower of the Natural History Museum in London, and Pune-based herpetologist Ashok Captain, gathered clues to identify the snake, which has now been reported as a new species in the prestigious Zootaxa magazine. This is the fourth species described under the genus Smithophis, found only in northeastern India, Myanmar, and southern China.
We describe another beautiful #new species of #natricine #snake since #Dibang, #Arunachal Pradesh, #India, Smithophis arunachalensis is the third described species of this genus 1/6 pic.twitter.com/c3z2PEksJ2
– வீ.தீபக் / V.Deepak 🐢🦎🐍🔬 (@DeepakVeerappan) October 12, 2020
The researchers located six specimens at the Natural History Museum in London, the Zoological Survey of India, and regional museums in Arunachal Pradesh. The specimen in London, however, was damaged: its head detached from its body.
“This snake is so rare that we didn’t want to miss the data on a single specimen,” Das said. It was then that Dr. David Gower, head of the Department of Zoology at the Natural History Museum, London, told them about the genius of Edward OZ Wade. “He’s in his 80s and he’s a master at recreating snake scales,” Das said, “Basically, he can recreate the original morphology from a damaged specimen, almost like plastic surgery.”
For almost four months, Wade worked on the recreation of an exact replica of the original specimen. “I’m sorry I didn’t take pictures of you while you were working,” Deepak Veerapan, associate scientist at the Natural History Museum in London, said in an email. “Ed uses a microscope equipped with a camera lucid to carefully draw each scale on the snake’s head and neck by hand in order to reconstruct it to its original shape. It takes days, sometimes weeks, to draw a snake. “
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According to Das, Smithophis arunachalensis is so rare that since its first collection in 1935, only five other specimens have been recorded, and multiple studies in the lower Dibang Valley in Arunachal Pradesh yielded only one sighting. “So little is known about the distribution and natural history of this species that it is currently likely to qualify as ‘Data Deficient’ under the Red List of Threatened Species criteria,” he said.
The discovery also throws up another pertinent point. “The new species is found in the lower Dibang Valley and Changlang districts in eastern Arunachal Pradesh. The locations are downstream from the Etalin Proposed Hydroelectric Project, ”Das said. The controversial hydroelectric power project has raised concerns from environmentalists since it was proposed.
Veerapan added that such prey have the potential to “submerge the safe haven inhabited by many endemic species, including Smithophis arunachalensis.”
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