The snake species has been named Gujaratenisis.
By Dileep Thekkethil
A team of young Indian researchers and biologists have announced that they discovered a new species of snake, that too of a new genus, in the state of Gujarat.
The researchers claim that the species that found is of a new genus called Wallaceophis, named after the 19th-century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), who is considered as the father of biogeography.
The new snake species has been named Gujaratenisis to commemorate the site of Gujarat from where the new species was found.
The details regarding the new discovery were published in the latest issue of PLoS One’s on Thursday. The research team headed by Zeeshan Mirza also had Raju Vyas, Harshil Patel, Rajesh Sanap and Jaydeep Mehta as team members.
Zeeshan Mirza, a herpetologist by profession works with the National Centre for Biological Sciences Bangalore. He came to know about the existence of the species through a photograph taken by Vyas in 2007, one of the members of the research team who was an undergraduate student of the centre back then.
“This snake was really odd looking and called Vyas for his opinion on the snake’s identity, but barring the image, he had no other information,” Mirza said.
Harshil Patel who has been doing extensive research in Gujarat, studying the reptiles and amphibians in the southern part of the state informed Mirza that the snake in the picture has been captured by a snake rescuer.
Soon after this, Mirza, Sanap, Vyas and Patel started their research on the snake, comparing the one captured with available data and other measures to identify it.
Through the data corroborated by Vyas, the team concluded that there were 12 variants of the same species that are habited across different parts of Gujarat. Their basic difference was based on based on scalation, tooth numbers, bone morphology and DNA. But all of them belonged to a group of colubrid snakes.
Colubrid snakes are a group that includes racers, royal snakes and whip snakes, but they differ in many ways not only as a new species but also belonging to an entirely new genus.
Colubrid snakes “Family Colubridae” are present around the world with more than 1,800 species.
According to studies, the geography of Gujarat was totally different in the past, especially the areas like Saurashtra and Kutch, which were isolated islands only after the considerable rise of Himalayas and increase in the Antarctic ice sheet growth, the global sea level dropped by 50 metres which re-shaped landmasses worldwide, including Gujarat.
Mirza said it is quite likely that the so-called less biodiverse state would yield many more interesting biota in the future.
“In the 21st century, more than 100 new species of reptiles and amphibians have been discovered in India, many in the Western Ghats and the North-Eastern parts of the country, but the rest of India remains relatively less explored,” said Patel.
The Wallaceophis Gujaratenisis is presently found in just seven localities of Gujarat and virtually nothing is known about its biology, said Vyas who has extensively documented the reptilian fauna of that state.