Student's Instagram Post Leads To The Discovery Of A New Snake Species

Researchers and herpetologists have come across a species of Kukri snake, the Oligodon churahensis, in Himachal Pradesh, reported Times of India.

The team working on finding the species consisted of Zeeshan A Mirza of the National Centre for Biological Sciences (Bengaluru), Virender K Bhardwaj of Guru Nanak Dev University (Amritsar) and Harshil Patel of Veer Narmad South Gujarat University (Surat).

However, what is interesting is that the story behind this discovery, Zeeshan said. Virender, a master's student was back home in Chamba because of the lockdown and was exploring his backyard. He was photographing and uploading pictures of whatever he found on Instagram - this included pictures of snakes, lizards, frogs and insects.

TOI

¡°I saw one of these images in his search feed and discussed the photo with Harshil. I then contacted Virendar and inquired about the snake, which belonged to a group of snakes commonly called Kukri as they bear teeth that are curved like that of the Nepali dagger Kukri. The snake which Virendar found was similar to the Common Kukri snake (Oligodon arnensis), however, it differed in several aspects,¡± Zeeshan said.

The picture which led to the discovery was uploaded by Virender on June 5, 2020. He found two snakes which were enough to start their identification. The discovery was delayed as the labs were not functional for a long time and visiting natural history museums was not possible.

Novataxa

After labs resumed work, molecular data (DNA) for the species was generated which confirmed that the species was indeed different from the common Kukri snake. A joint paper was submitted in the first week of August 2021 and was published in the recent issue of the international journal Evolutionary Systematics. The new species has been named Oligodon churahensis, after the Churah Valley in Himachal Pradesh.