Re: Snakes Of India The Field Guide.pdf
Viva Allor
Strong monsoon winds almost swept us off our feet. My friends Gnaneswar, Varun, Faiza and I seemed to have chosen the wrong day to explore the high grasslands of the Nilgiris; wind speeds here in August have been recorded as high as 130-140 kmph.! Little wonder we were the tallest beings in the landscape. Even the rhododendron shrubs and the scattered shola trees here were stunted and bent in response to high seasonal winds. How the Black Eagle navigates these winds, soaring gracefully over the layered slopes, is quite a mystery. The one thing working to our advantage that morning was that we were bent over on our fours most of the time, peering into rock cracks and grass clumps for our endemic reptilians. As an adaptation to the cold winds and stunted vegetation, most wildlife sought the cover of the short shrubs or the shelter of exposed boulders.
Over the years, we covered parts of the Western and Eastern Ghats, with information and photographs on diverse species, ranging from the critically endangered resplendent bush frog of the high Anamalais, the Kudremukh shieldtail of the high sholas near the Kudremukh peak, the White-winged Tern that stopped over in Pulicat and Kundapura, to the Myristica sapphire, a beautiful damselfly endemic to the foothill Myristica swamps of southern Western Ghats.
South India is a conglomerate of habitat mosaics fragmented by geological markers. Most of its unique and diverse species are best experienced on foot, the joy of which is lost in most of our popular parks but remains a necessity to understand the complexity of the South Indian wilds. Walks, not just in the pristine sholas or grasslands, but even in plantations of tea and coffee, rice paddies, urban wetlands, beaches, and dry hillocks in the Deccan bring out the essence of South India. Such worlds are sadly ignored by most. We chose to compile these wonders into a book to give people a chance to appreciate the wilderness of peninsular India.
The smallest ungulate, the Indian spotted chevrotain Moschiola meminna is also called the mouse deer. It stands around 25-30 cm. tall, weighs just four kilogrammes and can be found in evergreen and deciduous forest habitats. Photo:David Raju
This was not our first field guide. Working for years in the Satpura Tiger Reserve, where sighting a big cat was rare (though sloth bears were relatively common), we found that the key players during safaris, walks and canoe excursions were the lesser fauna. Consequently, our backpacks were stuffed with field guides on mammals, birds, dragonflies, butterflies, reptiles and such like. We honed our knowledge on experiences and species less sought after, stories less told.
To begin with the heterogeneity of habitats in South India was complex, unlike the comparatively smooth mosaics of the Central Indian landscape. South India was much more than just the Western Ghats. There was a disturbing lack of knowledge of the biodiversity of the Deccan, south-eastern plains of Tamil Nadu and the northern Eastern Ghats. We had failed to realise the enormity of the species diversity and the high degrees of endemism that these landscapes support. For example, north Godavari areas like Maredumilli, Papikondalu and Araku valley supported a huge range of species that were better known from Northeast India, a wide range of endemic reptiles apart from a few of Western Ghats and Deccan plateau species. We needed to understand this diversity and distribution and did so by exploring these landscapes.
The taxonomic arrangement of species and groups with complex identification keys was a major hurdle. Though we had come across Caecilians during our field visits, we had never bothered identifying them, perhaps on account of a combination of laziness and the complexity involved. We now had to learn about these species, select our images and lay out the pages as lucidly as possible. Identification of species groups such as Indirana sp. frogs, Hemidactylus sp. and Cnemaspis sp. geckos and even some warblers were beyond the scope of our book. We chose not to use technical jargon like pre-cloacal femoral pores, or focus on the precise lengths of digits in frogs. This was a major challenge, which we managed by using disclaimers, in-depth introductions and most importantly, splitting them based on distribution and visible external characteristics to, at the very least, help enthusiasts narrow down species.
In the course of compiling our book, we had the opportunity to interact with several experts and learn about countless new species. We scoured multiple image repositories, online banks and papers to find the right images for all species. Some described species however had no images, and instead were assigned old illustrations or images of museum specimens. Going through leaves of the Fauna of British India series, we learnt about many such species considered lost over time. Macromia sp. dragonflies and shieldtail snakes were two such groups. We looked for misidentifications in existing image banks and fresh searches for those species, which often turned up in the most unexpected places.
After two years of wrestling with volumes of information and new species additions, we finally proceeded with Pragati Offset in Hyderabad, where our book was to be printed. On a free Sunday, we visited Srisailam, a place we had written about in the book, but had never visited. We both wanted to see the Telangana plateau endemic, Nagarjunasagar skink Eutropis nagarjunensis, a stunning rock dwelling reptile. For company we had researcher Chethan Kumar who sent us the image of the animal we had never actually seen. Thanks to him we saw many individuals, plus other reptiles and birds that had made the granite hillocks that rose above the Telangana plateau their home.
The exhilaration we felt when we saw the skink in its own habitat, after months of just seeing it as a photograph in our book is precisely what we wish to transfer, both as naturalist guides and authors, to all who travel with this book in hand. South India has a lot to offer in every corner of its geography, for those who are interested in its diversity. What an incredible journey putting this book together has been! If through our book we manage to pass on the baton of curiosity, awareness, conservation and conscious travel to readers, we will have accomplished our purpose.
Surya Ramachandran is a widely-travelled engineer-turned-naturalist and author of two field guides along with fellow naturalist David Raju. His core interests lie in wilderness guiding and sustainable tourism practices together with understanding microhabitats and telling stories of ecological relationships.
This field guide features 79 species of snakes found in India. Along with colour photographs and informative text, the book also covers important topics like snake-bites and their prevention, the signs and symptoms of venomous snake-bites, first-aid measures and identification charts.
This book is immensely helpful for farmers, trekkers, doctors and students.
Most species of snake are nonvenomous and those that have venom use it primarily to kill and subdue prey rather than for self-defense. Some possess venom that is potent enough to cause painful injury or death to humans. Nonvenomous snakes either swallow prey alive or kill by constriction.
The two infraorders of Serpentes are Alethinophidia and Scolecophidia.[15] This separation is based on morphological characteristics and mitochondrial DNA sequence similarity. Alethinophidia is sometimes split into Henophidia and Caenophidia, with the latter consisting of "colubroid" snakes (colubrids, vipers, elapids, hydrophiids, and atractaspids) and acrochordids, while the other alethinophidian families comprise Henophidia.[16] While not extant today, the Madtsoiidae, a family of giant, primitive, python-like snakes, was around until 50,000 years ago in Australia, represented by genera such as Wonambi.[17]
While snakes are limbless reptiles, evolved from (and grouped with) lizards, there are many other species of lizards that have lost their limbs independently but which superficially look similar to snakes. These include the slowworm, glass snake, and amphisbaenians.[22]
The fossil record of snakes is relatively poor because snake skeletons are typically small and fragile making fossilization uncommon. Fossils readily identifiable as snakes (though often retaining hind limbs) first appear in the fossil record during the Cretaceous period.[24] The earliest known true snake fossils (members of the crown group Serpentes) come from the marine simoliophiids, the oldest of which is the Late Cretaceous (Cenomanian age) Haasiophis terrasanctus from the West Bank,[1] dated to between 112 and 94 million years old.[25]
Many modern snake groups originated during the Paleocene, alongside the adaptive radiation of mammals following the extinction of (non-avian) dinosaurs. The expansion of grasslands in North America also led to an explosive radiation among snakes.[29] Previously, snakes were a minor component of the North American fauna, but during the Miocene, the number of species and their prevalence increased dramatically with the first appearances of vipers and elapids in North America and the significant diversification of Colubridae (including the origin of many modern genera such as Nerodia, Lampropeltis, Pituophis, and Pantherophis).[29]
There is fossil evidence to suggest that snakes may have evolved from burrowing lizards,[30] during the Cretaceous Period.[31] An early fossil snake relative, Najash rionegrina, was a two-legged burrowing animal with a sacrum, and was fully terrestrial.[32] Najash, which lived 95 million years ago, also had a skull with several features typical for lizards, but had evolved some of the mobile skull joints that define the flexible skull in most modern snakes. The species did not show any resemblances to the modern burrowing blind snakes, which have often been seen as the most primitive group of extant forms.[33] One extant analog of these putative ancestors is the earless monitor Lanthanotus of Borneo (though it is also semiaquatic).[34] Subterranean species evolved bodies streamlined for burrowing, and eventually lost their limbs.[34] According to this hypothesis, features such as the transparent, fused eyelids (brille) and loss of external ears evolved to cope with fossorial difficulties, such as scratched corneas and dirt in the ears.[31][34] Some primitive snakes are known to have possessed hindlimbs, but their pelvic bones lacked a direct connection to the vertebrae. These include fossil species like Haasiophis, Pachyrhachis and Eupodophis, which are slightly older than Najash.[28]
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