A New Species of Snake Discovered by a Student’s Instagram Post

Interesting story behind the discovery  - “Virender, a student went back home in Chamba (Himachal Pradesh) because of the lockdown was exploring his backyard and was photographing and uploading pictures of whatever he shot on Instagram, including pictures of snakes, lizards, frogs and insects”.

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

In Himachal Pradesh, researchers and herpetologists have come across a species of Kukri snake (the Oligodon churahensis). The new species has been as ‘Oligodon churahensis’, after the Churah Valley in Himachal Pradesh. 

“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 a Kukri, as they bear teeth that are curved like that of Nepali dagger kukri. The snake which Virendar found was similar to the common kukri snake (Oligodon arnesis), however, it differed in several aspects” – said Zeeshan.  

Leading to the discovery, the picture was uploaded by Virendar on 5^th June, 2020. He had found two snakes which were enough to start their identification, but the discovery was delayed as visiting natural history museums was not possible and the labs were also not functioning for a long time. 

Molecular data (DNA) of the species was generated, after labs resumed working, and confirmed that the species was indeed different from the common kukri snake. In the first week of August 2021, a joint paper was submitted and published in the recent issue of the international journal of Evolutionary Systematics.