Skip to main content Skip to main navigation menu Skip to site footer
Responsive image
Issue: Vol. 5777 No. 2: 18 Mar. 2026
Type: Article
Published: 2026-03-18
DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.5777.2.5
Page range: 307-326
Abstract views: 26
PDF downloaded: 5

Report of colour polymorphism and range extension in two poorly known species of Indian Rhinophis (Squamata: Uropeltidae)

Department of Zoology; Centre for Applied Genetics; Jnana Bharathi Campus; Bangalore University; Bengaluru - 560056; Karnataka; India; Department of Zoology; Dr. Manmohan Singh Bengaluru City University; Jnanajyothi Central College Campus; Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Veedhi; Bengaluru - 560001; Karnataka; India
Department of Zoology; Centre for Applied Genetics; Jnana Bharathi Campus; Bangalore University; Bengaluru - 560056; Karnataka; India
Department of Zoology; Centre for Applied Genetics; Jnana Bharathi Campus; Bangalore University; Bengaluru - 560056; Karnataka; India
Department of Biotechnology; Karnataka State Open University; Mukthagangothri; Mysuru - 570006; Karnataka; India
Centre for Ecological Sciences; Indian Institute of Science; Bengaluru - 560012; Karnataka; India
Division of Entomology; Central Coffee Research Institute; Coffee Research Station Post; Chikmagalur - 577117; Karnataka; India
Department of Biosciences; University Institute of Biotechnology; Chandigarh University; Mohali -140413; Punjab; India
Department of Zoology; Centre for Applied Genetics; Jnana Bharathi Campus; Bangalore University; Bengaluru - 560056; Karnataka; India
Department of Zoology; Centre for Applied Genetics; Jnana Bharathi Campus; Bangalore University; Bengaluru - 560056; Karnataka; India
Kalinga Foundation; Guddekere; Agumbe; Shivamogga - 577411; Karnataka; India
Reptilia colour pattern Kodagu distribution range mimicry shieldtail snakes Wayanad Western Ghats

Abstract

We report new scalation, colour-pattern, and distributional data on two poorly known species of Rhinophis from India’s Western Ghats region. We report the first phenotypic data for a population of R. sanguineus from Ambalavayal in Wayanad, Kerala, India, including a highly distinct colour polymorphism. This polymorphism is characterised by syntopically occurring conspecifics of R. sanguineus having either the typical pattern of a uniform dorsum or a previously unreported distinctly cross-banded form. We observed multiple cross-banded morphotypes as young and adults, as well as males and females. We also report on a new population of R. karinthandani from Bhagamandala, in the Kodagu Plateau, nearly 70 km north of the previously known range in the Wayanad Plateau. This finding opens the prospects for inferred presence of R. karinthandani in a few of the intervening massifs as well. Our new finding of R. karinthandani also provides an extended range in known numbers of ventral scales for the species. Taken together, these findings underscore the incomplete knowledge on Indian Rhinophis, both old and recently described species, regarding multiple facets of natural history.

 

References

  1. Aengals, R. & Ganesh, S.R. (2013) Rhinophis goweri - a new species of shieldtail snake from the Southern Eastern Ghats, India. Russian Journal of Herpetology, 20 (1), 61–65.
  2. Barnett, J.B. & Cuthill, I.C. (2014) Distance-dependent defensive coloration. Current Biology, 24 (24), 1157–1158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.11.015
  3. Beddome, R.H. (1863) Descriptions of new species of the family Uropeltidae from Southern India, with notes on other little-known species. Proceedings of Zoological Society of London, 1863, 225–229.
  4. Beddome, R.H. (1886) An account of the earth snakes of the Peninsula of India and Ceylon. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Series 5, 17 (97), 3–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/00222938609460106
  5. Boulenger, G.A. (1890) The Fauna of British India, Including Ceylon and Burma. Reptilia and Batrachia. Taylor & Francis, London, 541 pp. https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.100797
  6. Boulenger, G.A. (1892) Description of a new earth snake from Travancore (Rhinophis travancoricus). Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, 7 (318), 7.
  7. Boulenger, G.A. (1893) Catalogue of the snakes in the British Museum (Nat. Hist.) I. Taylor & Francis, London, 448 pp.
  8. Boulenger, G.A. (1896) Description of a new earth-snake from Travancore (Rhinophis fergusonianus). Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, 10, 236.
  9. Cyriac, V.P. & Kodandaramaiah, U. (2017) Paleoclimate determines diversification patterns in the fossorial snake family Uropeltidae Cuvier, 1829. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 116, 97–107. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2017.08.017
  10. Cyriac, V.P. & Kodandaramaiah, U. (2019a) Conspicuous colours reduce predation rates in fossorial uropeltid snakes. Peer J, 7, e7508. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.7508
  11. Cyriac, V.P. & Kodandaramaiah, U. (2019b) Don’t waste your time: predators avoid prey with conspicuous colors that signal long handling time. Evolutionary Ecology, 33, 625–636. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10682-019-09998-9
  12. Cyriac, V.P., Narayanan, S., Sampaio, F.L., Umesh, P. & Gower, D.J. (2020) A new species of Rhinophis Hemprich, 1820 (Serpentes: Uropeltidae) from the Wayanad region of peninsular India. Zootaxa, 4778 (2), 329–342. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4778.2.5
  13. Cyriac, V.P. & Kodandaramaiah, U. (2021) Warning signals promote morphological diversification in fossorial uropeltid snakes (Squamata: Uropeltidae). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 191 (2), 468–481. https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zlaa062
  14. Cyriac, V.P., Ganesh, S.R., Madani, Z., Ghosh, A., Kulkarni, V. & Shanker, K. (2024) Phylogenetic systematics of the shieldtail snake genus Teretrurus Beddome, 1886 (Squamata: Uropeltidae) reveals extensive cryptic diversity and novel geographic spread in the Western Ghats of India. Bulletin of the Society of Systematic Biologists, 3 (2), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.18061/bssb.v3i2.9630
  15. Cyriac, V.P., Umesh, P.K., Achyuthan, N.S., Kulkarni, V. & Ganesh, S.R. (2025) A new species of Rhinophis Hemprich, 1820 (Squamata: Uropeltidae) from Siruvani Hills, Western Ghats, India. Evolutionary Systematics, 9 (2), 191–201. https://doi.org/10.3897/evolsyst.9.150536
  16. Deepak, V., Harikrishnan, S., Vasudevan, K. & Smith, E.N. (2010) Redescription of Bibron’s coral snake, Calliophis bibroni (Jan 1858) with notes and new records from south of the Palghat and Shencottah gaps of the Western Ghats, India. Hamadryad, 35 (1), 1–10.
  17. Edgar, R.C. (2004) MUSCLE: Multiple sequence alignment with high accuracy and high throughput. Nucleic Acids Research, 32 (5), 1792–1797. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkh340
  18. Ganesh, S.R., Gowri Shankar, P. & Sreekar, R. (2012) First record of Wayanad shieldtail Melanophidium wynaudense (Beddome, 1863) from the Central Western Ghats, India. Hamadryad, 36 (1), 53–56.
  19. Ganesh, S.R., Chadramouli, S.R., Sreekar, R. & Gowri Shankar, P. (2013) Reptiles of Central Western Ghats, India - a reappraisal and revised checklist, with emphasis on the Agumbe Plateau. Russian Journal of Herpetology, 20 (3), 181–189.
  20. Ganesh, S.R. & Murthy, B.C. (2022) Taxonomy of the shieldtail snake genus Teretrurus Beddome, 1886 (Serpentes: Uropeltidae) with a revised key and remarks on the geographic gaps in the Western Ghats, Peninsular India. Records of the Zoological Survey of India, 122, 25–35. https://doi.org/10.26515/rzsi/v122/i1/2022/154229
  21. Gower, D.J., Narayanan, S., Deepak, V., Muhammad, A.Y. & Das, S. (2023) Rediscovery and systematics of Rhinophis fergusonianus Boulenger, 1896 (Serpentes: Uropeltidae) from India’s Western Ghats. Zootaxa, 5374 (1), 74–92. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5374.1.4
  22. Gower, D.J., Sampaio, F.L., Vidanapathirana, D.R. & Wickramasinghe, L.M. (2024) Two new species of the shieldtail snake genus Rhinophis Hemprich, 1820 (Serpentes: Uropeltidae), from the Rakwana and the Knuckles Massifs of Sri Lanka. Zootaxa, 5458 (3), 332–360. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5458.3.2
  23. Günther, A.C.L.G. (1864) The Reptiles of British India. The Ray Society, London, 444 pp. https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.5012
  24. Karanth, D.N., Bhise, M.S., Praveen, H.N. & Cyriac, V.P. (2023) Observations on arthropod predation of uropeltid snakes (Squamata: Uropeltidae) from the Western Ghats, India. Hamadryad, 40, 53–59.
  25. Lanfear, R., Frandsen, P.B., Wright, A.M., Senfeld, T. & Calcott, B. (2017) Partition Finder 2: New methods for selecting partitioned models of evolution for molecular and morphological phylogenetic analyses. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 34 (3), 772–773. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msw260
  26. Miller, S.A., Dykes, D.D. & Polesky, H.F. (1988) A simple salting out procedure for extracting DNA from human nucleated cells. Nucleic Acids Research, 16 (3), 1215. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/16.3.1215
  27. Minh, B.Q., Schmidt, H.A., Chernomor, O., Schrempf, D., Woodhams, M.D., Von Haeseler, A. & Lanfear, R. (2020) IQ-TREE 2: New models and efficient methods for phylogenetic inference in the genomic era. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 37 (5), 1530–1534. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaa015
  28. Palumbi, S.R. (1996) Nucleic acids II: the polymerase chain reaction. In: Hillis, D., Moritz, C. & Mable, B.K. (Eds.), Molecular systematic. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, Massachusetts, pp. 205–247.
  29. Pyron, R.A., Ganesh, S.R., Sayyed, A., Sharma, V., Wallach, V. & Somaweera, R. (2016) A catalogue and systematic overview of the shield-tailed snakes (Serpentes: Uropeltidae). Zoosystema, 38 (4), 453–506. https://doi.org/10.5252/z2016n4a2
  30. Rambaut, A., Drummond, A.J., Xie, D., Baele, G. & Suchard, M.A. (2018) Posterior summarization in Bayesian phylogenetics using Tracer 1.7. Systematic Biology, 67 (5), 901–904. https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syy032
  31. Ronquist, F., Teslenko, M., van der Mark, P., Ayres, D.L., Darling, A., Höhna, S., Larget, B., Liu, L., Suchard, M.A. & Huelsenbeck, J.P. (2012) MrBayes 3.2: efficient Bayesian phylogenetic inference and model choice across a large model space. Systematic Biology, 61 (3), 539–542. https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/sys029
  32. Sampaio, F.L., Narayanan, S., Cyriac, V.P., Venu, G. & Gower, D.J. (2020) A new Indian species of Rhinophis Hemprich, 1820 closely related to R. sanguineus Beddome, 1863 (Serpentes: Uropeltidae). Zootaxa, 4881 (1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4881.1.1
  33. Sampaio, F.L., Day, J.J., Wickramasinghe, L.M., Cyriac, V.P., Papadopoulou, A., Brace, S., Rajendran, A., Simon-Nutbrown, C., Flouris, T., Kapli, P. & Vidanapathirana, D.R. (2023) A near-complete species-level phylogeny of uropeltid snakes harnessing historical museum collections as a DNA source. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 178, 107651. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2022.107651
  34. Smith, M.A. (1943) The Fauna of British India, Ceylon and Burma, Including the Whole of the Indo-Chinese Sub-Region. Reptilia & Amphibia. 3 (Serpentes). Taylor and Francis, London, 583 pp.
  35. Talavera, G. & Castresana, J. (2007) Improvement of phylogenies after removing divergent and ambiguously aligned blocks from protein sequence alignments. Systematic Biology, 56 (4), 564–577. https://doi.org/10.1080/10635150701472164
  36. Tamura, K., Stecher, G. & Kumar, S. (2021) MEGA11: Molecular evolutionary genetics analysis version 11. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 38 (7), 3022–3027. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msab120
  37. Thite, V. & Kirtana, A. (2013) First note on polychromatism in Uropeltis bicatenata (Günther, 1864). Sauria, 35 (4), 59–62.
  38. Wall, F. (1919) Notes on a collection of snakes made in the Nilgiri Hills and the adjacent Wynaad. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, 26, 552–584.
  39. Zhang, D., Gao, F., Jakovlić, I., Zou, H., Zhang, J., Li, W.X. & Wang, G.T. (2020) PhyloSuite: An integrated and scalable desktop platform for streamlined molecular sequence data management and evolutionary phylogenetics studies. Molecular Ecology Resources, 20 (1), 348–355. https://doi.org/10.1111/1755-0998.13096

How to Cite

Venu, G., Balakrishna, G.N., Gadha, L.K., Raju, N.G., Cyriac, V.P., Seetharama, H.G., Shampa, C., Ramakrishna, S., Venkatachalaiah, G. & Ganesh, S. (2026) Report of colour polymorphism and range extension in two poorly known species of Indian Rhinophis (Squamata: Uropeltidae). Zootaxa, 5777 (2), 307–326. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5777.2.5