Instagram has become an extremely popular tool for social media users. Many have turned to this to share their lives, activities, and even discoveries. While many have become so dependent on the app, no one really thought that Instagram would be the tool for a new discovery.
Recently, a man spotted a snake as he walked down the muddy roads of the Himalayas. He took a picture and shared it on his social media platform. He never thought much about it until experts told him that this was an unfamiliar species of snake that they had never seen.
In fact, a research from India were left intrigued by a photo that was shared on Instagram. They realized that this was a previously unknown species of kukri snake.
The story started when Virendar K. Bhardwaj stayed at home in Chamba because of the pandemic lockdown. He was a master student in Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar. Because he had nothing much to do, he started exploring his backyard. He took pictures of everything he saw there. He also decided to post these pictures online on Instagram.
This was when his said social media account started coming to life with pictures of snakes, lizards, frogs, and insects he that he had seen. In one of the photos he had was a picture of a kukri snake. This popped up in Zeeshan A. Mirza’s feed. He worked at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore. The moment he saw the snake, he stood up in shock and excitement. He spoke with his colleague Harshil Patel and decided to call Virendar. He wanted more details about the sighting made.
The snake that Virendar saw as he walked along a mud road on a summer evening actually belongs to a group commonly known as Kukri snakes. These have been named as such because of their curved teeth that resemble the Nepali dagger “Kukri”. At first sight, the snake that Virendar photographed looked a lot like the common type that was known as Oligodon arnensis. However, a herpetologist was able to see that this new one had some unique features. The experts had begun to question its identity because of the notable differences that was not common to the type.
Virendar had uploaded the said photo on 5 June 2020. By the end of that month, after extensively surveying the area, he found two individuals. This was enough for them to go forward with their identification. However, the pandemic also slowed down the research work as labs and natural history museums had been closed at that time.
As soon as the labs reopened, the team studied the DNA of the specimens and found out they belonged to a species that was entirely different from the Common Kukri snake. Then, went on to compare the snakes’ morphological features with the data they already had available from literature and museums. They made use of micro computed tomography scans to go further in their investigation of the snake’s morphology. After the work, the research team was able to confirm that this snake belonged to a species previously not known to science.
The discovery was then published in a research paper in the international peer-reviewed journal called Evolutionary Systematics. There, the new species is described as Oligodon churahensis, its name a reference to the Churah Valley in Himachal Pradesh, the place it had been discovered.
“It is quite interesting to see how an image on Instagram led to the discovery of such a pretty snake that, until very recently, remained hidden to the world,” said Zeeshan A. Mirza. He said, “What’s even more interesting is that the exploration of your own backyard may yield still undocumented species. Lately, people have been eager to travel to remote biodiversity hotspots to find new or rare species, but if one looks in their own backyard, they may end up finding a new species right there.”
“Compared to other biodiversity hotspots, the Western Himalayas are still poorly explored, especially in terms of herpetological diversity, but they harbor unique reptile species that we have only started to unravel in the last couple of years,” Mirza also added.
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