Wildlife biologists sighted and photographed the rare horseshoe pit viper Trimeresurus strigatus on August 2 at Udhagamandalam in Tamil Nadu. The snake is thought to be endemic to the Nilgiri hill ranges in the Western Ghats in south India.
“We spotted the pit viper basking on a rock in an open grassland in the afternoon,” says wildlife biologist Shashank Dalvi, who photographed the snake. Snakes being cold-blooded (poikilothermic), need to sun-bask to maintain their body temperatures. “Most records of this species are from around Ooty and the Silent Valley-Mukurthi landscape,” he adds.
The venomous horseshoe pit viper gets its name from a pale beige horseshoe-shaped mark on its nape. Not many studies have been done on the locally-common snake which is found only in the open grasslands of the threatened shola grassland ecosystem in the Nilgiris above elevations of 1000 metres above sea level.
The Horseshoe pit viper is one of the three pit vipers endemic to the Western Ghats. India is home to 21 species of pit vipers. These snakes are named after the infra-red sensing pit between their nose and eyes which they use to identify warm-blooded prey.
