by Playfuls Staff |
27th June 2006
Researchers searching through swamps in the heart of Borneo have discovered a species of snake with the ability to spontaneously change colour, the World Wild Life Fund said Tuesday. [more]
Researchers from Germany and the US discovered the water snake's chameleon-like behaviours by accident when they put it into a dark bucket.
The ability to change change is known in some reptiles, such as the chameleon, but scientists have seen it very rarely with snakes and have yet to understand this phenomenon, the group said in a statement.
"I put the reddish-brown snake in a dark bucket. When I retrieved it a few minutes later, it was almost entirely white," said Dr Mark Auliya, reptile expert at the Zoologisches Forschungsmuseum Alexander Koenig in Germany, and a consultant for WWF.
Unlike the chameleon, the snake is apparently not changing colour for camouflage.
Discovered in the Kapuas river in the Betung Kerihun National Park in Kalimantan on the Indonesian portion of Borneo, it belongs to the Enhydris genus of rear-fanged water snakes and has been named the 'Kapuas-Mud-Snake' (Enhydris gyii), the WWF said.
It is about 50-centimetres long and poisonous.
The genus Enhydris, to which the new snake belongs, is composed of 22 species, only two of which are widespread. All the others have a very restricted range.
The scientists believe this newly discovered snake might only occur in the Kapuas river drainage system, adding that in the last 10 years, more than 360 new animal and plant species have been discovered on Borneo.
"The discovery of the 'chameleon' snake exposes one of nature's best kept secrets deep in the Heart of Borneo. Its ability to change colour has kept it hidden from science until now," said Bambang Supriyanto, WWF's national coordinator of the Heart of Borneo Programme.
"I guess it just picked the wrong colour that day," Supriyanto said.
However, WWF warns that the home of the new snake is threatened. Today, only half of Borneo's forest cover remains, down from 75 per cent in the mid 1980s.
"This discovery has proved to us that the tropical rainforest in the Heart of Borneo is abundant in natural uniqueness and that makes us very proud indeed," echoed Banjar Y. Laban, director of area conservation at the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry.
Concuring with the environmental group's view, Laban said all that pride means nothing if deforestation and the destruction of the habitats which are home to those species is continually taking place as it is in the present.
"Therefore it is necessarily required of us to make a common effort to avoid deforestation," he said.
© 2006 DPA
