27 Jun
2006 Gland, Switzerland – A new snake with the
ability to spontaneously change colour has been
discovered in the forests of the Heart of Borneo,
one of the most biologically diverse regions on
Earth, possessing staggeringly high numbers of
unique species across all groups of plants and
animals.
This ability of the snake to
change colour is known from some reptiles, such
as the chameleon, but scientists have seen it
very rarely with snakes and have not yet understood
this phenomenon.
The snake was discovered by
a German researcher who described it with the
collaboration of two American scientists.
“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.
Dr Auliya collected two specimens
of the half-metre long poisonous snake in the
wetlands and swamped forests around the Kapuas
river in the Betung Kerihun National Park, an
area in Kalimantan (the Indonesian part of Borneo)
where WWF supports conservation work. The scientists
named it the Kapuas mud snake.
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.
In the last ten years, 361 new
animal and plants species have been discovered
on the island of Borneo. This amounts to three
new species a month in an area only a little more
than twice the size of Germany.
“The discovery of the ‘chameleon'
snake exposes one of nature’s best kept secrets
deep in the Heart of Borneo," said Stuart
Chapman, WWF’s international coordinator of the
Heart of Borneo initiative.
"Its ability to change
colour has kept it hidden from science until now.
I guess it just picked the wrong colour that day.”
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.
But there is also hope that
this trend could be halted as the three Bornean
governments – Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia and
Malaysia – recently launched the Heart of Borneo
initiative, which aims to preserve approximately
220,000km2 of equatorial forests and numerous
wildlife species.
Stuart Chapman / Stefan Ziegler
/ Olivier van Bogaert
