An additional record of the Sri Lankan Flying Snake, Chrysopelea cf. taprobanica Smith 1943, from the Agasthyamalai Region in the southern Western Ghats, India

Abstract

F lying snakes of the genus Chrysopelea Boie 1826 comprise five known species (Uetz et al. 2022). Two species of Chrysopelea are found in mainland India: the Golden Flying Snake, Chrysopelea ornata (Shaw 1802), and the Sri Lankan Flying Snake, Chrysopelea taprobanica Smith 1943. Chrysopelea ornata is a widespread species found across southern and southeastern Asia. Chrysopelea taprobanica initially was thought to be endemic to Sri Lanka (Smith 1943;Taylor 1950), but subsequent studies reported it from the Eastern Ghats of India (Constable 1949;Guptha et al. 2015; see also Somaweera et al. 2015). Later, Narayanan et al. (2017) reported C. cf. taprobanica from the Western Ghats of India. More recently, Kalaimani et al. (2023) reported five new distributional records of C. taprobanica from Tamil Nadu (Table 1). In this work, I report the occurrence of C. cf. taprobanica from the Agasthyamalai region of the southern Western Ghats.