A new species of green pit vipers of the genus Trimeresurus Lacépède, 1804 (Reptilia, Serpentes, Viperidae) from western Arunachal Pradesh, India

Zeeshan A Mirza,Gaurang G Gowande,Harshal S Bhosale,Harshil Patel,Pushkar U Phansalkar,Mandar Sawant

doi:10.3897/zse.96.48431

Abstract

A new species of green pit vipers of the genus Trimeresurus Lacépède, 1804 is described from the lowlands of western Arunachal Pradesh state of India. The new species, Trimeresurus salazar, is a member of the subgenus Trimeresurus, a relationship deduced contingent on two mitochondrial genes, 16S and ND4, and recovered as sister to Trimeresurus septentrionalis Kramer, 1977. The new species differs from the latter in bearing an orange to reddish stripe running from the lower border of the eye to the posterior part of the head in males, higher number of pterygoid and dentary teeth, and a short, bilobed hemipenis. Description of the new species and T. arunachalensis Captain, Deepak, Pandit, Bhatt &amp; Athreya, 2019 from northeastern India in a span of less than one year highlights the need for dedicated surveys to document biodiversity across northeastern India.

Highlights

The pit vipers of the genus Trimeresurus Lacépède, 1804 are charismatic venomous serpents, with morphologically as well as ecologically diverse species (Sanders et al 2004)
David et al (2011) suggested valuable amendments in the nomenclature of the generic splitting, and in following them, we assign the new species to the subgenus Trimeresurus Lacépède, 1804
Based on a short fragment of 16S and ND4 gene, the new species was recovered as sister to T. septentrionalis (Fig. 6), with moderate support (ML bootstrap 58 and Bayesian Inference (BI) posterior probability 0.74), from which it differs by an uncorrected pairwise sequence divergence (p-distance) of 6% on ND4 (Appendix II)

Summary

Introduction

The pit vipers of the genus Trimeresurus Lacépède, 1804 are charismatic venomous serpents, with morphologically as well as ecologically diverse species (Sanders et al 2004). They are distributed across east and southeast Asia. At least 48 nominate species (Gumprecht et al 2004; Whitaker and Captain 2004; Wallach et al 2014; Captain et al 2019) are known, of which at least 15 occur in India. The diversity of pit vipers is likely underestimated, as several species are morphologically cryptic making it difficult to distinguish them in the field (Malhotra and Thorpe 2000, 2004; Zhong et al 2015; Zhu et al 2016; Mulcahy et al 2017)

Methods

Results

Conclusion