Yatin Kalki

Ecophis Wildlife

In urban areas, restricted property access poses a significant challenge, making conventional herp survey techniques like visual encounter, cover-board, and drift fence surveys infeasible. When urban residents encounter snakes, they often kill them out of fear and ignorance. This behavior is not only detrimental to snake populations, but attempting...

A total of 209 observations of Ahaetulla nasuta feeding on prey were compiled from social media platforms, citizen science websites, and from the literature in order to gain insights into the food habits of this arboreal colubrid, and to construct an inventory of the prey species recorded in its dietary spectrum. The diet of A. nasuta consists prim...

Lycodon deccanensis Ganesh, Deuti, Punith, Achyuthan, Mallik, Adhikari, Vogel, 2020 was recently described from the Mysore plateau of Karnataka based solely on morphology but lacking in-depth descriptions and comparisons. A scrutiny of the description reveals that the type series, of two specimens, comprise specimens of two different species along...

Systematic and thorough studies of snake populations across large areas are rare in the tropics. Bengaluru city in southern India has not had a thorough checklist of snakes in over a century, during which time land-use changes, taxonomic revisions, and fluctuating reptile populations have left the current status of snakes of this region unclear. We...

Spectacled Cobras (Naja naja) and Oriental Ratsnakes (Ptyas mucosa) frequently share habitats and presumably occupy a similar trophic niche. We present a dietary synopsis of both species as well as niche metrics based on feeding events retrieved from crowdsourced data. Our analysis suggests a high importance of ophiophagy in the diet of N. naja, wh...

Alternative reproductive tactics are discrete, intrasexual differences in reproductive behaviour within a population. In some cases, these complex phenotypes are determined by autosomal supergenes or sex chromosomes—both of which exhibit reduced recombination and thus enable the linked inheritance of co‐adapted alleles from multiple loci. Most alte...

Climate change is one of the major drivers of biodiversity loss. Among vertebrates, amphibians are one of the more sensitive groups to climate change due to their unique ecology, habitat requirements, narrow thermal tolerance and relatively limited dispersal abilities. We projected the influence of climate change on an endemic toad, Malabar Tree To...

The freshwater crab, Barytelphusa cunicularis (Westwood, 1836), is a common and widespread crustacean species inhabiting freshwater streams throughout India except the northeast. It is an omnivore that feeds on small crustaceans, gastropods, insects and aquatic vegetation. This species is commonly collected as a food commodity and is also often rea...

The secretive behavior and life history of snakes makes studying their biology, distribution, and the epidemiology of venomous snakebite challenging. One of the most useful, most versatile, and easiest to collect types of biological data are photographs, particularly those that are connected with geographic location and date-time metadata. Photos v...

[Revista Latinoamericana de Herpetología 3(1): 111-115] Only four specific prey items are reported in the literature for the Mexican small-headed rattlesnake (Crotalus intermedius), which occurs in the central and southern Mexican highlands. To augment these data, we dissected museum specimens housed in the University of Illinois Museum of Natural...

The introduced smooth-billed ani Crotophaga ani has become widespread across the Galápagos archipelago in the past half-century. It is known to predate upon a range of native and endemic species, and is a potential vector for the spread of invasive plants and parasites. Here we report previously undocumented examples of smooth-billed ani predation...

Kirtland’s snake (Clonophis kirtlandii) is a poorly known natricine inhabiting moist environs within Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. Recent prospects of federal listing have been thwarted by the scarcity of information regarding its natural history, distribution, population size, and threats. Thus...

[Revista Latinoamericana de Herpetología 2(1): 48-50] The Venezuelan forest pitviper (Bothrops medusa) is an endangered viperid endemic to the central range of the Cordillera de la Costa in Venezuela. Little is known regarding its natural history and no specific prey are mentioned in the literature. We examined the stomach contents of museum specim...

Erratum: (UIMNH 93940; SVL = 269 mm; total length = 203 mm) should read (UIMNH 93940; SVL = 269 mm; total length = 302 mm)

[Bulletin of the Chicago Herpetological Society 54(1): 4-8] The variable coral snake (Micrurus diastema) is distributed along the Atlantic versant from central Veracruz, Mexico, through the Yucatán Peninsula, Belize, and northern Guatemala to northwestern Honduras (Campbell and Lamar, 2004; Heimes, 2016). It preys primarily on small snakes, but liz...

[Bulletin of the Chicago Herpetological Society 53(12): 249-252] The diamondback water snake, Nerodia rhombifer (Hallowell, 1852), is a large, New World natricine occurring in the Upper Mississippi and Lower Illinois Rivers through the Great Plains and along the Gulf Coast of Mexico into Campeche (Gibbons and Dorcas, 2004). As an aquatic specialist...

[Revista Latinoamericana de Herpetología 1(2): 35-43] The montane pitvipers (Cerrophidion spp.) consist of five recognized species that disjunctly occupy high elevational habitats from southern Mexico to western Panama. However, two of these species were recently delineated, leaving previously published natural history data on Cerrophidion outdated...

On 26 July 1964, J. Bower- man collected a large female Micrurus narduccii melanotus from Limoncocha, Sucumbíos Province, Ecuador (0.41°S, 76.63°W; WGS 84). The specimen (UIMNH 61058, University of Illinois Museum of Natural History Herpetology Collection) measures 1173 mm total length (SVL = 1131 mm). The previous reported maximum length for M. n....

Dicephalism (axial bifurcation) has been documented in Epicrates maurus previously (Wallach 2007. Bull. Maryland Herpetol. Soc. 43:57-95), but it is unclear if a specimen exists and whether it was captive bred or wild-caught. Here we present an overlooked prodichotomous E. maurus neonate that was collected by W. L. Burger on 24 June 1950 in Cumanoc...

The montane pitvipers (Cerrophidion spp.) consist of 5 recognized species that disjunctly occupy high elevational habitats from southern Mexico to western Panama. However, two of these species were recently delineated, leaving previously published natural history data on Cerrophidion outdated and in need of a re-examination. To gain more informatio...

We investigated six historical Malayopython reticulatus museum specimens thought to have been collected from mainland India and examined their validity. Most specimens offered insufficient data to support collection from present-day mainland India and were discounted. Despite this, one specimen (UIMNH 62394) collected in “Calcutta, India” prior to...