Mock Viper (Taipei)

English Name: Mock Viper
Scientific Name: Psammodynastes pulverulentus papenfussi
Chinese Name: 茶斑蛇 (Chaban She)
Chinese Meaning: "Tea-Striped Snake"

Date: May 12, 2010
Location: Mt. Xinglong, Wenshan Dist., Taipei City
Coordinates: 24° 59' 44.7" N, 121° 34' 6.7" E

I encountered this snake while wandering through a bamboo patch looking for the hiking trail to cross Xinglong Shan, a hill about 90m high in Southern Taipei (near MRT Wanfang Community Station). It was slithering through the undergrowth, and stopped long enough for me to line up some cool telephoto shots. It's a small snake that only grows to a couple feet long. Known as the "Mock Viper" because its triangular head resembles a poisonous viper, it's actually only very mildly venomous. It's a rear-fanged (opisthoglyphous) snake, which means that it only has small fangs in the back of its mouth. If it does bite, it's only known to cause mild pain and swelling in the bite area (usually your finger, since it has to get its jaws around you in order to nab you with the rear-mounted fangs).

The Mock Viper is a pretty common snake, found throughout most of Southeast Asia, west into India and Nepal, and north into southern China and Taiwan. It lives mostly on the ground and eats frogs, lizards, and occasionally other snakes. Like many snake species, it's ovoviparous, which means that its young develop inside eggs, but the eggs hatch inside the mother's body and the little snakes are born live. This particular subspecies, P. p. papenfussi, is only found in Taiwan, but it's not clear to me what differentiates it from the one other subspecies that lives everywhere else.

Whenever I see a new reptile or amphibian, I try to get some top-down shots like this of its back, because they tend to be useful in identifying the species. Out of the world's nearly 3,000 snake species, about 50 can be found in Taiwan (apparently St. Patrick never made it over here), so I need to get as much information as I can in order to match it to a species. The first place I go is usually a guidebook from the local library. But there's also a really great Snakes of Taiwan website, which has the added benefit of offering both Chinese and English, and lots of pictures.

Formosan Rock Monkey (Kaohsiung)

English Name: Formosan Rock Monkey, Formosan Macaque
Scientific Name: Macaca cyclopis
Chinese Name: 台灣獼猴 (Taiwan Mihou), 黑肢猴 (Heizhi Hou)
Chinese Meaning: "Taiwan Macaque", "Black-Limbed Monkey"


Date: February 12, 2010
Location: Chaishan Park, Gushan District, Kaohsiung City
Coordinates: 22° 39' 22" N, 120° 16' 11" E

The Formosan macaque (or rock monkey) is a species of monkey found naturally only in Taiwan (though there are some introduced colonies in Japan). It is also the only species of monkey or ape found in Taiwan, other than humans. Although the monkeys living in Taiwan are a unique species, they are closely related to other species of macaques, such as the Japanese "snow monkeys" and the "Barbary apes" found in North Africa and the Rock of Gibraltar (the only monkeys in Europe). Formosan macaques live in groups called "troops". It's reported that in the past they roamed Taiwan in groups of 100 or more, but now each troop usually has no more than a dozen members. Due to human interference, monkeys are now found only in the hills and mountains of Taiwan, but they are not especially endangered, due to their protected status under Taiwanese and international laws.



I finally got to see some monkeys when we went to Chaishan Park in Kaohsiung, also known by the names Shoushan and "Monkey Mountain", because it's well known for being home to many monkeys living close to the city (the Dutch colonists called it "Ape Hill"). When we first started on the trails, we didn't see any monkeys, and we were a little discouraged, but sure enough, when we walked far enough up the hill, we finally found a troop hanging out. They didn't seem to be afraid of humans at all. I was able to get very close to take pictures, though I was careful not to provoke them or stare into their eyes, because the park signs warned us not to. I caught this funny shot of one monkey panicking as another monkey almost falls off a tree branch:



Monkeys and humans in Taiwan don't always get along. The monkeys in Kaohsiung, in fact, have a reputation for being hostile to humans. There were apparently some monkey attacks on humans a few years back, though they seemed perfectly docile when we visited. In other parts of Taiwan, monkeys sometimes clash with villagers when they raid farms for food. In places like Kaohsiung, people will sometimes feed them on purpose. This can sometimes cause problems, because the monkeys become more reliant on food from people, and there are more opportunities for clashes. In the wild, Formosan rock monkeys eat things like fruit, leaves, and insects. There is also some illegal hunting of monkeys in Taiwan, but overall the species seems to be doing quite well, with the number of monkeys recently growing from previous years.

Note: A lot of the information for this post comes from the IUCN Redlist page for the species. The IUCN is the international organization that keeps track of which species are endangered or not endangered.