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.