Article

Snakes

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Snakes

Snakes have attracted sustained attention in the natural history literature of the Malay Peninsula and Borneo, from the earliest volumes of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society through the mid-twentieth century. The records span a range of species and phenomena: the capture of exceptionally large pythons, the documentation of cave-adapted colour morphs, the observation of unusual nesting behaviour, and the taxonomic description of rare specimens. Together they reveal a scholarly tradition in which individual field observations, however brief, were considered worthy of publication when they extended known ranges, corrected common misidentifications, or revealed adaptive features of zoological interest.

Notable Specimens and Records of Size

The most dramatic account in the available literature concerns a python (ular sawa, the Malay term for the species) discovered on Gunong Pulai, Johore, in December 1904. C. Boden Kloss, accompanied by H. N. Ridley, learned from a local collector that a python approximately thirty feet in length had been killed by Chinese workers at the foot of the mountain. The skin, nailed out on boards and missing its head, measured twenty-nine feet in the portion that remained [1, p. 281]. The snake had entered a pig-sty in the evening and consumed a gravid sow along with thirteen piglets of various sizes, becoming so distended that it was unable to escape through the hole it had used to enter [1, p. 282]. Kloss noted that while pythons under twenty feet were common in the Peninsula, a thirty-foot specimen warranted formal recording [1, p. 282].

A separate but related contribution by N. B. Dennys in 1882 addressed the reticulated python (Python reticulatus), correcting the common misidentification of the species as a boa constrictor and noting that all true boas are of American origin [2, p. 162]. Dennys described the egg, from which an illustration was made, as part of a mass of approximately one hundred eggs cemented together by a glutinous substance, around which the female coils herself. He recorded that the female’s temperature rises to 75° Fahrenheit and is maintained for fifty-six days until the young emerge, each about sixteen inches long. The specimen was a gift from the Maharaja of Johor to the Raffles Museum [2, p. 162].

Cave Adaptation and Colour Morphs

H. N. Ridley’s 1898 note on the white snake of the Selangor caves represents one of the most detailed observations in the available records. Specimens captured by Ridley and C. B. Harvey in December 1896 were identified by G. A. Boulenger at the Natural History Museum as Coluber tæniurus, a species previously known from Darjeeling, Sumatra, Borneo, and China but not the Malay Peninsula [3, pp. 99–100]. Ridley provided a detailed colour description of the Selangor population: a bluish-grey head, pale ocreous back with isabelline-tipped scales, a yellowish vertebral centre, a pale yellowish-white belly, and a white-and-black barred tail. All ten specimens examined were uniform in colour [3, pp. 99–100].

Ridley argued that the snake’s coloration constituted a remarkable adaptation to the pale ocreous-yellow limestone walls of the caves, where it rests motionless on ledges near bat roosts to ambush its prey, making it nearly invisible against the rock but conspicuous on the dark cave floor. Comparing his specimens with Boulenger’s catalogue description, which depicts a much darker olive-grey-brown animal with black transverse lines, Ridley concluded that the cave form was “at least on the way to become a species distinct in the eyes even of the systematist” [3, pp. 100–101].

Nesting Behaviour and Taxonomic Notes

In September 1905, when a sickly old Spathodea nilotica was felled in the Botanic Gardens, Singapore, a living female Simotes octolineatus approximately one foot long was found ensconced in a longicorn beetle tunnel within a bough more than twenty feet from the ground. The snake had already laid about a dozen oblong eggs, each an inch long, inside the tunnel. The tree was isolated with a bare trunk, and Ridley noted that the snake must have entered through one of several beetle escape openings in the bough [4, p. 263]. This observation, though brief, documented a nesting strategy of considerable zoological curiosity: the use of an arboreal beetle gallery as a protected oviposition site.

G. Hope Sworder’s 1929 note on Calamaria gimletti Boulenger documents the fourth known specimen of the species, collected by C. S. Nava Ratnam at Fraser’s Hill, F.M.S., at an elevation of 4,000 feet. The specimen extends the known range of ventral counts for the species (165, compared with 202–249 in the three previously recorded specimens) and differs in markings from earlier records: it lacks yellow spots on the tail and bears a large confluent yellow spot on each side of the body at eight costals from the head. A table summarising the four known specimens was provided, and the specimen was deposited in the Raffles Museum, Singapore [5, pp. 336–337].

The King Cobra in Singapore

The occurrence of Ophiophagus elaps, the king cobra, in Singapore was recorded twice by N. B. Dennys in the early volumes of the Society’s journal. The first note, published in the inaugural volume of 1878, documents the presence of the species in Singapore, a colubrid snake known for its diet of other snakes [6, pp. 99–105]. A second note, also in 1878 but in volume 2, records the capture of a single specimen and its significance for the local fauna [7, pp. 233–235]. The title’s reference to the “snake-eating Hamadryad” reflects the contemporary common name for the king cobra, underscoring the species’ notoriety as a predator of other snakes [7, pp. 233–235]. Both notes are brief in scope, reporting the capture of single specimens, yet their appearance in the first two volumes of the journal indicates that the species commanded immediate attention from the Society’s founding contributors.

Research and Documentation

The available records reveal a consistent pattern in the Society’s literature: snake-related contributions are predominantly short notes, typically one to three pages in length, reporting single specimens or single observations. The earliest records date from 1878, when Dennys published two separate notes on Ophiophagus elaps in the first two volumes of the journal [7], [6]. Through the 1890s and early 1900s, the focus shifted toward pythons and their biology—Dennys’s 1882 note on the reticulated python’s egg [2], Ridley’s 1898 description of the cave-adapted Coluber tæniurus [3], and Kloss’s 1906 account of the thirty-foot python from Gunong Pulai [1]. The period also saw attention to nesting behaviour, as in Ridley’s 1906 note on Simotes octolineatus [4].

By the 1920s, the emphasis had moved toward formal taxonomic documentation of rare specimens, exemplified by Sworder’s 1929 note on Calamaria gimletti, which includes a comparative table of ventral counts and a text-figure of enlarged scale details [5]. This reflects a broader maturation of the Society’s approach: from the recording of curiosities and first occurrences in the Straits Branch period to the systematic comparison of morphological characters in the Malayan Branch period. The records also show a geographic spread from Singapore and the Selangor caves to Johore, Fraser’s Hill, and the highlands of Sarawak, though the Sarawak Museum’s cataloguing system, which assigned reptiles the class letter C, indicates that the institution maintained a dedicated herpetological collection even where no specific snake papers appear in the available records [8, p. 71].

The limitations of the record should be noted. No comprehensive faunal survey of snakes in the region appears among the sources provided; the literature consists of discrete observations rather than systematic treatments. The economic dimensions of snake-hunting or snake-bite treatment are absent from these particular records, as is any discussion of venomous species beyond the king cobra’s predation on other snakes. The available evidence thus presents snakes as objects of zoological curiosity and taxonomic interest, documented through the accumulated short notes of field naturalists and museum curators working across the Straits Settlements, the Federated Malay States, and Sarawak.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. C.B. Kloss (1906). A Johore python JSBRAS 45: 281–282.
  2. N.B. Dennys (1882). Python’s egg JSBRAS 9: 161–162.
  3. H.N. Ridley (1898). The white snake of the Selangor caves JSBRAS 31: 99–101.
  4. H.N. Ridley (1906). Curious nesting place of Simotes octolineatus JSBRAS 46: 263.
  5. G.H. Sworder (1929). A note on Calamaria gimletti Bouleng JMBRAS 7(2): 336–337. Read on JSTOR
  6. N.B. Dennys (1878). On the occurrence of Ophiophagus elaps, the snake-eating Hamadryad in Singapore JSBRAS 1: 99–105.
  7. N.B. Dennys (1878). Capture of a specimen of Ophiophagus elaps JSBRAS 2: 233–235.
  8. R.S. Shelford (1901). Notes from the Sarawak Museum JSBRAS 35: 69–71.