Snake Predation in Taiwan - Observation of the Week, 10/10/23

Our Observation of the Week is this predation event: a Brown Spotted Pitviper (Protobothrops mucrosquamatus, 龜殼花 in Chinese (traditional)) eating a Taiwanese Gray Shrew (Crocidura tanakae, 台灣灰麝鼩 in Chinese (traditional))! Seen in Taiwan by @r_cj!

“When I was young, I was very interested in the flora and fauna that surrounded me. At first, I just observed the plants, birds, and insects in my elementary school campus. Observing ants alone could occupy my entire afternoon,” says Chen Jin, a student at National Taiwan University (NTU).

After joining NTU’s conservation club, she started becoming involved in night observations, and she also met Janus Olajuan Boediman (@janusolajuanboediman), a senior at the university, who taught her about finding snakes at night.

And Chen Jin was doing that exact thing this June when she came across the snake you see above. She first encountered it was it was lying beside the trail, waiting for prey.

Unexpectedly, on the way back, I was fortunate enough to see it just after catching its prey. At first, it held the prey by the neck, seemingly retreating to avoid the approaching ants. Once it got away from the disturbance of the ants, it quickly adjusted the position of the prey and began to swallow it from the head. From the moment I saw it to its swallowing the last part of the tail of the prey, the whole process lasted about four minutes. After completing its meal, it stayed in place for three minutes, then slowly moved toward the location where I had first seen it on my way out and disappeared from my sight.

Brown spotted pitvipers range throughout much of Asia, from India to southeast Asia and Taiwan, and like all vipers evenomates its prey using hinged fangs which move forward when a bit is delivered. They generally grow to a length of 112 cm (44 in).

And while shrews are sometimes confused with rodents, they actually belong to a completely separate family: Soricidae. While rodents have two pairs of ever-growing incisors, shrew teeth are sharp and pointy, and some are even venomous!

Speaking of mammals, Chen Jin (above with a Pareas atayal snake) has also started monitoring and research the monitoring and researching the masked palm civet “in urban areas such as Taipei and around NTU campus, as I’m concerned for the wild animals that are trying to survive in the constantly expanding city and avoiding the threat of free-ranging urban dogs.”

She’s been on iNat since 2019, and says that

at first, I used iNaturalist to assist me in identifying species, combined with the Seek app, which made me more curious about the surrounding flora and fauna. I often opened the app to try to learn the organisms around me, increasing my curiosity about biology. Starting this year, after beginning night observations and buying a camera, I started using iNaturalist as a platform for recording observations of species and also helping identify observation records uploaded by others, while practicing my own species identification skills.

(Photo of Chen Jin by Janus Olajuan Boediman.)

- you can follow Chen Jin on Instagram!

- @janusolajuanboediman’s weevil observation was featured as an Observation of the Week back in 2022!

- fun fact: the musk shrews (genus Crocidura) may be the most speciose mammal genus of them all!

Posted on October 10, 2023 07:16 PM by