Christmas Eve in Hong Kong: A Common or Oriental Rat Snake

AJP was walking on Lamma Island on the morning of Christmas Eve. In a semi-abandoned village he spotted this rat snake on a patio. He estimated it was a good 1.4 metres in length.

These snakes will eat any land vertebrate they can catch. They are constructors but only applying sufficient coils, contraction or body-weight to kill their prey. In other words they do not go all in such that the whole body engulfs the animal in their mouth as in some other snakes They are powerful snakes and object mightily being caught by biting, thrashing and emptying the contents of its alimentary canal on the captor.

They are said to be diurnal. One of this species lived beneath our flats in the University of Hong Kong in 1965-66. We saw it occasionally sunning itself but we did not tell anybody lest the gardeners were told to kill it.

Our most memorable sighting was in Sri Lanka. One was high on a tree being mobbed by Rose-ringed Parakeets. They nipped its tail as it retreated to the ground.

A common snake throughout south and south-east Asia, this species was known as Ptyas mucosus from the mid-1800s. It had  been named as Coluber mucosus by Linnaeus in 1758. Then in 2004 two people published a paper saying that since Ptyas is of the feminine gender, the specific name must be changed according to the ICZN rules to the feminine, i.e. mucosa. And mucosa is now what you see, creating even more confusion for indexing and searching, for scientists in other disciplines and for anybody interested in natural history. This is the sort of trivial nonsense that confuses rather than clarifies and gives taxonomy and its practitioners such a bad name in the mainline biological sciences. 

Back to Christmas Eve in Hong Kong. a sunlit patio must be an attractive spot for a snake to warm up on a chilly morning.