Check List 22(5): 876-881, doi: 10.15560/22.5.876
Further records of Lycodon irwini Naveen, Mirza, Choure & Chandramouli, 2025 (Squamata, Colubridae) from Great Nicobar, India
Govindarasu Gokulakrishnan‡, Ravi Shanthy Naveen§, Sekar Iyanar‡, Balu Kannan Aravindan‡, Senthil Barath‡, Digvijaya Pattnaik‡, Bawa Mothilal Krishnakumar‡, Sruthi Srinivasan‡, Honnavalli N Kumara‡, Santhanakrishnan Babu‡‡ Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History, South India Centre of Wildlife Institute of India, Coimbatore, India§ School of Environment and Science, Griffith University, Nathan campus, Brisbane, Australia
Corresponding author: Santhanakrishnan Babu ( sanbabs@gmail.com ) Academic editor: Nikhil Modak © Govindarasu Gokulakrishnan, Ravi Shanthy Naveen, Sekar Iyanar, Balu Kannan Aravindan, Senthil Barath, Digvijaya Pattnaik, Bawa Mothilal Krishnakumar, Sruthi Srinivasan, Honnavalli N Kumara, Santhanakrishnan Babu. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Gokulakrishnan G, Naveen RS, Iyanar S, Aravindan BK, Barath S, Pattnaik D, Krishnakumar BM, Srinivasan S, Kumara HN, Babu S (2026) Further records of Lycodon irwini Naveen, Mirza, Choure & Chandramouli, 2025 (Squamata, Colubridae) from Great Nicobar, India. Check List 22(5): 876-881. https://doi.org/10.15560/22.5.876 |  |
Abstract
We report additional records of the recently described, supposedly rare species of wolf snake, Lycodon irwini Naveen et al., 2025, known only from Great Nicobar Island, India. We report 14 sightings of this species from opportunistic encounters recorded during sporadic surveys over seven months. This highlights the limited extent of previous surveys in this region and suggests that this species is not as rare as previously assumed. We also emphasise that Great Nicobar is a poorly surveyed area, and further rigorous surveys could yield more data on seemingly rare species and potentially reveal new ones from this region.
Keywords
Data-deficient region, distribution records, Nicobar Archipelago, insular fauna, road-cruising surveys, wildlife road mortality, wolf snake