Chrysopelea ornata (Shaw, 1802)

Ziegler, Thomas, Hendrix, Ralf, Thanh, Vu Ngoc, Vogt, Martina, Forster, Bernhard & Kien, Dang Ngoc, 2007, The diversity of a snake community in a karst forest ecosystem in the central Truong Son, Vietnam, with an identification key, Zootaxa 1493, pp. 1-40 : 4

Chrysopelea ornata (Shaw, 1802) : Golden tree snake / Ran cuom

According to Nguyen et al. (2005) the species is distributed all over the country. We photographed this snake ( Figure 2 ) in September 2006 during daytime in secondary shrub vegetation in the National Park's border area. Characteristic were the greenish-yellow head with black markings, the ivory chin and supralabials, the greenish yellow body with some black-edged scales and some entirely black scales that form crossbars, and the yellowish-green ventrals with black spots next to each lateral notch ( Cox et al. 1998). Remarkable are the orange dorsal blotches that we already observed in a specimen from Khanh Hoa Province in southern Vietnam, because Manthey & Grossmann (1997) stated such a pattern occurring only in the nominate form from Sri Lanka, India and Bangladesh. However, Pope (1935) mentioned that the coloration in the species is extremely variable (see also Bourret 1936).

Figures

FIGURE 2. Golden tree snake (Chrysopelea ornata) from Phong Nha - Ke Bang. Photo: Bernhard Forster