Journal of Global Ecology and Environment

Shed snake skin is comparatively easily available, ethically viable and non-invasive source of genetic sampling for DNA studies. In most rural landscapes, villagers including farmers who frequently encounter snakes in agricultural fields, often experience immediate fear and uncertainty upon such encounters. Under such conditions, DNA-based identification of shed skins can be a practical approach to either proving that the observed species is dangerous or that the animal is a safe and non-aggressive species that is friendly to farmers. Therefore, this type of studies can be used to reduce human-snake conflict. In this article we present the COI-based molecular identification of a snake species using one shed skin collected during a faunal survey by the Zoological Survey of India, Gangetic Plains Regional Centre in the agricultural lands at Dahiyar, Bihar. The shed skin produced genomic DNA of high-quality and a pairwise identity match of 100% to Ptyas mucosa (Linnaeus, 1758) commonly referred to as the Indian rat snake or the Oriental rat snake was retrieved with the help of BLASTn against NCBI GenBank database. This assignment was further confirmed by phylogenetic analysis through the Neighbor-Joining method and the Kimura 2-parameter model. The case study indicates the usefulness of shed skin as a practical non-invasive sampling resource to identify snake species in agro-ecosystems, and could be applied in citizen science and wildlife forensics and conservation surveillance.