Hydrophis fayrerianus Anderson, 1871

Mondal, Sonia, Ganesh, S. R., Sethy, P. G. S., Raghunathan, C., Raha, Sujoy & Sarkar, Sagnik, 2022, Redescriptions of the type specimens of synonymous nominal taxa of sea snakes (Serpentes: Elapidae: Hydrophis, Laticauda) at the Zoological Survey of India, Zootaxa 5169 (4), pp. 301-321 : 306

Hydrophis fayrerianus Anderson, 1871

synonym of Hydrophis curtus ( Shaw, 1802)

( Table 1 ; Fig. 3 )

Material Examined. ZSI 8270 Holotype from Puri , Odisha (Eastern India).

Description. Head short, head shields large, regular; Rostral broader than high; Nasal superior in position, nasal shield in contact with each other; Prefrontal squarish, 2 nd supralabial touching prefrontal; Frontal longer than the distance from the tip of the rostral; Parietal broken; Two large anterior temporals; One Supraocular on each side of head; One Pre- and Postocular on each side of head; Eight Supralabial on each side of head; 2 nd touching prefrontal; 4 th touching the eye on left side of head, 3 rd and 4 th touching the eye on right side of head, 5 th broken; Ten infralabials on each side of head; 3 infralabials touching the chin shield; Chin shield well developed; both the pairs in contact with each other; Anterior Pair 4.9 mm, Posterior Pair 6.5 mm; Scales around neck 29-31; Scales around Midbody 35; Ventral 195, distinct, twice the size of the adjacent dorsal scales anteriorly, posteriorly divided with a suture; Preanal small; Dorsal scales with a faint single keel; Ventrals with spiked keels; Head width 21.1 mm; Head depth 18.3 mm; Head length 38.7 mm; Snout to Vent length 900.0 mm; Tail length 105.0 mm. Dorsally brownish grey with dark gray bands across the body till lateral / sides, band does not extend till belly and ventrally the entire body creamish yellow. Number of bands 57 around body till vent; One band present at the base of the tail; remaining part black.

Remarks. The original description [incorrectly as H. fayreriana ] stated the scale rows to be 35, ventral count to be 193 and body bands to be 39 (Anderson 1971). Following Boulenger (1890), Sclater (1891) listed the specimen, as the type of H. fayrerianus under the synonymy of H. hardwickii (Gray, 1834) . This was also followed by Boulenger (1896) and Wall (1906, 1909). However, Smith (1926, 1943) did not make any mention (also see Das et al. 1998) of either the specimen ZSI 8270 or of the nominal taxon Hydrophis fayrerianus in his species accounts of both H. curtus ( Shaw, 1802) and H. hardwickii (Gray, 1834) , which was treated as valid then. As is known, currently, only one species H. curtus is recognized, with H. hardwickii being treated as its subjective junior synonym (see Wallach et al. 2014; Boundy 2020). This specimen was included in the catalogue of available types by Das et al. (1998).

Figures

FIGURE 3. Holotype of Hydrophis fayrerianus ZSI 8270, dorsal (top), ventral (middle) and lateral (bottom) aspects.Photograph by Zoological Survey of India, Kolkata.