Morphological Characteristics of Short Sea Snake, Lapemis curtus (Shaw, 1802), with Notes on New Identification Characteristics

A morphological study of the short sea snake, Lapemis curtus was carried out. Two specimens of L. curtus were collected during fieldwork in vast area of west of the Chabahar Bay Mouth (Gulf of Oman) in 2011 A list of new important identification morphological characteristics of this species is also provided.The sea snakes are comprised of at least two groups: (1) Laticauda, which spend much of their life at sea but come on land to lay their eggs, and like terrestrial snakes have fully developed ventral scales, and (2) hydrophiid, the viviparous and fully aquatic true sea snakes, which have many morphological adaptations to a fully marine life (Keogh, 1998). While Rasmussen et al. (2011) has stated that the taxonomic status of the sea snakes is still under review and no general agreement exists at the moment. Traditionally, sea snakes have been regarded as one family, Hydrophiidae, with Laticauda as the most primitive genus. Sea snakes occur in the tropical and subtropical waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans from the east coast of Africa to the Gulf of Panama. Most species are found in the China Sea, Indonesia, and the Australian region. They have also been found in lakes in Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, and the Rennell Island (Rasmussen, 2001). Many species of sea snakes are recorded from different regions of Persian Gulf. Studies on sea snakes tend to be poor because of logistic difficulties inherent in sampling them (Palot and Radhakrishnan, 2010). Lapemis curtus (Shaw, 1802) is a moderate sized (up to 900mm) venomous sea snake distributed from the Southwest Pacific to the Persian Gulf (De Silva, 2011). As the identification of sea snakes to the species level is very difficult, morphological characters are very important for identification of this sea snake in the area.