"The fidelity of snakes to their home island was absolute," say Sohan Shetty, then at the University of Sydney, Australia, and now at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and Richard Shine of the University of Sydney, Australia, in the October issue of Conservation Biology.

Widely distributed in the Pacific Ocean, the snakes (yellow-lipped sea kraits) forage for moray and conger eels in the ocean, and typically return to land to digest their prey, mate, lay eggs. The up to 5-foot long snakes are prized for their meat and skins, which are used to make high-quality leather goods, and are easy to catch in huge numbers because they are concentrated on small islands and, although venomous, are so docile that they rarely bite or even try to escape.

Overexploitation has caused local extinctions of yellow-lipped sea kraits in the Philippines and Japan. While translocation has been proposed to restore these populations, no one knew if the relocated snakes would stay put.

To help assess the likelihood that translocation would restore these sea krait populations effectively, Shetty and Shine studied the snake's homing behavior on two small Fijan islands. The islands are about 2 miles apart and one (Mabualau) is uninhabited by people while the other (Toberua) has a resort.

Shetty and Shine caught 328 yellow-lipped sea kraits by hand on Toberua, marked them by clipping their scales and then released them on Mabualau. When the researchers recaptured the translocated snakes, they found that all of them had returned "home" within about a month. The researchers also caught, marked and released 674 snakes on Mabualau, and found that none of them were recaptured on Toberua
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Contact: Sohan Shetty
sohanshetty@yahoo.com
65-6790-3936
Society for Conservation Biology
24-Sep-2002