• Team of herpetologists hoping to study its diet, breeding pattern and habitat
• India now has a fifth brown pit viper but with a reddish tinge.
• A team of herpetologists led by Ashok Captain have described a new species of reddish-brown pit viper, a venomous snake with a unique heat-sensing system, from a forest in West Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh.

BACKGROUND:

• The discovery, published in the March-April volume of the Russian Journal of Herpetology, makes the Arunachal pit viper (Trimeresurus arunachalensis) the second serpent to have been discovered after the non-venomous crying keelback in the State’s Lepa-Rada district in 2018.
• The new species also makes Arunachal Pradesh the only Indian state to have a pit viper
• The other four — Malabar, horseshoe, hump-nosed and Himalayan — were discovered 70 years ago.