Combank promotes Sri Lanka’s biodiversity with project to search for more types of blind snake

Funds new research study of Herpetological Foundation on Family Typhlopidae Eight of the known types of fossorial blind snakes of the Typhlopidae family are endemic to Sri Lanka, and the Commercial Bank of Ceylon is funding a new scientific project to identify and classify more types in this species to add to the country’s biodiversity pool and promote conservation.

The Bank has committed financing support to the Herpetological Foundation of Sri Lanka (HFS) to conduct a research study relating to the taxonomy (or the classification study) and conservation of the Typhlopidae, which seeks to systematically revise, study and classify the Typhlopidae in the country, with the potential for the introduction of several species of the family that are new to science.

“Commercial Bank’s funding of this research will also help create conservation awareness about the family of blind snakes among the general public, while enabling the updating of a fully-curated collection of the species to be deposited in the National Museum of Sri Lanka,” the Bank’s Managing Director Jegan Durairatnam said. “We believe that contributing to the expansion of scientific data and knowledge in the sphere of biodiversity is a worthy cause for the Bank to support.”

The objective of the study extends to arriving at a detailed understanding of the current distribution of the Typhlopidae in the country, and to recognise conservation issues faced by the species. Besides this, publishing new species would pave the way to declare Sri Lanka as a separate Biodiversity Hotspot as per the mission begun by the National Species Conservation Advisory, and as a ‘Megadiverse’ country -- a country with high numbers of endemic species, a spokesman for the Herpetological Foundation of Sri Lanka said.