There are no snakes in the Maldives! Somebody once said that to me, it sticked, and I found it sad. There are a couple of reptiles, like the sea turtles, geckos, agamids and skinks. Why not snakes? That’s what the snakes might have thought too. And so there are snakes in the Maldives. Aliens though.
Indian wolf snakes for example. Lycodon aulicus is its name, and it is a wolf in Kraits clothing! In fact it’s a sheep if you want so. ok it’s a sheep in wolf’s clothing, but a wolf also. A non-venomous snake that mimics a venomous one. Lycodon translates to wolf teeth, and aulicus means hall or court. So it’s the “hall wolf-teeth”. A snake with wolf-like teeth that likes to visit you at home.
They feed on reptiles, and obviously don’t hesitate to grab even too large agamids. In this case the attack of our approximately 30cm long worm wasn’t successful. I saw that same thing with a paradise tree snake and a young monitor lizard in Singapore. Our snake was described by Linnaeus in 1758 and belongs to the family Colubridae, which contains almost 2000 of the 4200 species of snakes.
The Indian wolf snake mimics the Common krait Bungarus caeruleus, and that is important to know when you are in the Indian subcontinent. A krait is highly venomous. So it is good to know the difference. Krait translates probably to black, while Bungarus means golden, and in fact the type species of this genus, Bungarus fasciatus, is banded in black and golden. The word caeruleus refers to color again, it’s blue, sky blue or such.
That means the snake with wolf teeth that likes to visit you at home mimics the bluish black golden snake.
To mimic the Common krait might be a good idea. Untreated bites have a lethality rate 70-80% according to www.toxinology.com. This number depends on many factors, for example the availability of medical treatment. The page also gives a detailed plan for first emergency.
Many websites explain the differences of kraits and wolf snakes. It you see a loreal shield or scale it’s a harmless wolf snake. The loreal shield is a scale between the eye and the nostril. To me it seems a krait has a shorter face where there’s no space for an extra scale, while the wolf snakes have a longer face. Always better be safe than sorry! L’ORÉAL (from L’Auréole, the halo) btw has nothing to do with loreal, though for sure they’ll have products for your loreal area (between eye and nose), and they even sell a snake peel effect since 2025.
So what’s more dangerous then, wolves or snakes? The WHO (not the band) presents following figures.
Yearly, 5.4 million people are bitten by snakes. Over 80.000 people even die each year, and some 2-300.000 carry disabilities from snake bites. These shocking numbers are higher than I thought.
For wolfs, Wikipedia has a list of each know case. Https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wolf_attacks
Meta Ai counts 817 attacks ever since recording globally, of which 26 were fatal. Wolfs are much lesser than snakes, that’s not fair to compare.
Let’s extend it to dogs. Tens of millions of people bitten, that’s the best guess I found, with 60.000 fatalities of rabies, which of course can also be spread by other animal bites. In fact 99% of the transmission is from dogs. These numbers are similar to the snakes!
Some quick and dirty math, no guarantee for nothing here:
Total number of snakes 3 billion (Meta AI). 80.000 fatal bites make 0.003%.
Dogs: 60.000 dead from rabies from 900 million dogs, thats 0.007%. Don’t ask me where AI got the total population of snakes from.
This please -don’t-take-too-serious comparison shows that the wolf / dog (-snake) hiding in snakes (kraits) clothes actually makes sense. Somehow.
Anyways, the wolf snake is harmless, and an ID from this photo is impossible of course.
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