The habits of Malay reptiles
H. N. Ridley, Director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens, published this natural history survey in 1899, drawing on his personal observations across Singapore and the wider Malay Peninsula to describe the behaviour, ecology, and distribution of the region’s reptilian fauna. The article is organised taxonomically—tortoises, crocodiles, lizards, and snakes—and represents one of the most comprehensive behavioural accounts of Malayan reptiles available at the time, building on the foundational checklists of Cantor (1847) and Flower (1896).
Summary
Ridley’s primary aim is to move beyond mere species enumeration and document the living habits of reptiles as observed in their natural and semi-natural settings. He draws heavily on his own collections and long residence in Singapore, supplementing these with reports from correspondents in Perak, Pahang, Malacca, and Penang. The tortoise section covers both terrestrial and marine forms, noting the box-tortoise’s decline in Singapore due to land reclamation, the snapping turtle’s predation on flamingoes in the Gardens’ lake, and the Chinese practice of releasing named tortoises as sin-bearers, which Ridley identifies as the source of an influx of turtles into the Gardens’ water bodies.
The crocodile and lizard sections are comparatively brief but include notable observations: the common crocodile’s marine range (a skull found at Cocos Island, some 200 miles from shore), the Gavial’s probable wider distribution than previously recognised, the Monitor’s feeding behaviour (shaking prey like a dog before swallowing it whole), and the flying lizard’s measured flight distance of twenty-five yards from a height of fifteen feet. The snake section is the longest and most analytically ambitious. Ridley challenges the popular perception of Malayan snakes as uniformly deadly, arguing that the risk of fatal snake-bite is “infinitesimal” compared to India, and attributes this partly to the arboreal habits of local venomous species, which pursue prey in the trees rather than on the ground. He provides detailed behavioural accounts of the python’s feeding mechanics (including cannibalism among captive specimens), the cobra’s accurate spitting at a distance of eight feet, the Hamadryad’s refusal of all food in captivity, and the green viper’s comparatively mild envenomation in multiple documented human and animal cases.
The article concludes with a locality-based checklist of all reptiles recorded from the peninsula, marking Ridley’s own collections with an exclamation point, and explicitly notes how little is known of the fauna of the Native States.
Key Findings
- A python over seventeen feet long consumed two black swans at the rate of one per month; a 15–16 foot python was found having just swallowed twelve ducks; a 19-foot python ate three smaller pythons (12–15 feet each) in two nights (pp. 196–197).
- A 20-foot python fed on a pariah dog refused all food for nine months before passing the remains; another fasted for seven months (p. 197).
- The flying lizard Draco volans achieved a measured flight of twenty-five yards from a height of not more than fifteen feet (p. 192).
- The local cobra (Naja sputatrix) spat accurately at a distance of eight feet, striking Ridley all over the face; a student examining one was struck in the eye, causing inflammation lasting several hours (p. 201).
- Multiple documented bites by the green viper (Lachesis wagleri)—on a Java sparrow, a cooly’s toe, and a pariah dog’s thigh—produced only local swelling and pain, with full recovery within hours, leading Ridley to conclude the species is “not as deadly as it is reputed to be” (pp. 202–203).
- One hundred and ten species of snakes were recorded from the peninsula, more than half of which had been found in Singapore alone; thirty-one were poisonous, nearly half of those being sea snakes (pp. 195, 200).
Conclusion
Ridley’s definitive takeaway is that the Malayan reptile fauna, while rich and behaviourally diverse, is far less dangerous to humans than popular imagination suggests, and that the region’s reptiles are being rapidly displaced by deforestation and the burning of lalang (Imperata) grass, with snakes in Singapore already noticeably scarcer than in earlier decades. He calls for better-identified records of snake-bite cases and for sportsmen to look more carefully for the Gavial and Mugger in the larger rivers, where they are likely more widespread than current records indicate.
Context
- Ridley was Director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens and a senior figure in the Straits Settlements scientific establishment; his observations are framed by the colonial administrative and curatorial context of the Gardens’ collections and the Singapore Museum.
- The article relies on the locality-based checklist format standard to the Journal at this period, and its distributional data for the Native States (Perak, Pahang, Selangor) is explicitly acknowledged as incomplete, reflecting the limited penetration of Western natural history into those territories in the 1890s.