New legless amphibian family found in India

A new family of legless amphibians, caecilians, has been discovered in northeastern India by a team of scientists led by a Delhi University professor, S D Biju. These animals could be mistaken as huge earthworms; but they are actually vertebrates with backbones and more like salamanders or frogs. Prof. Biju and team named the new family as Chikilidae and the new genus as Chikila, deriving the name from the Northeast Indian tribal language of Garo.

DNA evidence suggests the family split from its closest African relatives more than 140 million years ago, when the ancient super-continent of Gondwana fragmented, separating present-day India and Africa. Until this discovery, there were only nine known families of legless amphibians or caecilians, found across the wet tropical regions of Southeast Asia, India, Sri Lanka, parts of East and West Africa, the Seychelles and northern and eastern parts of South America.

Caecilians are very hard to spot as they live either underground or under leaf litter that lies on the soil. The females incubate their young for several months without eating. Their eggs hatch into adult caecilians, with no larval stage in between. Their eyesight is very limited and their skulls adapted for burrowing.

Professor Biju, also known as Frogman, found them in the forest area and close to human settlement, so conservation of this group may be extremely challenging. Some of the animals have reportedly been killed by villagers who mistook them for poisonous snakes. In fact, they carry no venom. Slash and burn agro-practices can also pose challenge for this newly found animal in the north-eastern state of India. One positive point for the new discoveries is that the region seems to be free of the fungal disease chytridiomycosis, which has devastated amphibian populations in many parts of the world.

Globally, amphibians are the most threatened group of animals, with about 40% of species on the Red List. But new discoveries are regularly made, though most come from rarely-visited regions of rainforest rather than quite densely-populated areas.

These findings have been published in a paper titled 'Discovery of a new family of amphibians from Northeast India with ancient links to Africa' in the current issue of Proceedings of Royal Society of London B.