Abstract

The survey of herpetofauna in Ladakh part of Jammu and Kashmir covered 42 locations in 75 days of field work between June and August of 2000 and 2001. The amphibians and reptiles were opportunistically searched in all locations. Information from local people was also used to find species, and a species was marked present only when that species was observed. During the survey seven species were recorded. The species presence/absence data was analysed using capture-recapture approach. When a species was seen for the first time in any location it was treated as a ‘capture’. The resighting of the same species in any location was treated as a ‘recapture’. The program SPECRICH2 provided estimates of number of species (species richness) along with the standard error and the species detection probability from the data. It was estimated that there were seven species of reptiles and amphibians (S.E = 1.45) in the Ladakh region.

The data from this survey was compared with historical data on presence/absence of species in 3 different locations in Ladakh using the program COMDYN4 to quantify the change in different vertebrate communities (mammals, reptiles, and amphibians). The data from two time periods came from the same locations and it was assumed that there was no change in the detection probabilities (test for the violation of the assumption was made). The amphibian community has undergone significant change since 1978 compared to other vertebrate taxa. Only one amphibian species Bufo viridis, was recorded from four locations in this survey while, in 1978 three species were recorded from three locations from the same area. The probability of amphibian species occurring in these locations has decreased in the recent past. The local extinction of two species endemic to northwest Himalayas has contributed to the change. Among the various possible causal factors that explain the observed phenomena, the hypothesis that increase in UV radiation levels since the late 1970s in the higher elevation areas of the region caused local extinction of B. latastii and Scutiger occidentalis is likely to be true.

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