A viper named Salazar

A new snake brings joy to Harry Potter fans, and puts the spotlight on the biodiversity of the northeast

- MATHEW T. GEORGE

At last, Salazar Slytherin has a snake named after him. A stunningly beautiful green pit viper with an “orange to reddish stripe running from the lower border of the eye” to the tip of its tail. The Salazar Pit Viper (Trimeresurus salazar) was found in the lowlands of western Arunachal Pradesh by Zeeshan A. Mirza, Harshal S. Bhosale, Pushkar U. Phansalkar, Mandar Sawant, Gaurang G. Gowande and Harshil Patel.

“It was sort of a hat tip to J.K. Rowling for colouring my childhood,” said Mirza, lead writer of the paper that described the snake. “Childhood is a magical time in many ways, and she just made it more so for me and many others. People tend to think of scientists as nerds. We are not locked up in our labs forever! We live a normal life. And, Harry Potter is very much part of that life. I can still read all of the Potter books with the same amount of joy as I first read them.”

Author J.K. Rowling had imagined the fictional Slytherin as one of the four great wizards who founded the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. In 2017, Rowling had tweeted that Slytherin’s first name came from the Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar. In the early 1990s, she had taught English in Porto, Portugal, got married there and had her first daughter there as well.

One of Slytherin’s gifts was that he was a Parselmouth, a wizard who could talk to reptiles. He also established the namesake Slytherin House, with its coat of arms featuring an erect silver serpent against a field of green. For the record, Potter, too, was a Parselmouth.