Snake Encyclopedia
Search and identify 1,000+ snakes from around the world — with family, range, size, habitat, and how to tell similar species apart.
Annulated Sea Snake
A widespread, boldly banded sea snake with alternating dark and pale rings, common in shallow coastal and estuarine waters across Asia.
Anomalous Sea Snake
A sea snake named for its unusual combination of scale and morphological traits, found in coastal waters of the northern Indian Ocean.
Banded Sea Krait
A distinctive black-and-pale banded sea snake that comes ashore to rest, digest, and lay eggs, unlike fully aquatic sea snakes.
Beaked Sea Snake
A fully aquatic sea snake often entangled in fishing nets.
Belcher's Sea Snake
A fully aquatic sea snake, rarely encountered by people.
Black-Headed Sea Snake
A sea snake with a strikingly dark head found along the coasts of Japan and Taiwan, occupying temperate to subtropical coastal waters.
Blue-Lipped Sea Krait
A banded, amphibious sea krait that hunts in coral reefs but returns to land to rest, digest, and lay eggs.
Brown-Lipped Sea Krait
A widely distributed, boldly banded sea krait recognized by its dark upper lip, common on coral reefs across the Indo-Pacific and known for amphibious habits.
Chinese Sea Snake
One of the larger and more widely distributed true sea snakes, recognizable by its bold black and yellow-green banding, ranging across coastal Asian waters.
Dusky Sea Snake
A small, dark-colored sea snake with a restricted range in Western Australian reef waters, of conservation concern due to sharp historical population declines.
Elegant Sea Snake
A large, robust sea snake native to Australian waters, patterned with broad dark bands that fade with age, often found in reef and estuarine habitats.
Erabu Sea Krait
A banded amphibious sea krait from Japan's Ryukyu Islands, known for coming ashore to digest food, rest, and lay eggs, and long featured in local island culture.
Fine-Spined Sea Snake
A stout, boldly banded sea snake common in muddy coastal waters and a frequent bycatch species of trawl fisheries across the Indo-Pacific.
Hook-Nosed Sea Snake
A sea snake found in murky coastal and estuarine waters across the Indo-Pacific, notable for its distinctive hooked snout.
Ijima's Turtle-Headed Sea Snake
An egg-eating sea snake from the Ryukyu Islands with a blunt, turtle-like head.
Katuali
A banded sea krait found only around the island of Niue in the South Pacific, known locally as the katuali.
Lambert's Sea Snake
A moderately sized sea snake native to the Gulf of Thailand, closely related to the large-headed sea snake and named after a naturalist collector.
Olive Sea Snake
A common sea snake of Indo-Pacific coral reefs, known for its curious behavior toward divers and olive-brown coloration.
Olive-Headed Sea Snake
A moderately large sea snake with an olive-toned head and faint banding, found in the estuarine and coastal waters of northern Australia.
Ornate Sea Snake
A moderately robust sea snake with variable, often diamond-shaped dorsal markings, found across coral reef and coastal waters of the Indo-Pacific.
Persian Gulf Sea Snake
A moderately sized, banded sea snake commonly found in the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf and surrounding Arabian Sea coastlines.
Rough-Scaled Sea Snake
A heavily built sea snake with distinctly rough, keeled scales.
Sea Krait
A banded, amphibious sea snake that comes ashore to rest, digest, and lay eggs, unlike most fully marine sea snakes.
Sea Snake
A fully marine elapid adapted for life at sea, with a paddle-like tail and no need to return to land.
Shark Bay Sea Snake
A regionally endemic sea snake restricted to the seagrass and reef habitats of Shark Bay in Western Australia.
Short-Nosed Sea Snake
A small, rare sea snake with a short blunt snout, historically known from a few reef systems off Western Australia and now considered of high conservation concern.
Slender Sea Snake
A slim-bodied sea snake found in tropical Indo-Pacific waters, with a tiny head and greatly elongated, thin forebody.
Small-Headed Sea Snake
A slender sea snake with a strikingly tiny head and narrow forebody widening toward the rear, found in shallow coastal waters across the Indo-Pacific.
Spectacled Sea Snake
A slender, pale-banded sea snake named for the ring-like markings around its eyes, inhabiting shallow tropical seas of the Indian Ocean and western Pacific.
Spine-Bellied Sea Snake
A stout, small-headed sea snake with distinctly keeled belly scales, common in shallow tropical and subtropical waters and frequently caught as bycatch by trawlers.
Stokes's Sea Snake
One of the largest and most robust sea snakes, with a thick body and disproportionately small head adapted for feeding on catfish and other spiny prey.
Turtle-Headed Sea Snake
A small reef sea snake specialized for feeding exclusively on fish eggs.
Viperine Sea Snake
One of the largest and most heavily built sea snakes, with a viper-like thick body and disproportionately large head.
Yellow-Bellied Sea Snake
The most widely distributed snake species in the world, a fully pelagic sea snake found drifting across open tropical oceans.
Yellow-Lipped Sea Krait
A boldly banded, air-breathing sea krait of Indo-Pacific coral reefs and coastlines.
Bighead Sea Snake
A sea snake with a proportionally oversized head, found in coastal waters of northern Australia and the Arafura Sea.
Black-Banded Sea Snake
A slender sea snake marked with bold black bands along a pale body, found in muddy coastal waters and estuaries throughout South and Southeast Asia.
Black-Ringed Mangrove Snake
A boldly ringed sea snake associated with mangrove-lined coastlines of the northern Bay of Bengal.
Bombay Sea Snake
A regionally documented sea snake of the western Indian coast, associated with the shallow waters of the Arabian Sea near Mumbai.
Brooke's Sea Snake
A sea snake named for the historic 'White Rajahs' of Sarawak, found in coastal waters around Borneo and neighboring Southeast Asian regions.
Brown-Lined Sea Snake
A slender sea snake with fine brown longitudinal striping over a pale body, native to shallow coastal waters of the Gulf of Thailand region.
Cogger's Sea Snake
A reef-associated sea snake of northern Australian and western Pacific waters, named for herpetologist Harold Cogger.
Collared Sea Snake
A patterned sea snake with a distinctive dark collar marking behind the head, found in coastal waters of the Bay of Bengal and northern Indian Ocean.
Crocker's Sea Krait
A remarkable sea krait endemic to a single landlocked lake in the Solomon Islands, unique among sea kraits for living entirely in brackish water.
Dubois's Sea Snake
A reef-dwelling sea snake of northern Australian waters known for its uniform coloration.
Dwarf Sea Snake
A tiny, slender sea snake with an unusually small head, found in muddy coastal waters of the Gulf of Thailand.
Estuarine Sea Snake
A sea snake specialized for life in murky estuarine and river-mouth waters across the Indo-West Pacific, tolerant of reduced salinity.
Grey's Mudsnake
A small, primitive sea snake specialized for soft mangrove mudflats along the coast of north-western Australia, the sole member of its genus.