Ahaetulla nasuta
species of reptile
Ahaetulla nasuta, also known as Sri Lankan green vine snake, long-nosed whip snake, and long-nosed tree snake, is a venomous, slender green tree snake endemic to Sri Lanka. It was previously known as the common green vine snake and was widely distributed across India and South East Asia, until a 2020 study split them into several different species, restricting Ahaetulla nasuta just to the Sri Lankan population.
Etymology
The genus name Ahaetulla comes from the Sri Lankan Sinhalese words ahaetulla/ahata gulla/as gulla, meaning "eye plucker" or "eye picker", because of the belief that they pluck out the eyes of humans, as first reported by the Portuguese traveler João Ribeiro in 1685. The species name nasuta is Latin for "of the nose", in reference to its elongated snout.
Vernacular names
The Sinhala name "Aheatulla" or "eye-plucker" forms the taxonic genus name. In Tamil, it is known as pachai paambu. In Kannada, it is known as Hasiru Haavu.
Sinhala: ඇහැටුල්ලා (Pronounced: Aheatulla)
Tamil: பச்சை பாம்பு
Kannada: ಹಸಿರು ಹಾವು
Marathi: हरणटोळ (Pronounced: Harantol)
West Bengal: লাউডগা (Pronounced: Laudoga)
In Western internet culture, the vine snake has occasionally been humorously nicknamed as the "judgmental shoelace", due to their long, slender bodies and the horizontal shape of their pupils resembling a person narrowing their eyes in a captious expression.
Distribution and taxonomy
Due to longstanding confusion over the taxonomy of A. nasuta, the species was once thought to have a large range from Sri Lanka to peninsular India, including the Western Ghats, along with a disjunct population in Southeast Asia. Recent phylogenetic studies have since found the species to be paraphyletic, and in need of taxonomic revision.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Ahaetulla nasuta” as species of reptile. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the science & nature register because the source frames it as species of reptile. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q619087. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2020 and 1685.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ahaetulla nasuta” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.