Sichuan hot-spring snakes imperiled: reason, situation, and protection

The Sichuan hot-spring snake (Thermophis zhaoermii) is a rare and endemic species found at high elevations in the Hengduan Mountains of China. Recent species-specific investigations showed that the Sichuan hot-spring snake is still restricted to geothermal zones at elevations higher than 3 000 m a.s.l. The species also remains at risk of extinction, with the effective population size showing continual decline over the past one million years based on coalescent inference from genome-level single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data. We propose several approaches for protecting Sichuan hot-spring snake populations and their habitat.