Calamaria curta

The dark-bellied reed snake is a small Sulawesi endemic described as Calamaria curta in 1896. Boulenger's type account describes an olive-brown upper surface, each dorsal scale marked with a black point. The centre of the underside is black while the sides are white, and the underside of the tail is white. These colour characters explain the modern English name (Boulenger 1896; MCZbase).

The type locality was in southern Celebes at roughly 610 m, and later checklists restrict the known range to south-western Sulawesi. Identification also depends on scale counts and head shields rather than colour alone. The opened sources did not provide direct observations of diet, microhabitat, clutch size or activity, so no such traits are supplied. Even the species name curta, meaning shortened, was not explicitly explained by its author (Boulenger 1896; de Lang 1985).