‘I needed each Kannadiga to really feel pleased with the king cobra’

It began with a snake chew again in 2005. Dr. P. Gowri Shankar was rescuing a king cobra when the ten-foot-long snake instantly struck him.

“You may die inside 20 minutes when you get bitten,” says the founder-director of the Kālinga Basis (kaalinga sarpa is Kannada for King Cobra) situated within the Agumbe rainforests within the Malnad area of the Central Western Ghats. Shankar was fortunate. “The snake didn’t inject sufficient venom as a result of I reacted rapidly… Didn’t give him an opportunity to carry onto me and pump it in,” he says. However even the minuscule quantity of venom resulted in horrible swelling and ache. The snake chew was handled symptomatically, “like COVID earlier than we had the vaccine,” he says.

Whereas there’s a polyvalent antivenom obtainable in India, which is steadily used to deal with bites by the “huge 4” snakes within the nation — Russell’s viper, saw-scaled viper, frequent krait, and Indian cobra — it doesn’t work in opposition to the chew of a king cobra. However since, until not too long ago, it was assumed that the king cobra was a single species broadly distributed by many components of Asia, he turned to the few vials of antivenom from Thailand that he had in his possession, hoping that it could work in opposition to the chew.

“However my physique didn’t settle for it. I couldn’t breathe, and blisters had been in every single place,” recollects Shankar, who lastly didn’t pursue this line of therapy. “Although we had a slight concept that Thai king cobra antivenom didn’t work on Indian king cobras, it was proved by this incident,” he says.

4 species

Shankar’s near-death expertise received him questioning why the antivenom didn’t work for the reason that species of king cobra from India was considered the identical because the one in Thailand (moreover the Indian subcontinent, king cobras are present in Southeast Asia and southern China).

“That’s after I began considering they could be two totally different species. So I made a decision to do my PhD on this,” says Shankar, who registered for his PhD in 2013, spending the following decade or so intently inspecting the morphology and genetics of those snakes. This analysis confirmed his hunch: there was multiple species of king cobra. Actually, he and his colleagues found that the king cobra is a posh of not less than 4 distinct species, overturning a 186-year-long perception that they belonged to a single species.

Since 1836, when the Danish naturalist Theodore Edward Cantor first described the animal, the king cobra was thought-about a single species. There was, nonetheless, one scientist who had his doubts ‒ the Sri Lankan palaeontologist Paulus Edward Pieris Deraniyagala. In line with Shankar, within the early Sixties, Deraniyagala prompt that there have been a number of subspecies of the animal, however “the scientific group didn’t settle for it since there was no correct proof,” he says.

Hunt for proof

Shankar spent the following ten years travelling throughout the nation and world, visiting museums to collect materials to help his speculation. Ultimately, he and his collaborators printed a groundbreaking examine in 2021 that proved the king cobra (Ophiophagus hannah) has 4 divergent, impartial lineages. “In that paper, we simply delimited their inhabitants and figured that there was one 1-4 % genetic distinction between them…largely targeted on the genetic and distribution half,” he says.

Extra not too long ago, in 2024, Shankar and his staff confirmed that there are 4 species of the king cobra. These embody the Northern king cobra (Ophiophagus hannah), Sunda king cobra (Ophiophagus bungarus), Western Ghats king cobra (Ophiophagus kaalinga) and Luzon king cobra (Ophiophagus salvatan), all of which present clear morphological variations, together with of their banding patterns. “I went into way more element within the second paper, the place the morphological characters had been studied, and names got,” says Shankar. “We didn’t give the names within the earlier one as a result of we weren’t positive concerning the morphology.”

Why this issues

Resolving species confusion is significant for a number of causes. For one, the therapy technique for king cobra bites must be reconsidered, provided that just one antivenom ‒ the one from Thailand that he was given, at the moment in possession of only a few folks right here ‒ is offered within the nation to deal with king cobra bites. “We import small portions of anti-venom for our (skilled snake catchers) security, however I type of proved, after my chew, it doesn’t work,” says Shankar, who feels that there must be extra work accomplished in India on king cobra antivenom. “We’re at the moment not ready…are nonetheless battling anti-venom for the large 4 species, in truth. However now that everyone is aware of there are totally different species, we’ll deal with that.”

And two, the latest discovery has vital implications for our conservation efforts. For example, until now, as a result of the king cobra was seen as a single species whose vary prolonged from India to the Philippines, it was considered a broadly distributed species and labeled as ‘Weak’ by the IUCN. Nevertheless, that might change. Every of the 4 species, together with the one discovered within the Western Ghats, possibly in a extra precarious state of affairs as a result of their endemic distribution. “The species within the Western Ghats is already below huge risk as a result of habitat destruction,” he says. “We at the moment are asking IUCN to vary the standing of the Western Ghats king cobra to ‘Endangered.’ “

Gowri Shankar believes that coaching and outreach are important for conservation.
| Picture Credit score:
Sujan Bernard

Fascinating insights

The king cobra belongs to the household Elapidae, which many different venomous snakes, together with cobras, coral snakes, kraits, mambas, sea snakes and sea kraits, are additionally a part of. They (king cobras) have an extended evolutionary historical past, going again not less than three to 5 million years in the past, says Shankar, who suspects that the Luzon king cobra, endemic to the island of Luzon within the northern Philippines, is among the many world’s oldest species.

“Then they began flowing into the remainder of Southeast Asia…. coming into India and all the way in which to the Western Ghats,” he says, including that as a result of they turned geographically remoted, the king cobra developed into not less than 4 separate species over time. “Because the populations separate, the breeding and gene circulation stops as they don’t seem to be interacting with one another,” he says. “They then grow to be an independently-evolving species.”

The genus title, Ophiophagus, comes from the Greek phrases ophi (snake) and phagos (consuming), an allusion to the serpent’s weight loss plan. “King cobras may be consuming not less than 30 species of different snakes,” explains Shankar, including that these animals additionally exhibit cannibalistic behaviour, preying on smaller members of their very own species.

Shankar shares another fascinating insights about these animals: they’ll develop as much as 15 toes, emit a growling sound, males have interaction in bodily fight to impress females, and they’re the one species of snakes that construct nests. “I’ve monitored near 50 nests, and they’re lovely,” he reveals, referring to king cobras as among the many finest engineers in nature. “We regularly get 6000-8000 mm of rainfall, however not even a single drop reaches the nest chamber.”

In love with the king

Shankar has been fascinated by snakes for so long as he can bear in mind, catching his first one when he was 13. “We had shifted to a home within the Okay.R. Puram space,” he says, recalling how that a part of Bengaluru was flanked by paddy fields and pretty remoted again then. In the course of the monsoon season, the compound of that home would flood, bringing snakes just like the buff-striped and checkered keelbacks with it. “My first snake was buff-striped keelback,” he recollects.

He encountered his first King Cobra within the zoo of Bengaluru’s Bannerghatta Nationwide Park, the place he typically escaped throughout faculty hours, and was instantly hooked. He was already rescuing snakes by then, largely rat snakes and cobras, and by the late Nineteen Nineties, he determined to do it professionally, occurring to hitch the Bangalore Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (now referred to as the Karuna Animal Welfare Affiliation of Karnataka) and later The Madras Crocodile Financial institution Belief & Centre for Herpetology. “Within the croc financial institution, we had 18 king cobras as captive-bred specimens, so I began managing them,” says Shankar.

In 2005, he helped Crocodile Financial institution founder Romulus Whitaker arrange the Agumbe Rainforest Analysis Station (ARRS), working there for the following seven years till he stop to determine the Kālinga Centre for Rainforest Ecology and Kālinga Basis. Kālinga Centre for Rainforest Ecology. “For my PhD, I needed to be in my very own discipline. My spouse and I appreciated Agumbe and needed to quiet down there,” says Gowri Shankar, who was awarded a doctorate in 2023 from the Maharaja Sriram Chandra Bhanja Deo College.

Umbrella species

Speaking about his work at Kālinga, Shankar says that as an organisation, they’ve rescued near 500 animals from misery conditions and educated almost a thousand snake rescuers. And whereas analysis doesn’t take the backseat ‒ he has authored round 11 scientific papers on king cobras — he’s equally captivated with outreach and training, counting on myriad media.

Shankar is firmly satisfied that conserving the Western Ghats king cobra, an apex predator within the rainforest ecosystem, might assist save the rainforests the place they’re discovered. “Rainforests are actually vital as 68% of the carbon sink occurs there; with out them, we might run into an enormous drawback,” he says. Happily, due to the snake’s vital function in faith and tradition, many Indians don’t simply tolerate it, they even worship it.

In Karnataka there may be the idea of Nagabanas or sacred groves for snakes, the place the forest is totally untouched, says Shankar, who selected to call the Western Ghats species as Ophiophagus kaalinga as an ode to the State that gives a lot reverence and safety to this iconic animal. “I needed to inform the world that if these folks can coexist with one of many longest venomous snakes so peacefully, why can’t you,” he says. “And I needed each Kannadiga to really feel pleased with it.”

(The official announcement ceremony will probably be held on the J.N. Tata Auditorium, Malleswaram, on November 22, at 4 p.m.)