For a long time, the king cobra, the world’s largest venomous snake, was thought to be a single species. A new landmark study has concluded it’s not: the snake is actually four different species.
“I feel like we created history,” study lead researcher P. Gowri Shankar, founder of the India-based Kalinga Foundation, told Mongabay by phone.
King cobras are like tigers in the sense that they’re the top predator in their habitats, Gowri Shankar said. They reach lengths of up to 5.6 meters (18.4 feet) and feed on other snakes, including other cobras (hence the name).
Found from India in the west to the Philippines in the east, king cobras have always appeared slightly different across their range. For herpetologists, this has long raised the possibility that they comprise multiple species, Gowri Shankar said.
Yet for nearly 188 years, ever since British naturalist Thomas Cantor first described the king cobra in 1836, it remained a single species: Hamadryas hannah, later renamed Ophiophagus hannah.
In 2015, Gowri Shankar and other herpetologists began analyzing the DNA of the king cobra across its range in South and Southeast Asia. In 2021, they published a study showing there were four geographically distinct populations with 1-4% genetic variation.
In their new study, the team found definitive physical differences between the populations as well, such as banding patterns that vary across regions. Based on both studies, the researchers have recategorized the snake into four species:
Northern king cobra (Ophiophagus hannah) has a wide range, including northern and eastern India, Myanmar, parts of China and much of mainland Southeast Asia.
Sunda king cobra (Ophiophagus bungarus) also has a wide range, including the Malay Peninsula, the Indonesian and Malaysian archipelagos, and parts of the southern and central Philippines.
Western Ghats king cobra (Ophiophagus kaalinga) is restricted to the Western Ghats mountain range in India.
Luzon king cobra (Ophiophagus salvatana) is restricted to Luzon, the main island in the Philippines.
Splitting the king cobra into four species has significant conservation implications, said study co-author Wolfgang Wüster, a herpetologist at Bangor University, U.K.
Considering all king cobras as a single species could mean you don’t worry too much about certain populations being lost, Wüster told Mongabay. “Now that we know that the populations in the Philippines and the Western Ghats are distinct species, restricted to relatively small areas that are also biodiversity hotspots that have suffered very high rate of deforestation and habitat loss … we need to consider their conservation needs separately from those of the more widespread northern and Sunda species.”
There are also implications for snakebite management. Currently, there is only one king cobra-specific antivenom produced in Thailand. But the study’s findings offer the opportunity to create region-specific king cobra antivenoms, Hiral Naik, Africa program manager at the Save The Snakes initiative, who was not involved in the study, told Mongabay.
Banner image by Max Tibby via Wikimedia Commons (CC0 1.0)
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