SHIVAMOGGA: The lush thick jungles of the Western Ghats are ruled by a magnificent creature. The specimen can attain an imposing length of 12 feet, yet it can craftily and stealthily slither after its prey – other snakes – which make up its predominant diet. There is much awe and mysterious beauty surrounding the largest venomous snake in the world, the king cobra, which has been deftly captured by an adventurous Indian researcher through a series of studies on the great serpent.
Now, biologist P Gowrishankar, through his latest observations has unearthed that the king cobra (Ophiophagus Hannah), which is endemic to several parts of Asia, has four divergent lineages. In India, two such lineages can be traced – one is found in the Western Ghats of Karnataka, and the other in the Eastern Ghats, stretching across the border from East Godavari district to Rajahmundry in Andhra Pradesh, onward to Odisha, Uttarakhand, and thereafter crossing into Nepal, and even as far as Cambodia.
As part of his research, the wildlife biologist looked at the widespread distribution and hypotheses that king cobras could represent a species complex, meaning that there could be multiple species. The research emphasised on the boundaries within which the snake’s habitat exists on earth, and its spread-out area was taken as the predo minant topic of study, which took eight long years to prove this conclusion.
Explaining the significance of his research on king cobra, Gowrishankar says that across geographies, king cobras have been considered as a monotypic genus – ‘single species’ – under the genus Ophiophagus.
They have long roamed the jungles of South and Southeast Asia. It is the world’s longest venomous snake, with a taste for other snakes, which might have prompted Danish zoologist TE Cantor to suggest the scientific name Ophiophagus Hannah (Ophio=snake, phagus=eating) in 1836.
King cobras reside in varied habitats, ranging from the tropics, sub-tropics and temperate areas. They are found in the wet regions of the Western and Eastern Ghats of Peninsular India, the Andaman Islands, Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand, across the North-East into Southern China, and Southeast Asia as well, all the way up to the Philippines.
“Our research has proved that there are four geographically separated lineages that we consider as confirmed candidate species: a) Western Ghats; b) Indo-Chinese; c) Indo-Malayan; and d) Luzon Island in the Philippines archipelago,” he says.
Based on extensive geographical sampling across most of the species’ range, he initially tested for the candidate species (CS) using Maximum-Likelihood analysis of mitochondrial genes. Then, he tested the resulting CS using both morphological data and sequences of three single-copy nuclear genes. Thereafter, multiple molecular analysis and morphological character were used to confirm his research findings.
Gowrishankar has set up the Kalinga Foundation, and a research laboratory at Agumbe. While this isn’t his first connect with the snake, Gowrishankar is well known for his work on conservation, having rescued over 375 king cobras, monitored 50 nests, and released over 500 hatchlings back into the wild. He has authored and co-authored several scientific papers on king cobras, besides other herpetological topics.
He was instrumental in initiating a pioneering radio telemetry study on king cobras and was able to discover the secret life of the snakes. He is an authority on the ecology of king cobras and has been featured in several wildlife documentaries, namely the ‘King and I’, ‘Secrets of the King Cobra’, ‘Asia’s Deadliest Snake’, ‘Wildest India’, ‘Mysteries of Wild India’, and ‘The Cobra King’, across channels like BBC, Discovery, NatGeo Wild, Animal Planet and Smithsonian. He is currently registered as a PhD student at North Orissa University. Besides being a TEDFellow in 2020, a TED and TEDx speaker, he was awarded the ‘Herpetologist of the Year 2015’ award by the Swedish Herpetological Society.
His research work was supervised by Dr Karthik Shanker from the Centre for Ecological Studies at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru; with Prof SK Dutta from the Department of Life Sciences, North Orissa University; and Jacob Hoglund of Uppsala University, Sweden.
Gowrishankar also collaborated with the Forest Departments of Karnataka, Odisha, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andaman Islands, Goa, Mizoram and Uttarakhand to collect samples and obtained tissues from zoos and museums as well to retrace the lineages of a massive serpent.
Over 375 king cobras rescued
Activities of Kalinga Foundation at Agumbe
The Kalinga Foundation was established in 2012 and it is engaged in research activities largely on king cobra. Gowrishankar is the founder-director of the Kalinga Centre for Rainforest Ecology, Kalinga Foundation, based in Agumbe, Shivamogga district, an environmental education centre and NGO focused on ecological research and conservation
Conservation efforts
50 nests monitored
500+ hatchlings released into the wild