The King Cobra must have a home too

Snake catching is a growing career option for young macho men across India. They are called to remove snakes from people’s houses in cities and towns. Every week or two, these serpents are released all at once in the nearest jungle. Sometimes forests are close-by but usually at least 50 km away. For a long time it was thought releasing snakes in the wilderness, out of harm’s way, was doing them a good turn. This was the protocol for “nuisance” snake management for the last couple of decades. Could they have a home, could they be loyal to it? A homing instinct? “Nah, only mammals do that, not reptiles,” was the popular belief.

Research on rattlesnakes in the U.S. during the 1990s upended that assumption. Moved far away from their capture sites, obviously confused snakes spent months wandering great distances and within a year, most were dead. It appears that these reptiles know their home ground very well, hide in the same holes, even meet mates at the same spots every year and rarely leave their territory. When taken out of this well-known terrain with prey, shelter and water, they are as lost as babes in the woods. But the U.S. is a temperate country where winters can be bitterly cold. Snakes survive by hibernating in large groups in the same burrows year after year and knowing the location of such a hide-out is a necessity for survival. Perhaps tropical snakes, that don’t have to hibernate, are not so sensitive to being relocated.

Sea kraits are a species that come ashore to digest food and lay eggs. In 2001, researchers from Australia and Singapore caught about 300 of them from one Fijian island and released them on another, about a mile away. Within a month, all of them were back where they had been caught. Tropical snakes appear to be as attached to their homes as mammals.

Through the 1990s, king cobras, seen in areca nut plantations, gardens or even homes in the Malnad area of Karnataka, were caught and released in the forests of Agumbe, Karnataka. In 2007, Rom Whitaker from the Agumbe Rainforest Research Station and Matt Goode from the University of Arizona started a project to study the effects of translocation on these snakes. Thumb-sized transmitters were surgically implanted into three adult snakes over three metres in length. Using a radio receiver, trackers were able to follow and plot the snakes’ locations using a Global Positioning System device.

The two king cobras, named ‘M2’ and ‘M4’, released where they were first found, crawled about 60 km within a tight 17 to 18 sq km circle over nine months. They frequently used the same termite hill or hole to hide, and the same spots to bask in the sun. These snakes knew their home range well: where to find prey, water and shelter as the seasons changed.

Another king cobra, called ‘M1,’ was caught more than 40 km. away, radio inserted and released in the vicinity of Agumbe. He traveled erratically, rarely returning to any one spot, like the disoriented rattlesnakes in the US By the end of nine months, he had traveled 77 km, covering a 124 sq km area. Although he crawled the same distance as the resident snakes, he ranged over an area that was almost seven times larger.

More interestingly, all king cobras do not appear to be all-weather forest dwellers. During the months of heavy monsoonal downpour, ‘M2’ stayed in the rainforest snacking on small pit vipers, for king cobras are exclusively snake eaters. But once the clouds cleared and the cool of winter set in, he moved to the rice fields and plantations targeting larger, rat-eating snakes like cobras and rat snakes. Whereas, ‘M4’ lived mainly in farmlands come rain or shine. Contrary to popular belief, the new research finding confirms that the king cobra is not “straying” into human habitations; he is at home there.

The trackers witnessed ‘M2’ fighting with another male, mating with a female, hiding for weeks in a tree hollow, and hunting prey within metres of a farmhouse without being seen by anybody else. This is typical; people seldom see the snakes, even such large species like the king cobra that live with them. It’s possible that the ‘nuisance’ reptiles, the ones that people want removed from their homes and gardens, have been there for months, or even years, and on the one occasion they were not quick enough to hide, they were spotted.

Although the researchers say that they need to track more king cobras before being certain, this preliminary study indicates that all is not well with translocated snakes. Whitaker and his team now agree to catch king cobras only when they enter people’s houses. The snakes are then released out of sight of humans but within 500 metres of the capture site. Any that are in gardens or plantations are watched to ensure that people and snakes don’t get in each other’s way. Despite the king cobra being the world’s largest venomous snake, only two people are known to have died from its bite in Karnataka State in 20 years.

But what to do with the thousands of snakes caught in cities and towns across India every year? Rat snakes are the commonest species caught by catchers, and Whitaker recommends encouraging home owners to tolerate them. They keep the place clear of rodents, and control other snakes, including venomous ones. Remove a rat snake and another will take its place, and this time it could well be a venomous species. If there are snakes, it’s because there are adequate resources to sustain them: food in the form of rats and shelter in the junk that people store.

Whitaker adds, “Most humans don’t realize that their habits have led to the proliferation of rats, and therefore their predators, snakes. If you don’t want snakes, then keep your surroundings clear of all debris and make sure that there is no aromatic smell of rodents emanating from your house.”

As for the venomous snakes, there are no easy answers. The recently published ‘Million Death Study’ ranks India as the world’s number one in deaths by snakebite. A million people are estimated to be bitten every year, about 50,000 die and many more pay the terrible price of losing an arm or a leg. However, most of these accidents occur in rural areas and very few in urban centres, which is small comfort for a city dweller when a serpent is discovered in his or her house. There is little choice but to move these venomous snakes out of people’s way. But releasing them in forests where rodents are few and far between or keeping the snakes in captivity will likely doom them to a cruel, protracted death. This is the dilemma facing “nuisance” snake management: do we risk people living cheek by jowl with venomous snakes or should we do the humane thing and euthanize the snakes?