Archives of The Cold Blooded News

The Newsletter of the Colorado Herpetological Society

Volume 29, Number 7;   July, 2002

The King and I

by Edward 0. Moll
Adjunct Professor
School of Renewable Natural Resources
University of Arizona

Leaving the vehicle by the side of the road, I slipped down the embankment and began pushing through the high grass making my way towards the small stream. As the vegetation parted, I noticed an attenuate shape on the ground just in time to miss stepping on it with my foot. It was the tail of a large snake. The scales appeared to be arranged in a braided fashion, somewhat reminiscent of a coachwhip's tail. This, however, was Malaysia and well outside the range of Masticophis. Could this be the tail of a large elapid? Had I at last stumbled on the snake of my childhood fantasies? Would the tail lead to the king?

My objective this day had nothing to do with king cobras. In fact, after spending over a year in Malaysia on a previous trip and not encountering one, I had pretty well given up hope of ever finding a king cobra in the wild. On this day in August of 1978, I was out trapping turtles sampling as many aquatic habitats as I could in northern Terengganu to determine which species occur in the state. This itself was a holiday from my main project, censusing the nesting population of a large river turtle, the painted terrapin (Callagur borneoensis), that nested on beaches of the South China Sea near the Setiu River. Inasmuch as Callagur nests at night, I had time during the day to explore other interests, which in my case, usually involved turtles.

So here I stood looking at the end of a snake's tail protruding from the four-foot high grass in front of me, debating my next move. If Steve Irwin were on TV in those days, I might have considered grabbing the tail and pulling the snake to me, but this option never crossed my mind. On the other hand, there was never any question that this tail had to be followed to its source. I had waited over three decades to see a king cobra in the wild and this might well be the opportunity. An attraction to reptiles began in my preteen years. My father, a high school biology teacher, annually brought home an array of small reptiles that he kept in the class room when the school closed for the summer. My job was to care for the animals during this period, and I soon became interested in finding out more about these impermanent pets. To fuel this interest, my dad also brought home the two books on reptiles that he kept in his small biological library. These books, Reptiles of the World, and Snakes of the World, were authored by Raymond Ditmars, curator of mammals and reptiles at the New York Zoological Park. Ditmars' books can be credited with sparking the herpetological careers of a number of young students of my generation. His writing had a way of exciting one about reptiles. Certainly these two books and later the writings of Archie Carr had a very strong influence on my choice of a career.

Another result of reading Ditmars' books is that I began a fascination with the king cobra. Quotes such as those in the preface above and the following stuck in my mind. Apparently the most deadly of the Old World poisonous serpents is the King Cobra, or Hamadryas. Of all the species of snakes observed by the writer, the King Cobra is most intelligent. Wild King Cobras have a diabolical temper, coupled with a dangerous degree of intelligence. Here was a dangerous, bad tempered snake with high intelligence that takes no guff from any species. Someday I had to see this animal in the wild.

Thereafter, the king became a minor obsession, and I read whatever information that I could find about the snake. The species ranges extensively throughout South and South East Asia. Chiefly a forest dweller that readily climbs trees, the king is unconventional in several respects. Not only is it the longest venomous snake (attaining 5 to 6 meters in length), it is also unique in building a conical nest of leaves and humus (approximately 30 cm high and up to a meter in diameter) in which to lay its eggs. Parental care continues throughout the incubation period with the female staying near the nest until shortly before emergence of the young. As the current genus name, Ophiophagus, suggests it primarily eats snakes. Trips to the Lincoln Park and Brookfield Zoos in Chicago always began with a visit to the reptile house to view the cobras. Another memorable but yet disappointing trip to see the king was a family visit to the Miami Serpentarium. This unique facility, on the side of the South Dixie Highway in Florida, could be seen a couple of miles in the distance due to a huge stone replica of a king cobra that shimmered in the sunlight due to a coat of metallic gold paint. This was my kind of place. I had heard that the owner, William Haast, regularly dueled with king cobras which he caught by hand and then collected the venom by allowing the snake to bite through a rubber membrane covering a vial. As it turned out this all was true, but the king cobra was brought out only on Sundays and we had arrived on a week day. I eventually did see Haast duel with the king on television but this was hardly the same. Nevertheless, I did get to see the caged animals and watched Haast extract venom from several of the lesser elapids.

The years went by and my research interests had turned to turtles. Through academic associations with Hobart Smith and John Legler, I had opportunities to study in Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama. No king cobras there, but coral snake encounters were common. At least I was encountering snakes in the same family. I received my doctorate at University of Utah in 1968, and took my first academic position as an assistant professor at Eastern Illinois University. The tropics seemed very far away but there were plenty of turtles to study in the Mississippi River. Cottonmouths and timber rattlesnakes were exciting to observe and the king was temporarily shelved in the recesses of my mind.

As my first sabbatical year at Eastern Illinois University began to loom on the horizon, that old tropical fever began to infect my brain once more. If enough grant money could be scraped together, it was time to explore new territory. The old world tropics with huge river turtles and king cobras were beckoning. First I needed to find a sabbatical project in tropical Asia. Volumes of inquiry letters were mailed off to researchers, wildlife biologists, and game departments in Brunei, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Thailand. Finally, a reply from Mohamed Khan, chief game warden in peninsular Malaysia, provided the perfect project. The Game Department of Malaysia had been working on a conservation program for the endangered river terrapin, Batagur baska. They invited me to join them for the year to evaluate the project and offer suggestions for improving the program. Several dozen grant proposals later, and accompanied by my wife Judy, and sons Doug (6) and Jeff (5), I headed for Malaysia and another tropical adventure.

Over the school year of 1975/76, I worked with the Game Department's conservation programs for the river terrapin on both coasts, but particularly on the Perak (west coast) and the Terengganu (east coast) Rivers. Besides collecting and marking terrapins, I radio-tagged and followed a number of individuals. This was a suspicious activity in those days as the Viet Nam War had only recently ended and Malaysia had its own communist insurgency with rebel bands still active around the border with Thailand. For my part, it was difficult to convince local authorities that I was a biologist tracking turtles with telemetry equipment rather than a CIA spy. This is another story however.

As I traveled across the Malay Peninsula, the king cobra was always on my mind. After all, Tweedie's The Snakes of Malaysia clearly stated [that] the Hamadryad is found throughout the whole of Malaya, both in jungle and populated areas. So at every kampong (village), once the mandatory questions about turtles were completed, I would ask if anyone had seen a king cobra. Usually the answer would be similar to that given by one angler to another i.e., you should have been here last week; or last month; or last year. At one kampong, we were told that a very large cobra had been killed only days before. When queried about the fate of the carcass, the villager shrugged and said that it had been thrown into the bush. He took us to the general area but no evidence of any snake was found. On two other occasions we were told that a villager was keeping a large cobra captive. Both turned out to be common cobras of impressive length (ca.2 meters long) but not hamadryads. By the end of the year, I had encountered a number of common cobras along with a few other elapids, including the Malayan krait (Bungarus flaviceps), the blue Malaysian coral snake (Maticora bivirgata), and a selection of sea snakes (especially Lapemis hardwickii). I had not seen one king cobra.

Now as I pushed through the vegetation with the prospect of encountering my first king, my heart was pounding rapidly and my legs felt shaky. Every moment I expected to see the huge serpent rear above the high grass with its hood spread wide to challenge my approach. How worried I should have been is still not clear. I have read a lot about their temperament over the years but there is little agreement as to whether these are docile, unexcitable snakes or whether they are an aggressive and belligerent species that would actually seek out and pursue humans that venture too close to their lair. The aforementioned accounts in Ditmars' books suggested a highly aggressive, unpredictable snake. Similarly, James Oliver in his 1959 book Snakes in Fact and Fiction chose the king cobra over the taipan and mamba as his choice for the most dangerous snake based on its venom yield and aggressiveness. Conversely, my friend Rom Whitaker wrote in his book. Common Indian Snakes, that accounts of aggressiveness of this magnificent snake are more imaginative than factual. Rom had encountered a number of king cobras in South India and the Andamans Islands and found them to be timid snakes, unwilling to attack and always seeking escape when possible. J.H.E. Leakey, an African herpetologist observed 16 active king cobra nests in Thailand and found that none of the females guarding the nests showed any aggressive behavior until they were grasped with snake tongs. Tweedie (Snakes of Malaya) agrees with Whitaker that the reports of aggressiveness in king cobras are likely exaggerated. Tweedie relates an incident in Singapore, where two golfers hand-captured a 15 foot king cobra on the golf course, thinking it must be a python. Initially they picked it up by the tail and the snake offered no effective resistance. Could these varying views of king cobra aggressiveness be due to Ditmars and Oliver having observed the snake in a captive environment, instead of in the wild as Whitaker and Leakey?

Here was my chance to find out for myself. The parting of the grass had now revealed the head end of the big snake. The first thing that stood out was two large occipital scales on the back of the head confirming that this was indeed a hamadryad. I stood there in a half crouch, marveling at this magnificent creature but poised to spring backward should it suddenly rise to the attack. However, the only indication that the snake was even aware of my presence was a steady flicking of its tongue. For most of my life, I had wanted to see the king cobra in the wild. Now that I had achieved that objective, the sensible thing to do was to back up the way that I had come and go about trapping the turtles that had brought me to this stream. But I could not drag myself away. Just seeing this spectacular snake no longer seemed enough. At the time I convinced myself that the only reason I wanted to catch this snake was so that I could remove it to an open site where it could be photographed. Looking back, it is more likely that what I really wanted was the thrill of catching and holding the most dangerous snake on earth as I had watched Bill Haast do on TV so many years before (further, it would be decades before I would read Roger Repp's "look but don't touch" articles in the Sonoran Herpetologist).The major problem here was that this was a turtle trapping venture, and I had no snake stick or tongs to simplify the task of capturing this rather formidable snake. Further there were no sticks or branches in this habitat of grass. All I had in hand was a small hoop net and two spreader sticks. These sticks were wood dowels 3/8 inch in diameter and looked a little puny at the time. Would one be adequate to hold down the snake's head if it should begin writhing and thrashing? Was it worth the risk? King cobras can deliver relatively large amounts of a potent venom. One story that stuck in my mind was that a number of deaths of elephants, working in the lumbering of teak in Thailand, had resulted from king cobra bites. On the bright side, Sherman and Madge Minton, in their book Giant Reptiles, related that a couple of cases were known where humans had survived envenomation by a king cobra. In one case the survivor required over a quart of antivenin and over 19 hours on an mechanical respirator. The other case involved Bill Haast who had immunized himself against cobra venom by injecting himself with increasing quantities over many years. In his long career at the Miami Serpentarium, Haast was bitten by venomous snakes over 150 times, including 78 elapids. Although his closest call was the bite of a blue krait, the king cobra bite was among the worst. The attending physician was quite concerned over Haast's symptoms and despite his reputed immunity, injected him with large quantities of antivenin. Among the more serous symptoms were a very irregular heartbeat and rapid but shallow respiration. At one point his pulse dropped so low that it could no longer be detected. Then just when it had been decided to bring in an iron lung, Haast's blood pressure began to pick up and he recovered rapidly. Almost exactly 24 hours after he entered the hospital. Bill Haast was back at work at the Serpentarium. (Complete details of this bite are related in the popular book about Haast by Harvey Kursh entitled Cobras in the Garden.)

This was all very comforting, but I had less mass than an elephant, was no where near any antivenin, and as far as I knew, I had no natural immunity to elapid venom. Still knowing that the opportunity may never present itself again, I decided to give it a shot. I pressed the spreader stick down on the king's head, grabbed hold at the snake's neck and braced myself for all hell to break loose. The snake did not go berserk. It did not even "growl" as they are reputed to do when angered. Rather this snake calmly wrapped itself around my arm and remained docile. I began to side with Rom Whitaker's assessment of the king's temperament.

I carried the snake back up onto the road and hollered for Puad, my assistant, to get the camera. By this time it was late in the afternoon and the sun had sunk to a level that the light was poor for photography. We tried a few shots, but due to the poor light conditions, it seemed best to keep the snake until morning when there would be better light. We roughly measured the king by holding the anterior end up to my head height (just under 6 feet) and seeing how much of the snake was still stretched out along the ground (ca. 2 feet). Hence this king was close to eight feet, less than half the length that they can attain, but I was impressed. We then placed the cobra into a large plastic tub with a perforated top that I used for hauling turtles and venomous snakes, and drove to our kampong house (a small wooden structure on stilts) to spend the night.

The next morning when we opened the lid, I was devastated to find that the snake was dead. A close examination of the body revealed an area that had been crushed and I was able to put together a scenario that explained the surprising behavior of the snake. While crossing the road, it likely was hit by a car or motor bike, but was still able to crawl into the grass beyond the road where I found it. What I will never know is would this snake have been so docile if it had not been seriously injured. Despite many other trips to Malaysia and India, I never encountered another wild king cobra. Thus, with my sample size of one mortally-injured snake, I can not really contribute much to the controversy of whether king cobras are diabolically, dangerous, aggressive snakes or whether they are the pussy cats of the elapid world. It no longer concerns me. I achieved a life-long ambition to not only see a king cobra in the wild but to capture one and hold it in my hands. Should the king ever again cross my path, I would be content to admire it from a distance until it crawls away into the forest.

At least I think I would.