It was an engaging Sunday evening at The Bangalore Room with the mesmerizing Dr Gowri Shankar, the reputed wildlife biologist and conservationist who has danced with the King Cobra for over 20 years now! In the course of a talk that was full of humour, delivered with verve, and packed with incredible personal stories, eye-popping discoveries, and passionate advocacy for snakes and every other critter that call the Western Ghats home, Dr Shankar illuminated our minds and conquered our hearts.
Young debutant author Ishan Shanavas, whose beautiful book on his teenage explorations of the natural world, The Light of Wilder Things which had just released, introduced his mentor Gowri, and signed many copies of his book and thehe very talented 14-year-old snake buff and would-be herpetologist Chinmay Ajith exhibited his spectacular art on the occasion.
Here are some of the very cool things Dr Gowri told us.
The King Cobra is the only one of the 4000+ snake species in the world that builds a nest for its eggs, despite having no limbs!
India alone has 355 species of snakes, of which the venomous Big Four – the Russell’s viper, the common krait, the Indian cobra, & the saw-scaled viper – kill close to 60k people annually. The King Cobra has enough venom to kill an elephant, but it rarely bites humans.
The King does not hiss, it growls!
The temperature at which snake eggs are incubated determines the sex of the offspring.
The highly venomous African Black Mamba probably evolved into the King Cobra after the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana 55 million years ago.
Being bitten by a King Cobra changed the course of Dr Gowri’s life. Inexplicably, the bite did not kill him, but when the anti-venom administered to him did not work, Dr Gowri began to wonder if there was in fact more than one species of the King, each carrying a different venom. Years of research led him to the stunning discovery that there were in fact four different species, each endemic to a particular region of the world. Dr Gowri had the honour of naming the Western Ghats species – he named it Ophiophagus kaalinga, after the local Kannada name for the King.
