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 Centre for Rainforest Ecology, 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 2005, 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…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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