NSW & ACT
Deadly King Cobras dance to a possibly deadly mating ritual beat
- From: The Daily Telegraph
- August 07, 2014
LOVE can really bite when you are a King Cobra and your prospective mate is the longest and heaviest snake currently residing in Australia, not to mention highly venomous.
In the wild — where the otherwise solitary animal’s diet consists almost entirely of other snakes — the stakes could not be higher for a female King Cobra who faces being eaten should she decline his amorous advances or worse still is already fertilised by a rival male.
Not native to Australia, the King Cobra’s venom is not the most potent — the Aussie inland taipan takes that credit.
But it can deliver up to seven millilitres of the stuff in a single bite — enough to kill 20 people, or an elephant.
The Australian Reptile Park, at Somersby north of Sydney, is the first zoo to import the magnificent snakes from Asia and this morning paired two of its 10 resident King Cobras as part of its captive breeding program.
“We’ll know it hasn’t worked if we come back and find she’s missing,’’ Australian Reptile Park keeper Brad Gabriel joked.
“Because it means he will have eaten her.’’
It is the first time in four years since the zoo has attempted to breed the highly venomous species after successfully mating the same pair in 2010.
The male, named “Aran’’ - meaning forest in Thai — is the biggest venomous snake in the country at 4m long and is almost a third larger than the female — named “Alpana’’ or “Beautiful’’ in Indian.
With the species listed as “vulnerable’’ because of habitat destruction and poaching, fellow keeper Billy Collett said the breeding program was vital to establishing a solid population in captivity.
He said the male was wild caught in Java, Indonesia, and was the oldest and “most experienced’’ King Cobra at the park.
“So his genetics are really important,’’ he said.
With her survival, and that of their species in the balance, the courtship ritual is a primal choreography with male rubbing his chin and licking his tongue along the female’s back until he draws level with the back of her nape and head.
The snakes are “hooded up’’ with their distinctive flared necks as the female leads him around the enclosure, which stimulates the male further.
Copulation can go on for up to an hour and, once complete, the female will ignore the male completely and keepers return him to his enclosure.
If successful, Mr Collett said the female would build a nest before laying a clutch of about 30 eggs after a 60-day incubation period.
Deadly from birth, King Cobras use an “egg tooth’’ to break out of their shells and are born quite distinctive from their adult colourings with black bodies and yellow bands.