Google News The most poisonous snakes in the world: king cobra
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The king cobra is the longest venomous snake in the world, with venom powerful enough to kill an adult Indian elephant with a single bite. It is a snake widespread in northern India, southern China, Malaysia, the Philippines and a large part of Southeast Asia, including some islands, where it can also live at altitudes above 2000 m.
The color of the skin is variable and in adult specimens it ranges from yellow to green, from brown to black. Juveniles are darker and sometimes even black.
This snake lives on average 20 years, usually in tropical forests and mangroves, near streams and in wetlands, since it is an expert swimmer.
Its habitat in recent years has been destroyed by humans, so much so that today the king cobra is in danger of extinction. It also goes into cultivated areas, where it can create problems for farmers due to the dangerous poison, which is not powerful in itself, but due to the huge amount injected in a single bite equal to 7 ml.
Although it generally tries to avoid confrontation, when the king cobra feels threatened and wants to drive possible predators away from the territory, it starts hissing loudly, raises the front of the body and extends the ribs of the neck, thus opening the famous typical hood of the cobras, so as to take on a menacing aspect
and its considerable size allows it to capture most of the ophidians with which it shares the habitat, from snakes that feed on rodents to large pythons that can exceed 3 m in length.
The venom of the cobra is powerful enough to kill them before moving on to ingestion, which always occurs from the head so that the scales of the prey do not injure the digestive system and it is easier to swallow it. If necessary, practice cannibalism.
The king cobra is oviparous and its reproductive season goes from January to April, a period in which these ophidians live in pairs to protect, in an extremely aggressive way, first the eggs and then the young. The females build, unique among all snakes, a nest of crushed leaves and branches in which they lay from 20 to 40 eggs.