king cobra

Review: Self-Aware, but Not Sentimental, Conversations With the Unglamorous Wild

The most striking thing about ‘My Husband and Other Animals 2’ is the strong and unapologetic woman at its centre

The title, My Husband and Other Animals 2, first registered as too similar to Gerard Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals (1956), and then as something cloyingly conjugal. But understanding that this book is far from any sort of mawkishness is crucial to appreciating it.

It’s straight-faced and straight-talking, and demolishes tropes of heroism awarded to conservationists, in a break from the way they’re often showcased. It presents an often funny but deeply felt take on the wonder and worry in Indian conservation. Romulus Whitaker, the titular husband and reptile conservationist, appears in many chapters as a muse rather than a messiah. The author Janaki Lenin clearly adores him, but this is more about her than him.

Wildlife writing in India, represented by authors such as M.K. Ranjitsinh, A.J.T. Johnsingh, Kenneth Anderson and Jim Corbett has focused chiefly on native wildlife in forests and wildernesses. In Lenin’s telling, there is no obvious ‘endangered species’ list the author goes through, and nor does it address all of India. Instead, the animals – which include both wild and domestic, both exotic and native – are ones the author has encountered and, more meaningfully, has taken the time to observe.

So you have pet emus, millipedes, leopards, oystercatcher birds, king cobras, crocodiles and chippiparai dogs. In an easy narrative style, Lenin seeks to answer a single question: Why do animals behave the way they do, and what is our relationship with them?

Also read: A Forest Is a Story, and Two New Books Narrate It Through the Perfect Eyes

An intense curiosity pervades the pages. Lenin asks questions about animals the way other people might about human beings. For example, why did the emus eat a particularly stinking millipede? Because they wanted to. Why do lemurs rub centipede juice on their bodies? To ward mosquitoes off. Why didn’t a particular king cobra bite her, even though Lenin was unwittingly in its presence for nine hours?

Many of the reptiles that show up are dangerous, and generally considered uncharismatic. The Government of Gujarat, for instance example, is ‘freeing’ lakes near the Statue of Unity of almost 500 mugger crocodiles so tourist sea-planes can land there. In other places, crocodiles are at the centre of an intensifying human-wildlife conflict.

My Husband and Other Animals 2: The Wildlife Adventures Continue
Janaki Lenin
Westland Books, 2018

Sympathy for these animals is rare. Lenin’s gaze is unblinking: she accepts the animals for what they are, pointing out things that stood out to her. Like the tender gender-benders that crocodilians are good fathers. It seems a mugger at the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust (MCBT) would carry his hatchlings to the water, and shield them from birds and other predators.

A recent and unusual event in Bawa Mohtara village, Chattisgarh, where villagers mourned the death of a 130-year old crocodile, reminded me of a crocodile from the book’s pages. The MCBT’s first crocodile, which had been rescued from a zoo, died when a tunnel he was digging collapsed. Lenin writes about him: “The croc that survived spirit-crushing solitude for 15 years with equanimity, and a governor’s threat too, sired hundreds of babies in his decade-long career as a crocodilian stud.”

The book rises above observation and repartee because it doesn’t shy away from difficult topics in conservation… as much as in life.

Lenin writes in one place about how crocodiles are fed at the mausoleum of Khan Jahan Ali, a 15th century Sufi saint, in Bangladesh. The MCBT offered crocodiles to the shrine, which turned them down because it said the crocs were “heathen”. Whitaker then argued they would be blessed if the crocs drank the shrine’s water. MCBT also spotted a saltwater crocodile among the crocs already being fed and advised it be removed. But the shrine refused, thanks to a mix of superstitious beliefs and devotion. It ended up mauling people and was beaten to death.

Lenin writes, “I couldn’t help thinking: the road to this conservation hell is paved with our good intentions.”

She tries to understand human behaviour through animal behaviour, exploring why the males rape and or why homosexuality might have evolved. This could seem forced to some readers; I didn’t always buy into the associations. However, this is a new kind of writing in the wildlife and nature canon for India.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the book is the strong and unapologetic woman at its centre, who transformed from a city girl into a wildlife-lover. The bittersweet qualities of a hermetic life aren’t glossed over. Lenin takes the time, like a slow bildungsroman, to lay out her chequered journey. At the heart of it, this is a woman’s story – a woman in her own right, a woman following unglamorous animals. A woman growing deeply into what she followed. In my favourite chapter, ‘Marriages are made on earth’, she writes:

Rom was a single-minded reptile freak who loved the wild and the company of wild animals more than people. I was a city girl. I had never been in a forest or seen a wild animal before I met Rom. I chafed when trading colourful handloom saris for drab, jungle attire. I left behind armfuls of silver bangles, as they made too much noise in the forest. Beads could get caught in the undergrowth, so off they came. I confined my feet in shoes, a reminder of a hated school life. I didn’t look like me anymore.

These are moments of pure joy and pure confusion in other chapters.

Also read: Janaki Lenin’s series for The Wire on amazing animals

“While I enjoyed living at the Croc Bank, I also remember aching to get away… we only had other staff for company. We were in each other’s homes and lives much more than is healthy. Even the best friendships can dissolve in such a fishbowl.” The kind of space the forest presented didn’t make things easier. She writes:

To an outsider, I must have seemed like a demure bride, following her husband with her head bent down. I was hypnotised by the ground that was seething with brown worms.. Leeches. More than their dietary preference for warm blood, I was terrified of contact—of their cold, slimy bodies attached to mine. The thought made me feel icky.

There aren’t many autobiographies or memoirs of women, particularly of women close to nature. There’s the sweeping Born Free by Joy Adamson (1960) and the intensely literary H is For Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2014), but little else.

Lenin’s book turns its gaze both outwards to nature and inwards to her own self. She knows her weaknesses and she owns them. If not for the creatures, read the book for just that rarity: a frequently funny, self-deprecating woman who isn’t afraid to be flawed, to be ‘unfeminine’ with minimum fuss, and who prefers self-awareness to sentimentality.

Neha Sinha works for the Bombay Natural History Society. The views expressed here are personal.

If You’re a Southern African Python, Being a ‘Good’ Mum Could Get You Killed

Of the approximately 3,400 species of snakes, not even 3% show some form of maternal care. The southern African pythons are an exception with a vengeance.

Animals do the most amazing things. Read about them in this series by Janaki Lenin.

Southern African pythons (Python natalensis) set a new record for serpentine motherhood, taking care of their young at great cost to their health.

Most mother snakes take their jobs lightly. They find a safe refuge, lay their eggs and leave. If they are live-bearers, they vanish as soon as the last little one pops out. These newborns face the dangers of the big bad world on their own. Of the approximately 3,400 species of snakes, not even 3% show some form of maternal care.

King cobras go the extra distance, making a nest and guarding their eggs until they hatch. Mothers belonging to some species like the Indian rock python coil the full length of their muscular bodies around their mass of eggs. Throughout incubation, they shiver to keep the eggs warm. But that’s about it. They don’t stay with their young and protect them from the vagaries of life. No species of snake seems to take any further interest in the fate of their offspring. Over the years, herpetologists have found a few snake species that show themselves to be exemplary mothers.

Graham Alexander, a professor of herpetology and physiology at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, spent seven years tracking 37 male and female southern African pythons at the Dinokeng Game Reserve, about 40 kilometres north of Pretoria.

Scramble mating

Graham Alexander grappling with a python. Credit: Bryan Maritz

The arrival of winter chill in the southern hemisphere in June signals the start of the python breeding season. Females and their suitors travel as much as a kilometre or two from their regular haunts to areas riddled with burrows. Finding subjects for the study wasn’t that difficult. If one of them had a radio transmitter, it would lead the researcher to others. Such individuals earn the moniker ‘Judas snakes’.

Alexander observed ready-to-breed females turn stark black. They would not revert to their standard cryptic brown and tan colours until long after their breeding season ended. No other python changes its appearance so dramatically for reproduction.

Southern African pythons are the continent’s largest snakes, measuring up to five metres in length and 60 kilograms in weight. Single-handedly catching them can be a challenging enterprise. The strong ones slipped through Alexander’s hands and slithered down holes even as the professor struggled to hang on to their tails. He managed to overcome some into which he surgically inserted gadgets for tracking them and measuring their body temperature. His job didn’t end there. It was just the beginning of a punishing schedule.

Not only did he have courses to teach, but Alexander also had to drive 200 kilometres round trip every couple of days from his university in Johannesburg to the game reserve. As a single parent, he also had three young children to look after, so he took them along on his fieldwork. “I look back now and wonder how much danger I exposed my 5-year-old daughter to,” he says.

He was so pressed for time that he “had to run on the signal,” sometimes racing past hungry pythons lying in ambush. He got bitten thrice when the predators mistook him for an antelope. Thankfully for science, they realised their mistake and let him go. But one python started constricting his legs before Alexander could disentangle himself.

Two or three males hang around every would-be mamma, often resting while enveloped within her massive coils. Female pythons outgrow males and, as is typical of such species, males aren’t aggressive to each other. One resident landowner reported an entourage of 13 courting snakes following a female.

The females laze in the sun at the entrance of the burrows but flee underground at any disturbance. Their all-black maternity colouration could aid in the better absorption of the sun’s rays but also make them visible to any passing animals. But the males stand their ground unless a human approaches too close. Perhaps they think they are camouflaged and invisible.

Three months later, the males lose interest in sex and go on their way, leaving the females alone to handle parenthood. In other species, live-in relationships don’t last so long. Alexander doesn’t know why these male pythons spend months with females. Since every male has at least one rival, they may stay to make sure they get an equal chance of fathering the next generation, a behaviour called ‘scramble mating’.

A long fast

Alexander’s daughter watching a surgical implant of radio transmitter in a large python. Credit: Mary-Ann Costello

The females lay their eggs inside burrows made by aardvarks, warthogs, and porcupines. Alexander doesn’t know if any altercation does take place underground, but the mammals continue to use their subterranean chambers even after the reptilian intruders move in. He speculates the burrow owner and tenant may use different hollows, and all parties decide to give each other a wide berth.

Alexander couldn’t count how many eggs each python laid until after the hatchlings and their mother vacated the burrow. However, he monitored the goings-on inside the nesting cavity with an infrared video camera. When he broke into the chambers after their departure, he found the smallest clutch had 15 eggs and the largest, 74.

Although the mothers wrap around their eggs, they don’t rhythmically contract their muscles to raise their body temperature. Instead, two times a day, they lie at the entrance of burrow until they bake to 40ºC before returning to coil around their eggs, transferring the heat from their bodies. For the three-month incubation term, these massive mammas live an austere lifestyle, alternately sunbathing and curling around their precious loads. They don’t eat or drink.

In December, the warmest time of the year in South Africa, the young hatch. The baby snakes slit their leathery eggshells and poke their heads out, breathing air for two days before emerging. In other egg-laying species, this is the cue for mothers to leave and break their long fast.

Female Indian rock pythons, for instance, don’t even wait until their young hatch, abandoning their maternal duties about 12 days before the due date. The long months of starvation and thirst while tending to their eggs don’t seem to create any bonds.

But the emaciated southern African python moms stay put. The young take to basking in a dense mass during the day at the burrow entrance like their mothers before returning to the depths of their nest. At night, they rest in the dens within their mother’s embrace, absorbing heat from her body. These adults that had been shy earlier become defensive. When Alexander approached, they bunched their coils and prepared to strike, an indication that they might be ready to confront any predator.

Morning antics of baby southern African pythons

Watch baby pythons leave their mother’s coils in the morning to bask near the burrow entrance.

Posted by The Alexander Herp Lab on Tuesday, 20 March 2018

After two weeks of this routine, the hatchlings slough their skins all at once and leave the safe confines of the nest. They are ready to face the world. Only now do the thin mothers crawl away to find a meal. They hunker down along game trails, waiting in ambush for a warm-blooded animal.

Recently-shed baby pythons basking near the entrance of the burrow

We are celebrating Graham's new paper by dedicating this week to the southern African python! Luckily, Graham has a stash of unseen videos which we will be sharing over the course of the week. Here you see an aggregation of recently-shed baby southern African pythons basking near the entrance of the burrow.

Posted by The Alexander Herp Lab on Monday, 19 March 2018

Time is of the essence because winter is around the corner. During the more than six months of starvation, they lose as much as 40 percent of their body mass. High body temperatures rev up metabolism. By toasting themselves every day, the mothers burn through their body’s reserves. Each effort at procreation drains female southern African pythons so much that they may take several years to regain peak condition.

Alexander writes that “fewer than half the adult females bred in any given year.” Some of them may wait until it is too late. One weak, scrawny female that couldn’t find prey in time died.

A vastly underestimated complexity

Why do they go to such extraordinary lengths endangering their own lives? Newborns cannot crawl well when their bellies are full of yolk. At this vulnerable stage, the mothers possibly shield them from many toothy jaws. Predators such as mongooses, meerkats and ratels could make short work of the youngsters.

Resting on their mothers’ warm coils may speed up the digestion of this protein store. Data from temperature loggers bear this out. Mother pythons raise their body heat more than 5ºC higher than other pythons. They trade their well-being to give their young a head start in life.

Harry Greene, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University, and his colleagues wrote of live-bearing maternal rattlesnakes in the book Biology of the Vipers (2002). The authors describe mothers staying with their young for a few days and even chasing off the predatory southern black racer snake from their enclosure in the lab.

“As a bedrock natural historian,” says Greene, “of course I love [Alexander’s paper].” Alexander’s findings challenge the assumption that all large pythons incubate their eggs by shivering. His description of southern African pythons soaking up heat to warm their eggs and hatchlings raises new possibilities. “We have been vastly underestimating the behavioural complexity of snakes!”

Alexander suggests testing whether females become dark so they can warm up faster and also checking whether all the babies in a clutch have the same father. A litter of puff adder hatchlings, for instance, averages about three fathers, with one having as many as six dads. Southern African pythons may be similar.

Seven years is a long time to track snakes unless Alexander had an inkling of this unique behaviour. When a farm manager first told him he had seen a mother python with babies, he had dismissed that observation thinking the man had probably seen a large female with her smaller-sized suitors. A few other similar anecdotes convinced him that there was more going on.

His investigation is the first time a scientist has discovered an egg-laying snake extending her vigil to protect her offspring.

The study was published in the Journal of Zoology on March 8, 2018.

Janaki Lenin is the author of My Husband and Other Animals. She lives in a forest with snake-man Rom Whitaker and tweets at @janakilenin.

How, or Why, Cobras Evolved Tissue-Destroying Venom

En route to answering this question, a new study shows that some components of snake venom can be used for defensive purposes also.

Black-necked spitting cobras not only have bright body banding but also red warning colours. Credit: Randy Ciuros

Animals do the most amazing things. Read about them in this series by Janaki Lenin.

Cobras are an extraordinary family of snakes. Even though they have enough venom to knock down a herd of oxen, they’ve developed defensive displays in a league of their own. They unfurl the elongate ribs of their necks to form hoods. Some like spectacled cobras startle predators with eye-like markings. Others can shoot venom with varying degrees of accuracy from considerable distance at their assailants’ eyes.

For a long time, scientists thought spitting cobras’ venom have more toxins that induce pain and destroy tissue than the venom of non-spitting cobras. These are the cytotoxins or cardiotoxins, a class of proteins. When the venom of spitters hits their antagonists’ eyes, it has an immediate reaction. Therefore, these cobras need to have more cytotoxic venom, the thinking went.

Rinkhals, closely related to cobras, advertise their cytotoxic venom with bold body-banding. Credit: Giuseppe Mazza

Other cobras possess cytotoxins to digest their preys’ innards even as their predators begin the cumbersome process of swallowing them whole. A similar process causes human victims of cobras to suffer skin and tissue damage, often permanently debilitating them. Despite the damage they cause, these toxins are not as potent as neurotoxins that attack the nerves.

Why do snakes that already have deadly neurotoxic venom evolve less lethal cytotoxins? A team of 26 scientists from five countries sought the answers in a new study.

“Evolution has one innovation come on to the scene at a time,” Bryan Grieg Fry, the lead scientist of the study, told The Wire. “Spitting as an innovation would not evolve in the absence of something worth delivering.”

By tracing the ancestry of cobras and using statistical models, the researchers discovered that cytotoxins evolved after cobras developed hoods. Despite the name, king cobras are not close relatives of cobras. They also independently evolved to spread their hoods and sit upright, facing their antagonists. Puffing up to look large is a common defence mechanism in the animal world. Soon afterward, the venom of cobras and king cobras developed cytotoxins, say the researchers.

In cobras, the tissue destroyers are tiny peptides called 3-finger toxins. King cobras developed L-amino acid oxidase to perform the same job.

By opting for different lifestyles, a few African species like the water (Naja annulata), tree (Naja goldii), and burrowing cobras (Naja multifasciata) opted out of this defence strategy and lost their ability to hood. Consequently, the cytotoxicity of their venom dropped.

The Malayan population of king cobras, with a bright orange throat, has the highest cytotoxicity of king cobras tested in the study. Credit: Kevin Messenger

What if the hooding bluff fails to deter? The most recent ancestor of cobras and rinkhals was probably a drab snake that could hood. Like the Egyptian cobra (Naja haje), its hood may not have had any markings and its venom was possibly moderately cytotoxic. When confronted, the ancestor perhaps behaved like its modern day lookalike – fleeing after striking nervously.

Three clans of closely related snakes – African cobras, Asian cobras, and rinkhals – developed a new weapon as plan B. They fine-tuned their venom delivery kit so they could shoot a fine jet of venom from a distance at the eyes of their assailants. The opening in the fangs of these snakes became narrow and migrated from the tip to squarely face the front, the better to target the eyes. Their venom became less viscous for greater reach. In addition to using their venom to inject and subdue prey, spitting cobras also used it in defence.

“Defensive venoms are characterised not by lethality but by pain,” says Fry, University of Queensland, Australia. “Predatory venoms however are selected for their potency. So these are mutually exclusive strategies. Thus predatory venoms are not selected as defensive plan Bs.”

Supplementing their already potent arsenal with non-fatal peptides allowed these snakes to stand their ground. After all, no animal wants to call the snakes’ bluff and suffer the searing pain caused by tissue-destroying venom in their eyes.

While many African cobras aim accurately, Asian cobras, likely being more recent innovators of this technique, are not as proficient. Some like the Chinese cobras (Naja atra) and monocled cobras (Naja kaouthia) spit only on rare occasions. Unlike Sumatran spitting cobras (Naja sumatrana) for instance, they didn’t develop special adaptations for spitting.

Many others didn’t go the spitting route or lost it later. Instead they developed startling eye-like markings on the back of their broad and round hoods like our spectacled and monocled cobras (Naja naja and Naja kaouthia).

The researchers tested the potency of the cytotoxins against healthy and cancerous cell lines. “We wanted to focus on the toxins that were indiscriminate killers,” says Fry. “So we looked for congruence between the two cell types as the guide for the truly potent cytotoxic activity.”

Red-spitting cobras dispense with markings in favour of a scarlet coloration. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Indochinese cobras (Naja siamensis) and snouted cobras (Naja annulifera) developed startling black and white bands that serve the same purpose as the warning hood marks. Similarly, the more scarlet the snake, like red spitting cobras (Naja pallida), the more startling to predators. All these species that possess warning markings, bands, and colours have high cytotoxicity. Among king cobras, the Malaysian population that has a bright orange throat has more tissue-destroying toxins than other populations.

Across the board, whether they spat or not, Asian cobra venoms are highly cytotoxic. In contrast, drab, patternless African cobras that didn’t spit have lower cytotoxicity than ones with warning markings, bands, or colours.

All of this raises the question: Why don’t king cobras spit venom? After all, they already possess tissue-destroying factors in their venom. Unlike cobras, the cytotoxic elements of king cobra venom are large and globular that cannot easily attack the exposed surface of the eyes. So they never developed this weapon.

This study, perhaps the first, shows that some components of venom can be used for defensive purposes.

“I think it’s an excellent example of bringing multiple methods together to reveal a fascinating evolutionary story,” Rick Shine, a professor at the University of Sydney, Australia, told The Wire. “One of the aspects that fascinates me is the notion of ‘honesty in advertising.’ You might think that warning colours would help any snake to discourage predators, so those colours might evolve in fairly harmless species as well as deadly ones. But in fact this paper shows that a warning colour is generally a reliable indication that the snake does, indeed, possess a venom potent enough to cause major problems for any predator silly enough to attack it.”

However, cobras, rinkhals and king cobras aren’t the only venomous snakes to have cytotoxins. Many viper species that don’t spread hoods or spit venom possess them, too.

Fry says his team is conducting “a followup line of research with other snakes with significant warning displays, e.g. rattlesnakes, which have non-rattling ancestors.”

While cytotoxins cause a lot of human misery, they can also help us. They attack cancer cells with as much virulence as they do normal tissue. In the future, they may become the source of frontline drugs to treat cancer. “Anything that kills cells is a good thing in the search for new cancer medicines,” says Fry. “So our next step is to purify individual components out of the venoms and see if by fluke one happens to be more specific for cancer cells than healthy cells.”

The study was published is the journal Toxins on March 15, 2017.

Janaki Lenin is the author of My Husband and Other Animals. She lives in a forest with snake-man Rom Whitaker and tweets at @janakilenin.