The King Cobra, Ophiophagus hannah (Cantor, 1836) (family Elapidae) is the longest venomous snake in the world (up to 5 m in length). It is distributed across tropical, subtropical and temperate Asia, from the wet regions of the Western and Eastern Ghats of Peninsular India and the Himalayan foothills of northern India (Uttarakhand), east across Northeast India to southern China, and southeast across Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Peninsular Malaysia, to the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Borneo, Java, Bali, Sulawesi; and with its eastern-most extent on Mindanao in the Philippines (Das, 2010; Wallach et al., 2014). The disjunctions in the distribution pattern of the group members, the diverse ecological conditions in which the populations occur, and the presence of many potential geographical barriers through its range are expected to have created ample opportunities for the evolution of distinct lineages.
In a recently published paper, Gowri Shankar et al. (2021) examine the geographic variation in the King Cobra and found four candidate species. The mtDNA phylogeny, candidate species 1 occurs in the Western Ghats is strongly supported and forms the sister group to the second candidate species, widely distributed lineage with its range extending from the Himalayan foothills in the northwest and eastern Peninsular India in the southwest into the northeast and southeast of mainland Asia, with isolated insular populations in the Andaman Islands in the south. Due to sparse sampling, the southern limit in mainland Asia, potentially corresponding to the Isthmus of Kra, remains unclear. The third candidate species is well supported with no geographical structure – it is widespread. And, the fourth candidate species lineage is strongly supported and forms the sister group to all other lineages. The fourth candidate species occurs on the Philippine Island of Luzon.
Citation
Gowri Shankar, P., Swamy, P., Williams, R.C., Ganesh, S.R., Moss, M., Höglund, J., Das, I., Sahoo, G., Vijayakumar, S.P., Shanker, K., Wüster, W., Dutta, S.K., 2021. King or royal family? Testing for species boundaries in the King Cobra, Ophiophagus hannah (), using morphology and multilocus DNA analyses, Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2021.107300
