Sumatran cobra, or equatorial also not in Indonesian forests novelty. But what is new is that this formerly very large reptile collecting loose vegetation palm oil-for your home. Meter and a half long, dexterous snake was one of those, you've come across only once in a while, if you have wandered into the jungle. And if you meet each other survivors, you were lucky. The cobra is known for his short temper and the ability to spit venom up to 2.5 feet away. A well-aimed slap you can blind bites kill. Combination of neurotoxins and kardiotoxinů you had "turned off" the brain and heart in the course of an hour.
Its main diet includes small rodents, amphibians and small reptiles that laboriously searches in the lush undergrowth of the forest. Or, as it turns out, transferred its scope to the territory plantations where prey before it can hide so well. Muhamad Syahrial, one of the employees of rubber plantations in Riau province, recalls that the snakes in plantations occasionally encounter gives: "Once upon a time simply meet a king cobra or cobra brown." But just on oil palm in recent years become a " once in a while "actually" very often " and work among the palms have become quite risky now.
Indonesians working on plantations are no sharpeners and Indonesia has never been (for the snakes) just safe country. Annually here because of the bite dies of 11,000 people. And the fact that they are indigenous workers dismay of unusually high presence of cobras Sumatra, should therefore not be taken lightly. This is confirmed by herpetologist Romulus Whitaker, who during ten days at a plantation in Kalimantan caught a dozen cobras. "Sumatran cobra plantations are incredibly common species, are even more likely to find than the Indian cobra in the rice fields in India."
"Increasing numbers of cobras Sumatran plantations demonstrates how oil palm plantations of rubber trees or disturb the natural balance of the rainforest," says another herpetologist Amir Hamidi from Jakarta. "In the jungle, every animal and even plant their function and each control their abundance. But when the ecosystem turns into a monoculture plantation will disrupt this balance. "From the plantation are happy rodents and then the Cobras. They are also dangerously closer to human settlements where attacks example, to poultry.
Shift of species to humans amended sites is a phenomenon purely ecological character, but Indonesians working on the plantation now need to solve another very topical issue. None of the international suppliers (Sanofi Pasteur, Fav-Afrique) or local producers of pharmaceuticals (Biofarm) sell serum against bites cobra Sumatran. This species is still held in the forests and bite him were rather exceptional. Hazard Ranking led cottonmouth plantation, cobra Java or banded krait. But that's due to the impact of plantations in the countryside ceases to apply.
Author: Radomír Dohnal
Source: Ekolist.cz
