Snakes with personality and intelligence?

[The Snark]

King cobras are the smartest, no question. I had the privilege of watching a wild king for a bit, and they are so different from anything else I have seen, they are so much more calculated and confident.

What experience have you had with Hannah? Circumstances? Environment?

 

[Mordax8393]

What experience have you had with Hannah? Circumstances? Environment?

Seen them twice, both in India. First time, I tagged along with some experts on a rescue call. We got the snake out of a farmers field then pit-tagged it and released it nearby. King was nearly 12 ft, and super smart. He (was a male) was resting in a bush, when prodded he would look around, raising 4+ ft high and hooding for support. Throughout the whole time, never panicked/tried to bite or flee (xpt when we were pit tagging him, of course). Still, it took nearly 15 minutes to bag him because he would anticipate our movements and go the other direction, almost lost him many times. When we released he got out, flashed us a hood for a second then went straight up a tree as if he was a coachwhip, not a 12 foot cobra.
Second time I watched a radio-tagged king for a bit. Rather anticlimactic he just sat in one place for an hour.

 

[The Snark]

@Mordax8393 Sounds very typical. They reason and are not given to 'knee jerk' reactions. Arboreal as a chimpanzee, as lithe as a fish in water, a 500 meter Olympic runner, keen eyesight and serious smarts. Broke the mold when they made them. I'm delighted they tagged and released. Is that common there or? Another interesting something: they tend to escape by climbing, OR will head for water like a flooded rice field, canal or river. They seem to know how to evade the mongoose. Along that line, they usually don't evade when getting harassed by domestic cats. Just raise up and stare them down. They seem to know the difference between hyper mongoose and 'I only need to get a bite in and this thing is toast' cat.

What I have always found the most interesting is the pause. Fright - flight/fight doesn't happen if they aren't touched or otherwise encroached upon. The most major problem with them, as you probably saw in India if it was the hot season - they turn that camouflaged gray-green tan and are extremely difficult to spot in the tan grass. That lends to them being the number 1 people killer: if you step on it you have about 2-3 seconds to realize what you did and do the big time boogie, and that better be in the right direction. And it's not that Hannah has an exceptionally lethal venom being down around #50 on the LD50 scale. A 12 footer could deliver the sauce by the bucketful.

Right now I suspect a Hannah is living in a hole in our yard. Our cat got tagged about 6 months ago by a 4-5 foot juvenile and the hole has suspicious markings of something slithering in an out a lot. My wife wants it removed, the hole being among her pepper plants. But I'm not about to take on a Hannah alone and I trust the locals for sensible assistance about as far as I could toss a Mercedes. Besides, if one uses common sense and due caution I see no reason why we can't cohabitate. It's not like a viper, a loaded gun ready to fire when anything enters their proximity. I've spotted around 10 to 15 on our property and they always just want to be left alone, or will go somewhere else.
(Our yard is Hannah heaven. Between rice fields and a river which I let run wild with a huge shade tree. A perfect spot to get out of the sun and the fields and river offering a buffet feast of frogs and tadpoles.)

 

[Mordax8393]

Can't believe you get so many Kings in your yard - where do you live?? Many of my herper friends in India have only seen one or two, not counting rescue calls, but Kings are very rare in most of south India.

The place I was at is a research station specializing in Kings. They have two with transmitters in them and 120+ with pit tags.

Oh, and all of what you said about the kings matches what I have seen 100%. Unreal experience, especially for a US herper with little elapid experience.

 

[The Snark]

Can't believe you get so many Kings in your yard - where do you live??

Considering circumstances we should be seeing a lot more snakes than we have. We are outside Chiang Mai in a rather sad situation. We are 1 mile from undeveloped wilderness, among rice fields, recovering rain forest, farms and a rural area that is turning into urban with human encroachment happening at an accelerating pace. Rice fields equate to zillions of frogs, the undeveloped areas a habitat for agile predators and the wilderness an ongoing supply of prey. Thus it's only logical that a highly mobile yet stealthy ranging predator like Hannah would be successful here. But only seeing around 15 Hannah in our yard over 12 years isn't out of the ordinary under these circumstances considering there is more available food for Hannah than any other predator around. And a Hannah finding a tadpole loaded pond or puddle, very common around here as rice fields are flooded then emptied... the term 'pig out' doesn't begin to describe. It has to be seen to be believed.
I watched such a scenario from discovery to the end a couple of years ago. A very shallow pond about 20 feet by 10 feet swarming with countless tadpoles. The Hannah, about an 8 footer, lying in the shallows at one end. A mini strike of a few inches and one or more tadpoles get gulped, several strikes every minute. It took about 1 hour and 40 minutes to completely clean out the pond. Apparently Hannah has the refractive index hard wired in it's brain.

 

[Mordax8393]

Your tadpole story is awesome!! Never heard about it in hannah before. You should try publishing to Herp Review!

 

[SamanthaMarikian]

@ chrisweeet on Instagram has some amazing enclosures replicating the animals’ natural environments and has a few informational posts about the venomous snakes he keeps and how intelligent some seem to be from his experiences keeping them

 

[StampFan]

Complete aside, but here's a couple of links for research on intelligence in reptiles that I've recently looked at, as the discussion above sort of evolved into general reptile intelligence:

Spatial learning and the Redfoot Tortoise:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18085925

Another more thorough study on spatial learning with the Redfoot:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19466467

Redfoots using Ipads (not really, but close):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24946312

More Redfoot and cognitive abilities (recent):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30707365

Can Reptiles Perceive Visual Illusions:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30896231

Social learning in Bearded dragons:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-014-0803-7

 

[basin79]

I think pretty much everything's been covered. The fact a snakes with a very high prey drive like retics can be "switched off" with tap training proves snakes are intelligent.

But they're not dogs or parrots.

 

[SonsofArachne]

I'm thinking kind of hard about getting a falsie or other large colubrid like a cribo or indigo. I can probably afford an indigo next summer.

Here's a interesting video about cribos and indigos. This guy breed all the species of both.