A few months ago, video of a giant monstrous moth found by a man in Central Java went massively viral and caused nightmares around the world. But across the sprawling Indonesian archipelago, finding such incredibly freaky fauna is a fairly regular occurrence.
The latest aberrant animal to find viral fame on the Indonesian interwebs is this snake of seemingly impossible proportions, photos of which were posted by Facebook user Made Dwi Sudarmawan on Monday and that have already been shared over 20,000 times at the time of writing.
(UPDATE: The original post was taken down so here’s a repost by another Facebook user)
https://www.facebook.com/akim.kece/posts/559672481057104
In the post’s caption, Made says that it’s a king cobra from Kalimantan but gives no further details, allowing the photos of the super-sized snake do all the talking.
We’d note that a perspective trick, caused by the closeness of the snake to the camera, is why it looks especially large (and nearly as wide as Made) in some of the photos. But even in the photos where you can get a better sense of it’s actual size, it’s still a beast.
Of course in the age of Internet attention seeking, there is always the possibility that it could be a fake. However, Amir Hamidy, the head of the herpetology (that’s the study of reptiles and amphibians FYI) laboratory at the LIPI Biology Research Center, told local media it looked authentic.
“I think it is real. The snake is a king cobra, Latin name Ophiophagus hannah, the longest type of snake in the world, it can reach 5-6 meters in length,” Amir told Detik.
Of course this is far from the first giant snake found in Indonesia, and far from the scariest. In March of last year, a man in West Sulawesi encountered a 7-meter python (rescuers found him dead inside the snake’s stomach, having been swallowed whole). In October, another 7-meter python was eaten by villagers in Riau after being killed by a group of men (and not wrestled to death by one, as had been originally reported).