The Snake That Kills Without Waking You
Bungarus caeruleus, the Common Krait, accounts for a significant share of India's roughly 46,000 annual snakebite deaths, according to a 2020 study published in eLife that analysed mortality data across Indian states. It is not the largest venomous snake in the country, nor the most visually dramatic. It is a slim, banded creature, rarely longer than a metre, that spends most of its active hours in the dark. What makes it exceptional is not its size. It is the specific chemistry of what it injects, and the near-total absence of any signal that it has done so.
