Rescue group says 351 snakes taken from Dhaka homes in four months, some on ninth floors

Venomous snakes had been turning up for months in several crowded parts of Dhaka, and by early November 2025 one volunteer group said it had taken 351 of them out of homes, garages and apartment blocks in four months, some from as high as the ninth floor. The figure came from the Bangladesh Animal Welfare Association, whose convener, Adnan Azad, told BBC Bangla that only three of the 351 snakes were non-venomous. The report, carried by Jagonews24 on 4 November 2025, said the group had found snakes the rescuers called padma gokhra, khoia gokhra and raj keute, all cobras by their local names, along with Russell's viper. The Forest Department's Wildlife Crime Control Unit said it had no information about such a surge in the capital and that the group had not taken permission for its rescues.

Researchers interviewed for the report disagreed on what the numbers meant. A zoologist at the University of Chittagong called the situation unusual and worrying, while a researcher at the Venom Research Centre of Chittagong Medical College said it was largely the result of wetlands being filled for housing and of more rescue groups now reporting what they find. Despite fear among residents, the report said, few snakebites had been recorded in the areas concerned.

According to the Bangladesh Animal Welfare Association, its volunteers had been rescuing snakes from different parts of Dhaka over the previous four months. Azad said the total for that period was 351, and that all but three were venomous species. The count is the group's own: the report did not carry any official tally to compare it with.

Abdullah As Sadiq, a wildlife inspector with the Forest Department's Wildlife Crime Control Unit, gave a different picture. He said the unit had no information showing that snakes had become so numerous in Dhaka, and he said the organisation had not taken permission to carry out the rescue work.

Azad, for his part, said the group informs the Forest Department about its rescue operations and about how many snakes are found, though he added that it is not always possible to report every single rescue. Asked where the rescued snakes were, he said they are released at natural sites far from human settlements, usually in forest areas where the snakes can find their own environment and are unlikely to come into contact with people.

The Forest Department is the authority named in Bangladesh's wildlife law. Under section 5(2) of the Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act 2012, the department's Chief Conservator of Forests serves as Chief Warden, and the conservator and divisional forest officers in charge of the wildlife and nature conservation circle serve as Additional Chief Warden and Warden. These officers carry overall responsibility for the conservation, security and management of the country's wildlife.

The group listed the places where it had rescued venomous snakes: Banasree, Aftabnagar, Mohammadpur, Basila, Sector 18 of Uttara, Khilgaon, Kachukhet, Mirpur-2, Niketan, and Uttarkhan and Dakshinkhan in the Uttara area. The largest number came from the RAJUK flat project in Uttara's Sector 18, with Banasree in second place. In the week before the report, more snakes had been seen in Khilgaon.

"We found the most snakes at the RAJUK flats in Uttara Sector 18. We rescued snakes from the seventh and ninth floors. We rescued snakes from 11 buildings there," Azad said.

Asked how snakes could reach such heights, Azad said every building where snakes had been found in upper-floor flats had climbing plants such as bougainvillea growing by the gate, with supports for the plants to climb. The snakes may have climbed up the buildings along those plants, he said. This was his explanation; the report did not carry any study of how the snakes reached the upper floors.

The RAJUK flat project he named is the Uttara apartment project of Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha (RAJUK), the capital's development authority. The Daily Star reported in February 2017 that RAJUK had begun the project in 2012 on about 214 acres of land in Sector 18 to meet housing demand among low- and middle-income people, and that it comprised 179 buildings of 14 storeys in three blocks, 79 in Block A, 52 in Block B and 48 in Block C, with 15,036 flats in all. At that time the first flats were being prepared for handover to buyers.

Of all the venomous snakes, the one the rescuers call padma gokhra was the most common, Azad said: nearly 200 of the 351. Thirty-eight of them, he said, had been rescued from a few houses in Khilgaon, and they included males, females (mothers) and young snakes.

"In one house in Khilgaon we broke up the whole floor of three rooms and found the mother snake. From the same house we rescued two large snakes and seven young, and eighteen padma gokhra eggs. From one house we found 18 young padma gokhra," Azad said. People whose homes had been cleared had told the group that they had seen large and young snakes again, he added.

Azad said even more snakes might be found through November, because October and November are the breeding season of the padma gokhra. Numbers had also risen, he said, because August is the breeding season of the khoia gokhra. "That month we rescued 28 snakes from a single house, a mother cobra with 27 young," he said. Md Mizanur Rahman of the Venom Research Centre made the same point more generally: the months in which the snakes were being found were their breeding season, so wherever snakes were rescued, many young and eggs were being found as well.

Professor Farid Ahsan of the University of Chittagong said the padma gokhra is essentially a water-loving snake that prefers rivers, water bodies, canals and wetlands, though it is also found in bushes and holes near water.

Banglapedia, the national encyclopedia published by the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, describes the breeding habits of the country's cobras. A female guards a clutch of 10 to 25 eggs for about two months but does not incubate them, and the eggs hatch within 60 to 70 days. Cobras are nocturnal, measure about 1.5 metres and live near human habitations, cultivated fields and forests, feeding mainly on rodents, small birds and amphibians. Their venom is neurotoxic: it attacks the nerves and can lead to paralysis of the breathing muscles and heart failure.

Bangladesh has a large and varied snake fauna. Banglapedia puts the number of species at about 90, of which more than three-quarters are non-venomous, and says that fewer than half a dozen land snakes are highly venomous. Mongabay, reporting in April 2023, gave a count of about 100 species, 37 of them venomous: 16 sea snakes, three cobras, five kraits, two coral snakes, six pit vipers and one true viper, Russell's viper. The Business Standard gave the same breakdown in August 2023.

Two cobras of the genus Naja occur in the country, according to Banglapedia: the spectacled or binocellate cobra, Naja naja, whose hood carries a black U-shaped mark, and the monocled or monocellate cobra, Naja kaouthia, whose hood has a single dark ring. Local names for the two vary from place to place, which is why this report keeps the names the rescuers used. The World Health Organization's South-East Asia regional guidelines on snakebite management, published in 2016, say spectacled cobras occur around Dhaka and to the west and north of the capital, while monocled cobras occur throughout the country and cause most cobra bites. Banglapedia lists the cobras as threatened in Bangladesh.

The king cobra, Ophiophagus hannah, which Banglapedia calls raj gokhra, is a different and much larger snake: the longest venomous snake in the world, reaching up to 5.5 metres. Banglapedia says it is common in the Sundarbans but rare in the forests of Sylhet and Chittagong, and the WHO guidelines say king cobras occur where relatively undisturbed bamboo stands and forests remain.

Russell's viper, chandra bora in Bengali (Daboia russelii), belongs to a separate family, the vipers. Banglapedia describes it as a heavy snake about 1.5 metres long, with oval brown markings bordered by black and white or buff, whose bite can be fatal; its venom is mainly haemotoxic, attacking blood cells and the lining of blood vessels and stopping blood from clotting. Vipers give birth to live young rather than laying eggs. Mongabay reported in April 2023 that the species had been thought exceedingly rare in Bangladesh for more than a century until a flurry of bite cases from 2013, and that a 2018 study co-authored by Professor Farid Ahsan recorded 20 deaths from its bites between 2013 and 2016, with bites reported from 17 of the country's 64 districts. The study linked its spread to year-round cultivation under irrigation, which kept rats, its main prey, in the fields all year. Russell's viper drew wide public attention in Bangladesh in June 2024, when, Arab News reported, officials ran awareness campaigns to counter misleading information on social media.

Snakes in Bangladesh usually become more of a problem in the monsoon. When rainwater floods the holes they use as shelter, they move in search of dry ground to higher places, into settlements and into houses. Some researchers were surprised that so many venomous snakes were being found in a city as crowded as Dhaka, the report said, while others considered it normal.

Professor Farid Ahsan of the Department of Zoology at the University of Chittagong called it "unusual and worrying". "It is certainly unusual. There can be snakes in Dhaka city if there are bushes. But how there came to be so many is a matter of concern," he said. Some venomous snakes had been found in Dhaka before, he noted, but this was the first time so many had been reported.

Md Mizanur Rahman, a research associate at the Venom Research Centre of Chittagong Medical College, saw it differently. In his view, people had created a housing crisis for snakes by filling in water bodies, canals and wetlands to build homes, and so the snakes were entering houses. "What matters is which areas the snakes are being found in. In every place where they have been found, people have built homes by filling in water bodies, canals and wetlands. The snake is in its own place; we have moved into its place," he said.

Rahman also said that seeing so many snakes was in itself normal. Bangladesh used to have few snake rescue organisations, and people killed snakes on sight; now many rescue groups had sprung up, and he believed that was the main reason snakes had come into the limelight.

The Venom Research Centre where Rahman works is a government-funded initiative. Mongabay reported in 2023 that the government started it in 2018 in collaboration with national and international institutes, with the main aim of developing antivenom against bites from a range of venomous snakes, since Bangladesh had no antivenom of its own and relied on imports. Its principal investigator, Aniruddha Ghose, is a medicine specialist at Chittagong Medical College.

Azad, too, blamed the filling of water bodies, canals and holes for housing. Speaking from his own experience, he said that five, six or seven years earlier there had been no residential buildings at Diabari in Uttara, only water bodies, and that Aftabnagar had been the same. "The snakes lived in those water bodies. People built homes there for their own housing. So where did the snakes go? Their living space slowly shrank, so they moved to the plots behind, where buildings have not yet been built, and made their homes in the holes there," he said. When heavy rain falls for three or four days in a row and fills those holes, the snakes come out looking for dry ground and enter people's homes, which, he said, was why more were being seen at that time.

Studies published before the report support the broad picture of rapid wetland loss in and around the capital. In May 2019, The Daily Star reported a study by groups including the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA), the Bangladesh Institute of Planners (BIP) and Transparency International Bangladesh, which found that the Dhaka area had lost 43,200 of its 187,958 acres of wetlands since 2010, or 22 percent. Basila and North Uttara were among the areas named as most severely affected; both appear on the rescue group's list.

Mongabay reported in May 2023 that a 2019 BIP study found Dhaka had lost 36 percent of its water bodies to earth filling since the city's Detailed Area Plan was published in 2010. It also cited a 2018 study based on Landsat satellite images which found that wetlands covered 43.08 percent of the study area in 1988, 26.97 percent in 2002 and 12.13 percent in 2016. RAJUK's Detailed Area Plan 2022 recorded 3,464 ponds across its 1,528 square kilometres of jurisdiction, according to the same report.

The report said that under Bangladesh's wildlife law of 2012, catching and killing wildlife is a punishable offence. The law in force on the date was the Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act 2012 (Act No. 30 of 2012, dated 10 July 2012). Its definition of hunting in section 2(37) covers killing, catching or poisoning any wild animal, chasing it for those purposes, injuring or harming it, and collecting or destroying the nests or eggs of wild birds or reptiles. Section 6(1) says no person may hunt any wild animal without a licence or permit under the Act.

Rahman said that under the law, rescued wildlife, including snakes, has to be released back into nature, and no individual is allowed to keep a rescued snake. Section 9 of the Act says that when keeping a captured, rescued or seized wild animal in a cage or in confinement is a risk to its life, the necessary steps must be taken to release it into a suitable natural environment. Only the Venom Research Centre had permission to keep snakes for research, Rahman said; section 10 of the Act allows the Chief Warden to issue permits for purposes that include education, scientific research and the collection and preservation of snake venom for making life-saving medicines.

Section 39 sets the penalty for breaking sections 6, 10, 11 or 12: up to one year in prison, a fine of up to 50,000 taka, or both, and for a repeat offence up to two years in prison, a fine of up to one lakh taka, or both.

Few bites were reported in the areas where the snakes were found, but snakebite is a serious public health problem across Bangladesh. A national community survey in 2009, cited in WHO's 2016 regional guidelines, estimated 589,919 snakebites and 6,041 deaths a year in rural areas. A later national survey by the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) and its National Centre for Disease Control, published on 18 June 2023 and covering 2021-22, estimated that about 4.03 lakh people are bitten each year and 7,511 die, The Business Standard reported. Worldwide, WHO's fact sheet of September 2023 estimated 5.4 million bites a year, 1.8 to 2.7 million cases of envenoming and 81,410 to 137,880 deaths, with agricultural workers and children the most affected.

Health authorities give the same basic message to anyone who finds a snake: leave it alone. WHO's guidelines say never to handle, threaten or attack snakes, to avoid cornering them and to give them every opportunity to escape, and warn that even a dead snake or a severed head can still inject venom. Residents who find a snake in a home should keep people and pets away from it and call the Forest Department or a trained rescuer rather than trying to catch or kill it.

The same guidelines list steps that make homes less attractive to snakes:

• Store food in rodent-proof containers and do not keep chickens or other livestock inside the house, since they attract rodents and larger snakes.
• Clear rubbish, building materials and undergrowth from around the house, keep grass short, and do not let tree branches touch the house.
• Use a light when walking outside at night, and be especially careful after heavy rain and during floods.
• Sleep on a raised bed under a well-tucked-in mosquito net where snakes may enter sleeping areas.

If someone is bitten, WHO's guidelines set out first aid to be given on the way to medical care:

• Reassure the victim, who may be very anxious: a bite by a venomous snake does not always inject venom, severe poisoning usually develops slowly enough to allow time for treatment, and modern treatment is effective.
• Lay the person down in a comfortable, safe position, ideally on the left side in the recovery position, and keep the bitten limb still with a splint or sling, since any movement spreads venom.
• Do not cut, rub, massage or suck the wound, and do not apply herbs, chemicals or ice.
• Never tie a tight band or tourniquet; if one has already been tied, it should be removed only in hospital under medical care.
• Do not try to kill the snake, and take the person to a hospital as quickly and safely as possible.

In June 2024, a programme manager of the DGHS urged people to go to hospital without delay after a bite rather than to local quack healers, and said government hospitals and medical colleges nationwide were stocked with antivenom, provided free of charge, Arab News reported.

Photo: Md Shaifuzzaman Ayon / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources: Jagonews24 (4 November 2025, credited to BBC Bangla), Banglapedia (Cobra, Snake, Viper), Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act 2012 (bdlaws), WHO Guidelines for the Management of Snakebites, 2nd edition (2016), WHO snakebite envenoming fact sheet (12 September 2023), The Business Standard (16 August 2023), Mongabay (26 April 2023 and 10 May 2023), The Daily Star (11 February 2017 and 6 May 2019), Arab News (23 June 2024)