News: Celebrity Snake at Bronx Zoo
(Long Island, N.Y.) The votes were in today to name the Egyptian Cobra that escaped from its Bronx Zoo confinement over a week ago. The snake has gained widespread fame and received almost 1600 votes for the winning name of “Mia.” Mia, signifying Missing in Action, was the winner of an online naming contest held by the New York Daily News and Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the Bronx Zoo.
About 60,000 people voted in the contest, and the winning name received twenty-seven percent of the vote. Five final names had been chosen from nearly 34,000 submissions. Mia is a female Egyptian Cobra that went missing for six days before being found coiled in a dark corner of the Bronx Zoo’s Reptile House. “Mia” was nominated over two-hundred times as a name for the young snake, who is only a couple of months old.
Mia was found alive and well, all twenty inches and three ounces of her. Zookeepers maintained that patience was the best tactic for her return, and closed the Bronx Zoo’s Reptile House as a precaution. Though Mia was known to fear open spaces and was kept in a non-public area of the exhibit, she is also poisonous and capable of killing a human in as little as to fifteen minutes.
In addition to patience, zoo workers kept the lights dim and the sound low in efforts to bate Mia’s return. They wanted to make the young snake feel comfortable enough to leave her hiding place. Also, rodent-scented woodchips, which are used as the bedding that mice and rats sleep on, were planted around the building. They predicted Mia would be found after she grew thirsty or hungry enough to venture for sustenance, and aimed to tempt her into hunting.
During the course of her disappearance, Mia acquired a Twitter account with more than 230,000 followers. The Twitter posts documented the snake’s imaginary travels around New York City, fantasizing over the kind of adventures she would have during her week of liberation. Mia was a topic of interest on late night comedy shows, and the subject of a joke made by Jimmy Kimmel. Before being found, a Facebook campaign was created, and received thousands of “Likes”, in order to get her to host Saturday Night Live.
New York City businesses cashed in on the up-and-coming serpentine celebrity by printing T-shirts and coffee mugs with cobra logos. In one instance, the infamous “I Love New York” emblem replaced the heart shape with the figure of a cobra. The national coverage of Mia’s story has brought a considerable amount of interest to the Bronx Zoo. Some reports stated that officials at the Bronx Zoo claimed to be thrilled with the influx of attention, but wished that they would have received it for other reasons. Zookeepers are still unsure how Mia escaped, but reports have claimed that it’s characteristic of snakes to have Houdini-like qualities.
In a more serious light, some reports have stated that the Egyptian Cobra family is responsible for roughly fifty-thousand human deaths each year. This kind of statistic makes zoo visitors thankful that the missing snake incident didn’t become a tragedy. A more severe instance of animal escape occurred in 2003 when the United States Department of Agriculture filed a court complaint against the Los Angeles Zoo for losing thirty-five animals in the span of five years.
Bronx Zoo visitors who want to see Mia should know that the Reptile House will be reopened on Saturday, April 9th, and some reports have claimed that Mia is expected to be put on display. Zoo workers have stated that Mia never left the building throughout her time missing, and are thankful that the cold temperatures gave her less incentive to leave the building.
