Julie Larsen Maher/Wildlife Conservation Society

She’s been found!

An Egyptian cobra at the Bronx Zoo that had been missing for seven days was discovered “alive and well” on Thursday inside a nonpublic area of the zoo’s Reptile House, not far from where she disappeared, said James J. Breheny, the zoo’s director.

Mr. Breheny said the two-foot-long snake, weighing about three ounces and believed to be several months old, was found coiled in a secluded dark corner “almost exactly as we would have predicted.” She was caught at 9 a.m. by workers using tongs and a piece of equipment he compared to a golf club. Mr. Breheny said the snake avoided detection earlier because she was lurking in an area that had an “extremely complicated” system of equipment and a “labyrinth of pipes.”

Since her escape, the cobra had inspired feverish news coverage and a wildly popular fake Twitter feed, @BronxZoosCobra.

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Asked what sort of danger the cobra would have posed, Mr. Breheny said snakes in general are “shy, secretive creatures” whose venom is “not primarily a defense mechanism. “

“It’s a way to procure food,” he said.

Zoo officials said the Reptile House would remain closed for several days while they investigated how the snake had escaped and monitored her. Mr. Breheny said at a news conference that officials had not yet changed any procedures but “have double-checked existing protocol and have people double-checking each other.” On Friday, when the cobra went missing, she was not in the exhibition itself but in a holding cage elsewhere.

Since then, staff members at the Wildlife Conservation Society , which operates the zoo, had conducted sweeping searches.

Despite her newfound fame, the cobra has no official name. But that may change. Mr. Breheny said, “Maybe we’ll do some sort of naming contest.”