Anacondas: Not Like in the Movie

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1:01John Polk story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

1:19Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here for the moment, and this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. That's right. This was one of my ideas. I believe Olivia helped us with this because I am on a mission to get my daughter to watch the movie Anaconda. The first one? Was there another one? I think they remade it, yeah. Oh. I mean, if we're talking about the one with Jon Voight and Ice Cube and Owen Wilson, that's the one I'm talking about. Don't forget J-Lo. She's the star. Well, arguably the stars. Or is that big slithery snake? I guess so. I watched it for the very first time last night.

2:03Oh, did you really? It's not good. No, I know. I mean, it's not one of those ones that's like so bad it's good. It's just kind of bad. Oh, see, I think it's kind of a fun bad movie. Our friends of the podcast, The Flophouse, the bad movie podcast, has been around for as long as we have. Those guys are great. Their rating system is good, bad movie, bad, bad movie, or movie I kind of liked. So it's kind of fun. Did they read Anaconda, do you know? I don't know that they've ever done this one. I'll have to ask Dan about that. Well, I'm giving it a bad, bad movie. Okay. I remember it as being good, bad.

2:43And for an almost 10-year-old, she would like it. Yeah, totally. There's a lot of Jaws homage to it, so I'm sure that's one reason you like it subconsciously. yeah I had a just before we get going again while we're on movies uh a very humbling dad moment which is a reminder that you can't necessarily make your favorite stuff your kids favorite stuff uh we tried to watch army of darkness aka evil dead 3 and she made it through about 40 minutes and I thought she was liking it and then she went yeah can we turn this off and I was so heartbroken I was like oh really I was like you don't think it's kind of fun and funny and weird and she's like, yeah, but it's just not my thing.

3:23And I was like, okay. Did you write her out of the will? Yeah, that's it. Sorry. Bruce Campbell gets it all now. Do you know what she didn't like about it? No. I mean, it wasn't too scary because she doesn't mind scary stuff. It was funny. She was like, I don't know. I thought she was into it. It may have just been the mood. Maybe a try again later because that's happened before have you ever seen bubba hotep with bruce campbell you bet your sweet bippy i have it's a great movie i wonder if she would like that like maybe she didn't like all the skeletons that he had to fight and stuff like that but she would like bruce campbell doing his thing yeah i mean who doesn't i think bruce campbell is appeals to all ages he really does and that's our bruce campbell story all right should we do a good old-fashioned stuff you should know animal episode yeah this is definitely that we're talking anacondas for those of you who didn't bother to look at the title.

4:20And anacondas are giant, massive snakes, the world's heaviest snake, like by far. Not the world's longest, but they're not too much shorter than the world's longest. So they're just a massive, giant snake. They're boas, which means they like to constrict you. They're big enough that if you're a human, they could constrict around you and kill you and eat you if they wanted to. Luckily, they don't really have much to do with humans. Apparently, our buns are not substantial enough for their liking, and so they don't want none of us.

4:59And just remember, everyone, you can do side bins or sit-ups, but please don't lose that butt. No, not if you want an anaconda to eat you. I just referenced that specific part of that song this past weekend, because that is my favorite part of that song, which is one of my favorite songs. The side bends and sit-ups part? No, just that whole sort of section starting with workout tapes by Fonda. It's just, I don't know. Again, Sir Mick Scalette. We've talked about him a lot lately, I feel like. Yeah, he's come up a couple times, almost as much as Billy Joel. They should do a mashup. So, yes. So, anacondas are giant and scary, but strangely, they're not really anything to be scared of.

5:43According to science and people who don't live around them. Yeah. They are a member of the Eunectus genus, which means good swimmer in Greek. And as we'll see, they're great swimmers. And they are part of the—I've even looked this up. I think it's like it's spelled. All right. Say it then. Boide. Okay. I saw E, though. I think we've been pronouncing D-E-A-E wrong. I think it's D. Boede? Hmm. You're back on that bow bow thing again, and I'm pretty sure it's boede. Maybe. How about boede? But that is known as a true boa. They are non-venomous, so they're not going to kill you with venom. They're just going to give you a big warm hug.

6:27But they're not after you. Again, like you said, snakes generally don't want to be around people at all. So it's certainly not like the movie where they are on the attack. No. And I mean, they say so many lies about anacondas in that movie. It's, yeah, bad. Real bad. Yeah. Yeah. Luckily, most of the people who saw that movie probably don't live around anacondas and don't have a chance to kill them. But it was like that level of lies and smears against the anacondas in that movie. Yeah. One thing that the movie did get right and that I mentioned is that they are great, great swimmers. They have those eyes and the nose on top of the head so they can barely keep their little top of their head out of the water and still be below water, which is a terrifying thought.

7:10Although mostly when I've seen them, they're kind of swimming on top of the water like you see a lot of snakes do. But they can hold their breath for like 10 minutes, right? And just like fully dive. Yeah. Yeah. 10 minutes. Like the more you learn about anacondas, the more unsettling they are. Like, it's good that they don't really want to have much to do with humans, but if they wanted to, like, we would be in trouble for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Because they love the water so much, they obviously live in the swamps of the world, slow-flowing rivers. If there are places that are flooded annually or seasonally, they will be there during those times.

7:49And when it's not, they will probably travel to wetter climes or maybe just burrow down in the mud. But they'll also go into the jungle and forest here and there. Just they really like the water, though. Yeah, all freshwater, though. They're not salt tolerant, which was not immediately apparent to me. I had to look it up. Oh, you thought there could be like an ocean anaconda? Well, I'll explain why later on. How about that? I'm going to save that one for later, my thinking. Are you going to say the word brackish at any point? I may. Okay. So just because they're snakes, they have the Jacobson's organ in their mouth, the roof of their mouth.

8:21It's prominently featured in the movie Anaconda because that thing like bears its fangs at the camera like every 30, 40 seconds. And there's a Jacobson's organ, the big hole in the back of the roof of its mouth. And because whenever you see a snake flicker its tongue really quickly, what it's doing is it's sampling the air and transferring it to the Jacobson's organ, which analyzes it and says, there's a capybara right over there. Let's go eat it. Yes. uh they can also uh the heat signatures can be recognized so part of finding that that animal is their warm blood but they also use it to find a nice cool place to go rest after they've had a big meal which we'll get to that's the yeah and that's a different one that's the pit organ this is just nuts oh yeah yeah so so that's the one that so one um the jacobson's senses smells in the air pit organs like you said sense heat and the pit organs transfer these this um these electrical impulses based on thermal um signatures to their optic center and it gets integrated with their vision so they can see uh like a capybara again plain as day in complete darkness just like predator.

9:37Yeah. It's nuts. I mean, we think. We've never asked them to draw a picture of what that looks like. It's true. But this is the best we can figure. But I mean, that kind of goes to show just how amazing science can be, that we basically walk around thinking like we know what an anaconda's vision looks like, even though, yeah, no anaconda's ever told us. Yeah. I mean, that's the same with whether an animal is colorblind, I'm always like, well, how do you know? Sure. So if you want to talk, well, speaking of colors, we'll get to the nitty gritty of sort of the different kinds of anacondas. But for now, we'll just say the green ones are the ones that are really, really big.

10:17They're bigger than the yellow ones. They're the heaviest snake in the world, like you said. Basically, I think you mentioned not the longest. That goes to the reticulated python. But the female anaconda, green anaconda, is larger than the male, anywhere from 15 to 30 feet even sometimes. That's at the very high end. I think they're generally, you know, 15 to 20 feet and weigh about 150 to 200 pounds, whereas the males are only about 9 to 10 feet and 100 to 120 pounds. Still a very large snake. That's a giant snake still. And yeah, that 30-foot one, that's supposedly the record, although it's not obvious where that came from, but supposedly the record anaconda was 30 feet long and 550 pounds, right?

11:03Again, that's not—we don't know who said that originally, but there was, we know for a fact, a snake, a green anaconda female that was about 440 pounds and 20 feet long. So they do get—I mean, they are so big. and you look up like go look up pictures and videos of green anacondas and you'll be like wow it's a big snake and then see if you can find one next to like a human or something for scale and you will just be blown away by how giant these things are yeah like a banana uh also be wary because there are a lot of fake pictures and videos of giant anacondas yes and it's just harder to tell these days i saw some video from like helicopters above a river where it's like there's no way this thing is that big because they were 60 feet long and as big around as a basketball.

11:54I know. And they look really good. Yeah. Yeah. And they're hard to tell. Yeah. Like you said, I saw one and it was curling around this lion. And I was like, wait a minute. These things are only in South America and lions are not in South America. That was the only way I like I had to stop and think about it because it looked so realistic. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, can you just be amazed by the natural world as it is? Like, does everything have to be pushed to the extreme for you to get your jollies? I'm with you, buddy. I had the same thought. So I mentioned the yellows are smaller. They're 9 to 10 pounds for the females, which are larger than the males because they're only about 6 feet long, which is, again, still a very big snake.

12:40And they can top 100 pounds, a yellow one can. Again, like all snakes, they have intermediate growth, which means they're always growing. It slows down in adulthood, but the snakes keep growing forever. Yeah, and there was one other dimension that we left out, and that is those green anacondas can get to about 12 inches or a third of a meter in diameter. Yeah. That's an old thickie is what they call that. And how long do they live, Josh? For a while, actually. In the wild, up to 20 years on average. And then because the wild is so much more dangerous than a cushy zoo, in captivity, they can live up to 30 years.

13:21They're just not as happy as the ones in the wild. The ones in the wild are like, live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse. The ones in captivity are like, I'm going to get soft, but I'll live to an old age. That's right. Just throw me a capybira in here so I can have some lunch. Right. They're like, capybira again? Can I get a tapir? They are apex predators, so nothing is going to come after the anaconda. It's not going to happen. They feed on fish. They feed on reptiles. We mentioned mammals. They'll eat a deer. They'll eat a caiman. Although I did see a caiman stand off an anaconda because I think it was one of the smaller anacondas.

14:01So I got out of there. The caimans are like the mini crocodiles, right? Yeah, but they're still, you know, got some size to them. Sure, sure. But I just want to make sure it's the right animal. Totally. And they kill things like you would think. They're constrictors. So they grab it. They grab it around the neck. They coil that body. And they squeeze it. And I always heard that, like, oh, they'll crush your internal organs and you'll break your rib cage. They're really not doing that. And this is kind of a cool little fact. What they're doing is they're stopping the blood flow and you end up having heart failure because or stroke because you have no blood reaching your brain or your heart and you lose consciousness.

14:41They can bite if you're smaller, but they're generally going to constrict you to death. Yeah. And the reason that they don't break your bones is because they don't want bones sticking out of your body on the way down their gullet as they're digesting you. So they use a little bit of finesse, I think. Yeah, because they swallow you whole. You know, that's the idea. That's why when you see constrictors with those big bulges that is like a pig or something. It's probably John Voight. I wish it was. But we should say that they don't, you know, because they're eating such big things, they don't have to eat very much.

15:18They can go months between eating meals, and it can take weeks and weeks for them to digest. So they'll just sneak away to a nice cool place and digest on the down low for a little while. And there was one reported, a captive anaconda, that lived for two years without eating. Right. And they normally keep to themselves. They have their own hunting territories, but most of the time they're like, just leave me alone. I'm just over here doing my thing. Except they come together from April to May during breeding season. And they're polyandrous, which means that a single female will mate with multiple males, as opposed to polygamous, which means a single male will mate with multiple females.

15:58And they will mate in what's called a breeding ball. And if you want to be unsettled to your core, look up green anaconda breeding ball. Yeah, breeding ball is the stuff of nightmares for sure. That's like as many as 13 snakes sometime just having a big old snake party with each other. That's not how it always goes down, though. So a lot of times the females will spend an entire mating season with just one dude. But that dude may be lunch after they're impregnated because the female may just eat that male because they've just gotten pregnant and they need to bed down for seven months without eating again.

16:36So TS for you, pal. Yeah, there's something in the animal kingdom called sexual cannibalism. Yeah. Sexual cannibals is maybe the greatest band name we've run across so far. Yeah, they open for the fine young cannibals. Yeah, exactly. And I just want to think about that. I read some species of males will sacrifice themselves to be cannibalized after mating. And there was a study of fisher spiders or dark fisher spiders, something like that, where they found that after the female eats the male, she has more success, like healthier offspring and more offspring when she eats the male than if she immediately ate an alternative prey like a cricket or something like that.

17:19So there's something involved in that exchange that helps reproduction and natural selection go full steam ahead, I guess, in whatever species does that. Wow. That's super interesting. I thought so, too. They mate, the green ones, that is, mate every other year because it's a lot, I think we could admit, that big sex ball that they form sometimes. For weeks. Yeah. And just, you know, the seven-month pregnancy and they're not eating. It's just a lot. So they do this every other year. Greens have about 30 babies at a time. Yellow ones have about 40. But there is at least one verified case of a green anaconda having 82 baby anaconda snakes.

18:01Yeah, that's I mean, that poor snake. She's like my aching back. They have live births to their viviparous rather than oviparous. They don't lay eggs like some kinds of snakes. And regardless, however, the baby comes out, they don't do any parenting. they're just done. They have their babies and they just slither off and the babies are on their own immediately. And they just start swimming around and eating whatever's in the area. And then after three or four years, they get into their own breeding ball situations and the circle of life just keeps continuing on. Yeah. And those babies are a couple of feet long and that feels like a pretty good place to break.

18:44Yeah. Yeah. I don't know why I said yay. As opposed to nay. We'll be right back.

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21:38So, Chuck, there are different species of anacondas. And one of the things that's extremely interesting about this, I guess, the taxonomy of anacondas is that very recently they've shaken things up. I mean, if you're a herpetologist, this is one of the most exciting things in your field to come along in a really long time, I'm guessing. Yeah, I bet you're right. So originally, up until very recently, scientists divided anacondas into four species. There was the green anaconda, Eonectes marinus, which we talked about basically this whole time. Yellow anaconda, Eonectes notaeus. The beni, it's not even called an anaconda.

22:20That's how odd it is. That's Eonectes beniensis. And then the dark-spotted anaconda, which is Eunectes deschausensil. Deschauencil. Did I say that right, Mr. German pronunciation guy? I think that is an I at the end and not an L. Deschauencil. I think that is exactly right. That's definitely a German word. So those four species are the ones that they've considered anacondas since time immemorial. But within the last year or so, they're like, this is all wrong. We need to reconfigure stuff into like a new breeding ball of species of anaconda. Yeah, there was a paper, as Emily likes to say, probably a white paper from last year where an international team of scientists got together.

23:12They had probably the leading anaconda expert in the world, Jesus Rivas of New Mexico Highlands University. And they got together and said, guys, I think we got to we got to dig in a little deeper. We're being a little lazy and we got to rename these, reclassify these these snakes. We're going to split these green anacondas into two species and we're going to combine the other three into one. And Will Smith somehow has something to do with this. Yeah, interestingly, so they've studied anacondas for decades and decades to try to figure out the taxonomies correct. Because, I mean, when Linnea started taxonomy, it was all based on like this thing looks like this thing.

23:51And as we've gotten better at genetic analysis, we've been like, well, just because it looks like it actually they're not very related at all. That's been the case with anacondas. But a big chunk of the work that's been done, the research that's been done that led to this was done through a National Geographic show, Poll to Poll with Will Smith. Yeah. There was apparently at least one episode where one of the leaders of the Wairani people, his name was Pente Behua, he said, hey, Will Smith, why don't you guys come to Ecuador and we'll hang out in the Amazon and we'll lead you around and show you anacondas and you guys can capture them and test them and release them back.

24:33And that's exactly what happened. And from that, they took all sorts of blood samples and tissue samples and did genetic analysis. And they're like, we got this way wrong. Yeah. And Will Smith said, what did the five fingers say to the face? I know, man. That is going to be tough for him to ever live down. It's because it's one of the weirdest public things that's ever happened, televised things that's ever happened. It's weird. Yeah. It's still mind boggling to think about. And I remember seeing it live just being like, what did I just see? Yeah, same here. I'm pretty sure I saw it live and not a replay, but it was, but also the violence of it, I think, is what's going to make it so hard to live down.

25:11It was just an ugly, ugly thing. It's crazy. Oh, man. So strange. So they did some research. And again, you said that, you know, once we sort of get into the genetics, just because something looks like something doesn't mean much. So they did that. They got into the genetics of these snakes, and they found that the two green anaconda types, because, you know, they reclassified, were split up. They diverged because of probably plate tectonic activity about 10 million years ago when plates smashed together and created a big ridge or mountain range. And all of a sudden, it's like the Berlin Wall.

25:50And they were split up. And they look a lot alike if you look like them, like you were saying. But their genomes differ by about 5.5%, which is a lot genetically. Yeah, humans and chimps are separated by about 2%. And these are identical looking snakes. So they are definitely different species. And it just goes to show you like how species put into very similar habitats a long time ago that those small changes that spread out and out and out over millions of years can have huge sweeping effects that their genomes could be divergent by 5 % just over that time, which is the basis of chaos theory.

26:28Oh, really? Yeah. The little tiny changes to inputs early on over a long enough span of time create completely different things over long spans of time. You should say that all as Jeff Goldblum. I can't. I wish I could do a Jeff Goldblum. That would be amazing. I saw him once in person outside of the. What's the place we always stayed for Sketch Fest? I saw him outside the hotel, too. He was there the same time. And I was at one point even in a little circular group with friends I knew that knew him. And I just stayed quiet and tried to just be among Jeff Goldblum. I feel like we talked about this at the San Francisco show.