Before we say goodbye to the Americas, and while I have real-life water monsters on my mind, let’s take a detour to South America and contemplate the wonder that is the anaconda. She is everything a monster needs to be. She’s huge, deadly, mysterious, and fascinating. And she is indisputably real.
I spent a pleasant not-quite-hour watching the 2014 documentary, Anaconda: Silent Killer (originally in German as Anakonda: In der Welt der Würgenschlange). Despite the English title, it’s not a story of an aggressive and murderous creature—though the anaconda is a predator, and it kills to live. It’s set in Guyana, in northeastern South America, and it focuses on the largest species of anacondas, the green anaconda.
The documentary doesn’t go where you think it might go. It begins in the city of Georgetown, and introduces the star of the show as surprisingly well adapted to an urban environment. This huge creature—as much as 30 feet (9 meters) long and up to 550 pounds (250 kilograms)—is silent and stealthy, and thrives in wetlands. It’s known as a swamp monster, but the really big ones live in the rain forest, in and near the Amazon River and its tributaries.
In Georgetown it has ample space to hide, plenty of water to swim in, and a wide selection of potential prey. It’s particularly fond of street dogs, which are just about the right size, and it can easily scale a fence and snag a domestic chicken.
It hunts by scent via its forked tongue, and by sensing the body heat of its prey. It kills by constriction, which the documentary notes is a very old way to do it: 20 million years, give or take. Its jaws are lined with backward-facing teeth, which aren’t of any use for attacking or chewing prey, but prevent the prey once captured from slipping back out while the anaconda swallows it whole.
This process takes hours. Digestion can take months. An adult anaconda only needs to eat a handful of times a year. It’s particularly fond of capybaras, the world’s largest rodents, but it will eat other snakes, birds, tapirs and wild boars, even caimans—which not only fight back but may win.
There are stories of anacondas attacking and consuming humans, but the documentary doesn’t go there. It’s not interested in sensationalism. That’s for other films, fictional and otherwise.
This one takes us from the urban anaconda to the inhabitant of rural areas, farms and what it calls the savanna with its seasonal pattern of wet and dry. The anaconda needs water to survive. If it can’t migrate away from the dry, it dies.
The reason for this goes beyond hydration and into the physical reality of the animal. A snake this large and heavy needs the buoyancy of water to support its weight; otherwise it’s crushed by its own organs. It can navigate on land, but it’s slow. It’s much more a river monster than a land monster.
It can also be a tree monster. It’s a powerful climber and it may drape itself over a strong branch to lie in wait for prey. Its most favorable environment is the rain forest with its huge trees and its network of waterways. That’s where the giants live (with tales of individuals of truly enormous size, up to 100 feet, or 30 meters, but that gets us into cryptid territory, not to mention the problem of how that structure can function at those dimensions).
There is a down side to the forest, too. The anaconda, like other reptiles, cannot regulate its own body temperature. It’s very much a creature of the tropics, thriving at temperatures between 80 and 95 degrees F (25-35C). The forest floor can get down around 70 F (21C), which means the anaconda has to find the sun to get its body temperature up. It will do this by seeking out riverbanks and clearings and spending hours basking.
Most of what an anaconda does in fact is bask and basically just chill. It is not an aggressive creature—for that, we can look to its cousin the boa, and the documentary shows us an example. The anaconda hunts once every few months, but otherwise it’s hanging out (literally in the rainforest), sunbathing, and, in season, breeding.
Anacondas are strongly sexually dimorphic. The really big ones are all female, says the documentary. Males top out around 10 feet (3 meters).
The males track a female by scent, and approach her en masse. Breeding is a leisurely activity. Males jockey with one another for access to the female. As far as the documentary shows, nobody is killing or eating anybody else, though once the ritual is complete, the female may make a meal of one or more of her suitors.
This will be her last meal for seven months. Like other constrictors, she bears live young. She gives birth in the water to up to 80 snakelets, each about a meter-long, though the average brood seems to be around 29.
The documentary says that the babies stay near their mother for some time, and indicates that she cares for them in the sense of staying at the birth site and protecting them with her size and presence. And, it should be noted, not eating them, though she must be ravenous. Other sources aren’t quite so inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, but the fact she doesn’t have herself a feast is interesting.
The documentary is rather in love with this queen of the snakes. It sees the best in her: not as a terrible and fearful predator, but as a mostly peaceable, nonaggressive animal who just happens to be both huge and an obligate carnivore. She eats to live, but she doesn’t attack for the sake of attacking. She’s not angry snake, like the boa we’re shown by way of contrast.
It’s an intriguing angle. So many giant-monster stories, real or otherwise, focus on the killing part, and particularly on the part where they attack and kill humans. Even when they give the monster a viewpoint, it’s all about rage or malice or revenge. It’s never about a giant monster just going about its life.
This leads me to wonder about reptile cognition. There is great work being done with warm-blooded animals, mammals and birds, and some fascinating studies of cephalopods. But is anyone working with reptiles? Are they really as alien and cold and blankly predatory as they’re so often portrayed? What is really going on inside their heads? Writer brain would love to know.
