Anaconda and I have a special relationship. I saw it in theaters and thought it was a very good version of what it was: a simple monster movie.
It said nothing special, but it was well done. I’d see it a few more times before I took a very long flight across the Pacific.
And several flights with the same airline that year ended up showing me that movie over and over again, and whenever a meal was served, I was greeted with the sight of a giant snake regurgitating up a man in front of Jennifer Lopez.
Yeah, it kind of killed meals like that.
Still, it’s a well done, simple movie, the biology of which is of great interest these days.
The snake in the movie represents two major things in the movie: an obsession and the unknown. To the later, it is a reminder that for all our advancement and technological development, there are parts of the world which still hold secrets and dangers. They can render out technology moot and bring us back to a more primitive state: where we were prey.
The second is primarily regarding Paul Sarone (played with delicious ham by Jon Voight), where it serves as his obsession. Like Khan in Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, he is obsessed with hunting the giant serpent. Oddly, and unlike most Ahab-Exaggerations, he doesn’t hate it. In fact, he loves and respects it. When robbed of the opportunity to kill the first large snake, he snaps pretty hard and ends up being killed by a second giant snake later.
Ah, irony.
Biology
Okay, here’s the weirdness. This snake, like the shark in Jaws, is an extreme exaggeration of a real animal. It doesn’t have the benefit of mutation or other comic book science to explain it either. It’s simply a very long lived animal and with Indeterminate Growth applied to the species (many reptiles don’t stop growing as they age). It is far more aggressive and its hunting behaviors run more like a serial killer than any actual animal.
Anaconda are cold blooded animals. Sure, they may kill a Cayman or a large fish or something like that, but then they won’t eat for months. These animals have very low metabolisms and don’t do the active, thrilling chase thing that frequently. Or ever.
Also, like any real life predator, if it is injured slightly or encounters strong resilience, it will go away. Predators don’t kill for the thrill of it or mindlessly. They want to kill quickly and with minimal risk of injury. A broken bone in the wild can be a death sentence in the wild.
Finally, they do not regurgitate prey for sadistic purposes. They do so as a defense mechanism, to lighten them to run faster and to, basically, say “Here, have this and don’t eat me!” to a prospective predator.
So, yeah, it’s not a realistic Anaconda. But there is an animal that reached similar sizes. The largest snake ever to exist: Titanoboa.
Titanoboa is a truly massive animal from the Eocene of Venezuela, living in the late Paleocene, the period of time just after the Dinosaurs went extinct. I’d make a crack about how “Reptile’s didn’t want to give up ruling the world right away” or something, but birds are dinosaurs, in case you didn’t know yet, so calling them ‘reptiles’ is almost nonsensical at this point (especially since the word ‘reptile’ has no real taxonomic significance outside layman’s use, which effectively means “Diapsids + Turtles”).
Though not as long as the monster in the movie, it is noticeably thicker (and thus more realistic), this animal is the largest known snake. It grew to over 40ft in length (42ft, give or take 7ft), and had a head over a foot wide, getting about 3ft across at its thickest (without a big meal inside it, of course).
It lived alongside many other giant reptiles, terrapins the size of VW bugs and giant crocodiles. This is because, even though reptiles enjoy having no real limit on how big they can get with age, there is something limiting them outside their bodies: temperature.
At the time, in Venezuela, the average temperature was roughly 90 degrees. By comparison, the modern Amazon’s yearly average is 80. To illustrate the point better: summers there would get so hot that modern plants would have simply died from the heat alone. And then remember that it’s a rainforest with high humidity.
Oddly, the ancestors of many modern tropical plants lived there: Bananas and Cocoa among them.
It’s because it got so hot that such reptiles could have gotten so large. Other giant snakes in prehistory generally capped out at 30ft or so, but are still impressive beasts.
There’s two things we can say about it for certain: it would have been an ambush hunter like its modern brethren, and it would have spent most of its time in water to deal with its bulk. Modern Anacondas and Burmese Pythons pull the same trick. However, unlike the movie, real anacondas don’t swim. They, instead, crawl along the bottom like they would on land when they submerge.
Not that effective a movie monster, but a fascinating animal.
