Talk:Giant anaconda
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I've copied the following from the regular Anaconda discussion page as it seems relevant here....
Should any parts of it be worked into the main article.
There's a large article on cryptozoology.com about giant anacondas, and I think more could probably be added to the section that exists in this article (unless anyone was for making a seperate page for the giant anaconda?). There is also the photograph mentioned in that cryptozoology.com article, which I found again on a cryptozoology board and have uploaded to my photobucket so as not to steal their bandwidth. The supposed giant anaconda, and the message board it was posted on. Mainly, I'm thinking there's quite a bit more that could be added into the Giant Anaconda's section. - Indy Gold 04:06, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
The cryptozoology.com page is fairly disappointing. More "gee-whiz...what if" than biology. I used to live in Nepal for many years and occasionally ran into talk of tigers in the hills around Kathmandu and such like that seemed unlikely to be true for the period cited (then there's the Yetis....), so one should not automatically credit local populations' tales about larger-than-life snakes as being true, just becuse they are "Natives." This is stereotyping, not sound biology. That said, locals (including long-resident outside "explorers") are often quite knowledgeable about the local ecosystem so that some stories are true. One has to know the person and the context.
If there are extremely large snakes of the sizes mentioned, this suggests several remote possibilities:
-- The larger snakes are not common anacondas at all, but a separate, though possibly related, species. Likely they are rare. Conceivably they could be a relict population previously more common and adapted to feeding on now extinct larger fauna. Though they still survive they would be a fragile population. Unlikely, but possible.
--Another remote possibility is that they are reticulated pythons, accidentally introduced long ago, which have established themselves as an exotic population. In such a case they may have found an open niche, the nature of which favored evolution towards giantism, and the genes limiting growth, may somehow have been inactivated, particularly as in the Lion-Tiger offspring "Ligers." (This mechanism requires hybridization, an unlikely mechanism in this case.) This is, though conceivable and entertaining, again a very unlikely scenario.
-- Animals establishing themselves on islands, initially as exotics, tend to evolve rapidly into separate varieties or species if the population remains isolated. Often there is a rapid drift towards dwarfisn or giantism. Just as true islands are found in oceans, "virtual islands" can be found on land in the sense that there are isolated areas of habitat potentially suitable for a species but not populated with it because there are intervening barriers between this territory and the main territory of the species, preventing inmigration. Examples of a barrier may be a large river, a mountain range, or in the case of mountaintop adapted animals, intervening valleys. Climate change which fragments an earlier, more extensive continuous habitat into "islands" in which a species becomes isolated are common enough. In some of the "islands," the species goes extinct, leaving a potentially open niche if it ever migrates in again from other habitat areas. Though highly unlikely, it is again conceivable that the "giant" snakes are one of the anaconda species or conceivably a fertile hybrid group, that has colonized one or more of these isolated habitats, becoming a separate breeding population, and evolving towards giantism. This can occur in a relatively small area, with a very small population. It may be associated with a dwarfing in the same territory of another, usually larger, species, making the newly giant predator and newly dwarf prey a viable predator-prey combination in this one ecosystem, but not elsewhere. See Komodo dragons and their dwarfed deer prey as an example.
-- animal size within a species probably tends to follow a normal curve. Conceivably there are a few markedly larger than normal animals, possibly with physiological disturbance. If this is the explanation, there may be a further systemic reason reports are not commoner beyond the increasing rarity of individuals of great length from mere standard deviation effects. A study of commercial python hunters on Sumatra ( see abstract at 1 )showed that they tend to kill mostly medium sized pythons, but rarely kill large breeding females though they would if they had the opportunity. It is hypothesized that the reason may be that the juvenile, smaller snakes tend to live close to humans, feeding heavily on commensal rats, while mature females are unable to subsist on prey this small and seek larger animals in areas more remote from humans and the hunters. This pattern, if it applies to anacondas as well, might account for the infrequent reports of the larger snakes. However, the extreme rarity of such reports makes this hypothesis an unlikely explanation, and biologists seeking to find breeding female anacondas in the wild for research studies seem to have had relatively little trouble locating them.
-- Though not exciting, the most likely explanation appears to be either outright fabrication which is then passed on to third parties and spreads; distortion or embellishment as information travels from person to person; or unintentional miscalculation of the snakes' length. A travel book describing an encounter with an eighty-foot monster snake "as-thick-as-a-barrel" and throwing up a wake like motorboat as it churns through the water will sell more copies than one that recounts the mundane shooting of a twelve foot specimen. I would never have believed that writers, who I personally perceive as morally far purer than other forms of humankind would distort facts like this, but as it happens I know a travel writer and ....um...he has admitted to me that he makes up all his stuff most of the time! Gasp! WHAT'S print coming too! He particularly likes situations where all the other people are dead as not only can there be no contradiction, but also no libel case. My own father was a journalist, and while not this bad, I wouldn't trust a newspaper account without independent investigation, especially in small local newspapers in Latin America of the type where if an American wishes to disappear, for a consideration the paper will print a report of tourist XXX's sad death. You could even be eaten by a monster anaconda if you desire, though this is a fairly high profile choice. You not only get the press story but a death certificate, police report,a grave, and all the trimmings for a price. A really conniving writer could even plant a couple of false stories in these papers, complete with photoshopped photos then reproduce them as arm's length evidence in a book, but no writer would EVER do this....
All this said, I hope they exist and someone will make my day by obtaining documentary video proof of a population of 100 footers!
...And apologies for what is essentially stereotyping the rural Latin American press -- a series of comments not based on any real experience. FurnaldHall 09:04, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
FurnaldHall (talk) 02:35, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
--Observing that there has been some vandalization of the page. Not knowing exactly what was in place prior to vandalization, I can't accurately remedy the situation. If someone would like to clean it up a bit... it seems to begin in the second paragraph and end midway through the third. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.236.152.110 (talk) 23:12, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
I beleive that the longest anaconda ever measured is about 11 m (check the article about anaconda), the sentence 'Anacondas normally only grow to size of 25 metres..' should be corrected accordingly. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.83.249.136 (talk) 18:35, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
I am not really sure this is the same as 'sucuriju gigante'. The label 'giant anaconda' is usually used for reports where it is clear that the creature is an anaconda (such as when it is shot). I have seen the term 'sucuriju gigante' or 'giant boa' used for a different cryptid, larger and having glowing eyes. Has anyone else heard of this second 'giant boa'? Vultur (talk) 18:20, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
