Green Anaconda

🤯 Fun Facts

• Heaviest, Not LongestThe green anaconda is the heaviest snake alive and routinely gets called the biggest, which is only half right. Reticulated pythons grow longer, past seven metres, but an anaconda is built on a completely different scale of thickness and can pass 100 kilograms where a python of similar length is nowhere near it. Reliable measurements are rarer than the stories suggest. Claims above nine metres have circulated for over a century without one being confirmed.
• Constriction Is About Blood, Not BonesThe old description of constriction is that the snake crushes its prey or suffocates it. Measurements on constricting snakes point somewhere else: the pressure a large constrictor applies is enough to stop blood circulating, and circulatory arrest kills far faster than suffocation would. The snake tightens as its prey breathes out, so each exhalation gives away a little more room and never gets it back.
• It Gives Birth, It Does Not Lay EggsAnacondas are viviparous. Females carry their young internally and give birth to live snakes, often twenty to forty at a time, each already around half a metre long and able to swim and hunt immediately. There is no parental care after that. Females are also far larger than males, which is unusual enough among snakes to be worth saying plainly: a big female can be several times the weight of any male she breeds with.