Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, 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 is 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 John Boyd and Ice Cube and Owen Wilson, that's the one I'm talking about.
Don't forget j Lo. She's the star that's it.
Well, arguably the stars, that big slithery snake.
I guess. So. I watched it for the very first time last night.
Oh did you really?
It's not good?
No?
I know. I mean it's not one of those it's like so bad it's good. It's just kind of bad.
Oh, I see, I think it's kind of a fun bad movie. Are friends of the podcast the flop House. 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 raid Anna Conda? 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 and for a you know, almost ten year old like 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, a very humbling dad moment, which is a reminder that you can't necessarily make your favorite stuff your kid's favorite stuff. We've tried to watch Army of Dark aka Evil Dead three and she made it through about forty 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, oh really.
I was like, you don't think it's kind of fun and funny and weird and she was like, yeah, but it's just not my thing.
And I was like, okay, man, did you tried 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?
Uh? No, I mean it wasn't too scary because she doesn't mind scary stuff. It was funny, she was lad. 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 Ho Tep with Bruce Campbell?
You bet, your sweet Bibi 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's story.
All right, Should we do a good old fashioned stuff you should know animal episode?
Yeah, this is definitely that. We're talking Anaconda's for those of you who didn't bother to look at the title, and Anaconda's 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 BoA's, 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.
And just remember, everyone, you can decide bins or sit ups, but please don't lose that butt.
Nope, not if you want a anaconda to eat you.
I just reference 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 it's again, sir, mixedco Loot. How we've talked about him a lot lately.
I feel like, yeah, he's come up a couple of 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. According to science and people who don't live around them.
Yeah, they are a member of the unctus genus, which means good swimmer in Greek. And as we'll see, they are great swimmers and they are part of the I even look this up.
I think it's like it's spelled.
All right, say it then, bowie day Okay, I saw e though I think we've been pronouncing d e a e wrong.
I think it's a d Bowiiti, m, You're back on that bowbo thing again, and I'm pretty sure it's bowide Maybe how about boi de, But.
That is known as a true boa. They are non venomous, so they're not gonna They're not gonna kill you with venom. They're just gonna give you a big, warm hug. But they're not after you again. Like you said, they 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 Ana Conda's in that movie.
It's like, yeah, bad, real bad.
Yeah. Yeah. Luckily most of the people who saw that movie probably don't live around ana Conas and don't have a chance to kill them. But it was like that level of lies and smears against the anta condas 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. Although 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 ten minutes, right, and just like fully dive.
Yeah, yeah, ten minutes. Like the more you learn about anaconda, is this, 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, and when it's not they will probably travel to wetter climbs 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 fresh water. 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 bracash 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. It's prominently featured in the movie Anaconda because I think like bears its fangs at the camera like every thirty forty seconds. Yeah, and there's it's 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 cap of bara right over there, let's go eat it.
Yes, they can. Also the heat signatures can be recognized, so part of finding 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.
That's the one that so one the Jacobsen's senses smells in the air. Pit organs, like you said, sense heat, and the pit organs transfer these this these electrical impulses based on thermal signatures to their optic center and it gets integrated with their vision so they can see like a capa bara again, plain as day, in complete darkness, just like predator.
Yeah, it's I mean we think we've never 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 that we basically walk around thinking like we know what anaconda's vision looks like, even though yeah, no Ana Conda'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 couple. 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. They'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 fifteen to thirty feet even sometimes that's at the very high end. I think they're generally, you know, fifteen to twenty feet and weigh about one hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds, whereas the males are only about nine to ten feet and one hundred to one
hundred and twenty pounds. Still a very large snake.
That's a giant snake still. And yeah, that thirty foot one that's supposedly the record, although it's not obvious where that came from, but supposedly the record anaconda is thirty feet long and five hundred and fifty pounds. Right. Again, that's not we don't know who said that originally, but there was we know for a fact, a snake and a green anaconda female that was about four hundred and forty pounds and twenty feet long. So they do get giant.
I mean they are so big and you look up, like go look up pictures and videos of green ana condas 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. 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 sixty feet long and as big around as a basketball and they look really good.
Yeah, but 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 looks so realistic.
Yeah, yeah, it's like, can you just.
Be amazed by the national world as it is? Like, does everything have to be pushed to the extreme for you to get your jolly's?
I'm with you, buddy, I had the same thought, So I mentioned the yellows are smaller. They're nine to ten pounds for the females, which are larger than the males because they're only about six feet long, which is again still a very big snake, and they can top one hundred pounds. A yellow one can. 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 twelve inches or a third of a meter in diameter. Yeah, that's an old thicky, is what they call that.
And how long do they live, Josh for.
A while, actually, in the in the wild, up to twenty years on average, and then because the wild is so much more dangerous than a cushy zoo, in captivity they can live up to thirty years. They're just not as happy as the ones in the wild. The ones in a wild are like, live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse. The ones in captivity are like, I'm gonna get soft, but I'll live to an old age.
That's right. Just throw me a cappy, buyra in here so I can have some lunch.
Right, They're like camping byron? Can can I get a tep here?
They are apex predators, so nothing is gonna come after the anacondah. They're just it's not gonna happen. They feed on fish, they feed on reptiles. We mentioned mammals. They'll eat a deer. They'll eat a cayman. Although I did see a cayman stand off a Nana conda because I think it was one of the smaller Randa condas, so I got out of there.
That's the caymans are like the mini crocodiles.
Right, yeah, but they're they're still, you know, got some size to them.
Sure, sure, but I just want to make sure it's thinking of 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 your 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 a stroke because you have no blood reaching your brain or your heart,
and you lose consciousness. They 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 Boyd.
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. They 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 download for a little while, and there was one reporter but captive anacona that live 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, I 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, and they will mate in what's called the breeding ball.
And if you want to be unsettled to your core, look up green and Aconda breeding ball.
Yeah, breed is the stuff of nightmares for sure. That's like as many as thirteen snakes sometimes just having a big old snake party with each other. That's not how it always goes down, though, 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. So ts for you, pal.
Yeah, that'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 one other thing 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 fish or 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.
So there's something involved in that exchange that helps reproduction and natural selection go full steam ahead, I guess. And whatever species says.
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 that big sex ball that they formed 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 thirty babies at a time. Yellow ones have about forty, but there is at least one verified case of a green and a conda having eighty two baby.
And aconda snakes, yeah that's I mean that poor snake. Yeah, it's like my ache and back. They have live births too. They're viviparous rather than oviparis. 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 is 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. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know why I said ya as opposed to nay.
We'll be right back, so, chuck. There are different species of anaconda's and one of the things that's extremely interesting about this that 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 anticonda Eunectes marinus, which we talked about basically this whole time, yellow anaconda Eunectes notaeus, the benny doesn't even it's not even called an anaconda, that's how odd it is. That's Eunctes beniensis. And then the dark spotted anacona anaconda, which is Eunectes deshausen seal deshow and seal? Did I say that right, mister German pronunciation? Guy?
I think that is an eye at the end and on an.
L des showing see.
I think that is exactly right. It's definitely a German word.
So those four species are the ones that they've they've considered anti condas 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. They had probably the leading anaconda expert in the world, Jesus Revas of New Mexico Highlands University, and they got together and said, guys, I think we gotta we gotta dig in a little deeper. We're being a little lazy, and we got to rename
these reclassify these these snakes. We're gonna split these green anacondas into two species, and we're gonna combined 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 taxonomy is correct, because I mean, when LINEA started taxonomy, it was all based on like, this thing looks like this thing, And 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 anaconda's. 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 is apparently at least one episode where one of the leaders of the way Irani 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. And that's exactly what happened. And from that they took all sorts of blood samples and tissue samples and did it 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's that is gonna 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 it's ever happened.
It was 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? No, 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 it's going to make it so hard to live down. It was just an ugly, ugly thing. It really was 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 were they diverged because of probably plate tectonic activity about ten million years ago, when plates smashed together and created a big like ridge or a mountain range, and all of a sudden, it's like the Berlin Wall, and 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 five and a half percent, which is a lot genetically.
Yeah, humans and chimps are separated by about two percent, 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 five percent just over that time, which is the basis of chaos theory.
Oh really Yeah, the little tiny changes inputs early on over a long enough span of time, completely different things over long spans of time.
You should say that all as Jeff Goldbloom.
I can't. I wish I could do a Jeff Goldbloom. Yeah, that would be amazing. I saw him once in person outside of the What's the place we always stayed for sketch fiest.
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 Goldbloom.
I feel like we talked about this at the San Francisco show.
I think so. And my takeaway just from being near him is that boy, he was a charming, lovely guy that seemed like he wanted every interaction with the person to leave thinking like, what a great dude that guy is.
Andy smells like a million dollars, a million bucks. So, yeah, I wish I could do a Jeff Goldblum too, I guess is what I'm trying.
To say, so we should mention the range quickly before we probably break again. The greens obviously almost all of Brazil and other parts of South America east of the Andes up the northern Venezuela coast. You can find them as far south as Paraguay, and interestingly, also maybe unlucky for them, on the Caribbean island of Trinidad.
Yes, okay, now here's where the salt tolerance thing comes up. I could not figure out if you look at a map, Trinidad is there's a part of Venezuela that's no more than ten miles away from Trinidad and Tobago, the islands right off of Venezuela. So these things can swim and hold their breath for ten minutes. I was like, how did they get to Trinidad? Did they swim? I still
have no idea how they got to Trinidad. It had to have been, you know, at a point in time when Trinidad was still fused to maybe to South America or like maybe the sea levels were lower so there was a land bridge. I don't know, but that's how I found out that they're not salt tolerant they're only freshwater snakes, because no, they couldn't have swam to Trinidad. That's the answer to.
That, even if they vaselined up and wore the the goggles and the skull cap.
And the bike shorts.
Yeah, oh yeah, they were bike shorts these days.
What was it that Pee Wee Herman thing in Pee Wee's Big Adventure? He said, oh, yeah, he's talking about blowing your mind. He's like, have you ever seen a snake wear a vest? You remember that part? That's Youmi's favorite part in the entire.
I don't remember that part. That's funny. I thought I knew that movie inside out. That's very funny. I've not seen that documentary yet on Pee Wee Herman. I heard it's really really good, though.
Yeah, we just watched it. It is very good.
Yeah.
There's also one we're watching called Chimp Crazy by the guy who did Tiger.
King No No thanks.
It's it's not as hard to watch as you would think. It's more human interest stuff, but yeah, I mean there's still it's weird because you it's you empathize with both sides. It's one of those documentaries.
I'm one of the few people that didn't any interest or watch tiger Was it Tiger What Tiger King?
You kind of missed out? Man? That was something?
Yeah, I don't feel like it did.
Okay, well then yeah you might not like Chimp Crazy then if you didn't want to watch Tiger King.
All right, shall we take that break? Yes, all right, we'll be back and talk about human interactions with anacondas right after this. So we mentioned that you're probably not in danger around in anaconda. I don't know if i'd go like partying with one, but you know, we said they may eat like every couple of months. So if you know for a fact that anaconda has eaten something, those are probably the videos you're seeing on the internet.
When they're people like, you know, doing like documentary work on anacondas, they probably know that that thing is eaten.
Yeah. Interestingly, there was a study that found that humans who live around anaconas see a full anaconda as far less threatening than one that doesn't have a big pot belly.
Yeah, I would say, so it makes sense. There was a book that I don't even know if we should mention, but a book from the fifties called Giant Snake Hunt by a guy named Ralph Blomberg who claimed two definite cases of people being killed by snakes. But I think
that book is probably not accurate, is my guess. There is a video that I watched from Terra Santa, Brazil that has a guy I'm sure you watch this too, and anaconda standing or the guy was standing rather in like chest deep water in a river in Brazil, and anaconda was wrapped around him, and that his buddies up on the boat were trying to get it off, and he bit this snake near its head and the snake released it and they got this guy out of there.
It was weird. If you listen close, his bite made the same sound that Fred Flintstone makes when he bites into something. That trump sound. I was really surprised.
It was very surprising.
So yeah, this is the that's really really rare that that happens. And the guy was able to escape unharmed. The point is as if if an ana konda wanted to take you on, like you would be in big trouble.
Yeah.
Sure. It turns out that there are some people who want an anaconda to take them on. There's a guy named Paul Rizzoli, who, for all intents and purposes, his chainsaw from summer school. Did you look this up and see him?
I did, and I remember when this happened.
Okay, So Discovery Channel had a two hour special called Eating Alive, wherein Paul Rissoli was out looking for a giant anaconda to eat him and it was just pulse pounding from the beginning to the last moment from what I understand.
Yeah, he don't remember this. Oh boy. It was a media disaster and I would like to think a low point for Discovery Channel. But they made a carbon fiber suit that he wore and he drenched himself in pig's blood. And what he claimed was like, oh, I want to bring awareness to the loss of habitats, you know, for these snakes. But close to forty thousand people signed a petition beforehand calling it animal abuse, saying you can't do
a show like this. The show itself was a disaster, sort of a Heraldo digging for who is it Jimmy Hawth or was it?
I don't know about Haffa. I know that he found al Capone's vault.
Al Capone that was it that had nothing basically in it, and that was kind of the deal here, where almost all of the show is just prep In the last fifteen minutes, this snake, this poor snake being exploited, tries to bite him on the head and starts constricting him and he's like, oh, oh my arm and he taps out, and that was it.
Right. So, I think the rule of thumb here, Chuck, is if you are in another animal's habitat messing with it and there's a TV camera on you, you are in the wrong. There is no exception to that. Agreed. You are going into their house and messing with them for your own benefit, and that's just wrong. It's wrong, and don't do it.
Agreed.
Yeah, that's all I have to say about that.
I think we should mention a couple of these tweets though, because they're pretty funny.
Totally. There was one person who said that they called it eaten Alive because getting squeezed really hard didn't sound as enticing. That's a good one.
Another one someone said, calling it hashtag eating the Lime is like having a show on the Food Network about cooking a turkey and all they do after two hours is pre eat the oven good stuff roasted.
I don't remember it at all, and I don't remember it being a disaster, but I could see that.
Yeah, as far as human interaction, you know, humans are probably a bigger threat. Not probably, humans are a bigger threat to anacon than they are to them.
Definitely.
A lot of times it will be preemptively killed in a small community because of fear of like small kids maybe a little bit more of a threat, or a small elderly person perhaps, or your livestock. A lot of times they'll describe this as retaliatory killing because they they ate my prize year, so I'm going to kill it. But they did at an actual study in Brazil in twenty fifteen and they found it it's probably more of a preemptive fear to keep them from doing something like that.
Right, And based on your Human Development Index score, which is a rating of education level and standard of living and income for an area, the lower that score, the more likely you are to kill in anaconda. I feel like that's a little bit slanted, because I feel like people with high Human Development Index scores probably don't live with anacondas in their yard, So I think that's a
little bit skewed. But I get the gist that you know, the more you're educated about, say, animals, the less likely you are to hurt them.
Yeah.
At the same time, the more educated you are, probably the more removed you are from animals. So it's hard to fault people who literally live among anacondas or other things that they perceive as a threat killing them, even though to US and the developed world or the global North it seems just abhorrent. We don't have to deal with that. So it's there's a certain amount of judgment that you have to take perspective on either way. I wish that no one would kill an anti conda, especially
if they leave humans alone. But I can't also put myself in the shoes of the people who live among them, I guess, is what I'm saying. Yeah, well said, I'm glad you said that, because I'm out of breath.
No, that's great. Yeah, Obviously, a loss of habitat is a problem for everything in South America, draining of wetlands for agricultural use and just you know, clear cutting of rainforests and things like that. Despite all this, UH, they're in pretty good shape. The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources classified UH or they're currently classified as of least concern.
That was surprising.
Yeah, I mean they're they're they're doing pretty good. You might wonder about, like, well, what about these things, like if people bring them over and all of a sudden they're in the swamps of Florida. Uh, there are some anacondas in Florida, but it's generally not a problem. The Burmese python is, you know, very much on record as being a much much bigger problem. But regardless, Florida has a complete ban on anaconda's and they are prohibited as pets.
They said, don't even don't even think about it. We're Florida. We'll we'll find you. We'll hunt you down and find you if you release an anaconda here. One of the reasons why they're they're not a big problem as an invasive species is because they're really hard to keep as pets, like you essentially need like a a zoo exhibit size place. There's a word in there somewhere that I'm missing to keep an anaconda like at your home. Most people can't
do that. So there's not a lot of pet ana condas anywhere that could be released in the first place.
Yeah, So we're going to finish up with a little bit on some of the more famous ana condas, first of which has got to be Ana Julia. This is a twenty footer, four hundred and forty pound female, obviously green, and probably the most famous anaconda that lived in the Foremosa River or near Benito, Brazil, because there's a lot of ecotourism there and Anna Julia was just present a lot.
And the water there in the river around Benito's is pretty clear as far as that kind of water goes, and Anna Julia was not aggressive, so she was like, Hey, if you want to make a documentary about me, I'm right here, let's do it.
Come on in the water's fine.
Yeah, or maybe you don't come on in the water.
So there's a yeah. Well there's actually from that study that pulled the pole national geographic thing that contributed to a huge study that changed the species arrangement, the taxonomy. One of the biologists involved in that, there's a video of him swimming alongside Anna Julia and she's totally underwater, just swimming along and does not seem at all bothered by his presence. I mean, he's not like trying to ride or anything like that. He's not putting any on her.
Was he the one wearing the freaking dress shirt?
I think so. Yeah, he was not dressed for snorkeling or swimming.
It was very weird. Well, and I immediately went to the comments. I'm like, surely I'm not the only one that is noticing this, And of course everyone is like, well, I see the guy dressed, you know, formal for the occasion, and everyone's talking about this guy wearing I mean, it may be one of those weird sort of moisture wicking all weather outdoor shirts that just is a button up. But why swimming in a button up?
I get the impression that he's Dutch.
Oh, that explained it.
So what's sad about it, though, is that Anna Julia was found dead just a few weeks after this research that she was a huge part of, like because she was so docile, they were able to closely study and observe her, and she contributed greatly to our understanding of Ana Conda's and she died like five weeks after that research was published, that big twenty twenty four paper, And of course everybody's like, somebody like, who shot Anna Julia. It was like a murder mystery that Netflix quickly made
a ten part series about. And it turns out that she died of natural causes.
Yeah, which is sad, but good to know that she was not killed.
Yeah, definitely.
If you live in Saint Louis, you're probably screaming at us right now. You got to mention Jlo. Guys, you got to mention j Lo. J Loo was the eighteen foot two hundred and ten pound anaconda that lived for
about a dozen years at the Saint Louis Zoo. And you know, feel what you want about zoos, but this ana conda was saved, actually escaped being sold for meat and skin at a Guyana market and an animal exporter stepped in, bought the snake and brought to j Lo to the zoo in twenty ten and was apparently the star of the show. At they're developing herbetarium.
Yeah, and the animal exporter who brought her very famously put her in what looked like a present box with like a bow on it and everything. It was like here you go, guys, and let him open it, and all of a sudden, j Lo sprung out and coiled herself in a very like happy, playful way around the zoo keeper.
Yeah, kind of like a genuine hug.
Yeah, exactly, and slithered off. And because ana Conda's sound just like this anaconda in the movie Anakanda, she went eye as she slithered off, because that's the sound that that snakes make.
That sounds sort of like the sound that the mummy makes. Did you ever see that special? No, they they were just talking about this on the Threedom podcast with Scott Ackerman, Lauren Lapkins, and Paula Tompkins, where there was another one of the specials. So let's recreate this thing that we have no idea what it sounded like. And they tried to recreate what a mummy sounded like by building this i think a three D mummy voice box and passing air through it. And it was just sort of like.
He a mummy, a dead human being that's been embalmed. Yeah, that's bizarre. I mean, I'm sure they sounded like a human pre mummy, and then they didn't sound like anything because they were dead post mummification. That's just ah, I know, my mind just got blown.
I'm with you. It was a very strange thing. Okay, I don't know why they did it. I don't know much about it other than hearing it on threeedom and looking it up because I had to hear the sound.
Like. We may edit that gap out, but there is a substantial pause where we were both just stunned thinking about this for a second.
No, I think we should leave it in there, because that was that was real life.
Who else, chuck? We got to mention Oliver from the San Francisco Zoo.
Yeah, what's funny is I didn't. I was so caught up in the sound that that mummy made. I didn't even think about, like, what does that even mean?
Yeah, what are you doing?
Like?
Who thought of that idea?
Oh? I don't know. It's probably Discovery Channel.
So yeah, I mean, that's just bizarre. There's Oliver from San Francisco Zoo. He may have been the oldest anaconda to live in captivity. It was forty they think. And then the oldest living snake in captivity is Annie, who is in the Monte Casino Burg Gardens in Johannesburg, South Africa. And in two twenty twenty one May fourteenth, twenty twenty one, Guinness said that she was thirty seven years in three
hundred and seventeen days old. And since Olivia said that she couldn't find any mention of her death and that she she thinks that she's still there. She's coming up on her forty second birthday.
Wow.
So yeah, on May sixty second, she'll be forty two years old.
You know what they don't have in that bird?
Garden birds?
Yep.
That was great, And Chuck, we can't go any further.
All right, I'm done.
Okay, Well, Chuck's done because he just dropped the mic. And since he did that, it's time for a listener.
Man, I'm gonna call this. Oh this is a fun follow up. I always love it. And when we do something on someone and like a family member writes in, oh yeah, and that's what happened here with greed you dell. Hey, guys, listening to the popcorn episode is delighted. You mentioned Charles Creeters, my great great great grandfather. Here's some more information about him and how he came to invent the popcorn machine.
He founded See Creators and Company in Chicago in eighteen eighty five, initially building peanut roasters, patented the process of popping popcorn and oil or seasoning as he called it, to prevent popcorn from burning. In eighteen ninety three, patented the first popcorn popper, which use a steam engine to power it, and he debuted it at the eighteen ninety
three Colombian Exposition. At first, his invention wasn't getting much attention until he started handing out freebacks of popcorn brilliant. I love it. During the twentieth century early twentieth century, as invention became a staple for street vendors, helping them support themselves in their families, and today see Creators and Companies a fifth generation family business. My grandfather, Charles D. Creators, owns the company and both my uncles and my mom still work there to this day.
Oh that's so cool.
I love that. That is from Garrett. I guess you Dell.
Thanks a lot, Garrett. This is a fantastic email. We do love it when we talk about somebody and a family member writes in, especially when they're not upset at us.
Yeah, and especially when they did something great like committing the popcorn machine.
That's right. If you want to be like Garrett, you can get in touch with us via email. You can send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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