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Aug 12, 2019 · Aug. 12, 2019. WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Monday announced that it would change the way the Endangered Species Act is applied, significantly weakening the nation’s bedrock ...
- Overview
- Up close and personal with giants
- Okay, now do yellow anacondas
A recent analysis reveals a newly identified species was lurking in plain sight.
Botflies perch on the head of a northern green Anaconda in Yasuni National Park in Ecuador. A new study recently revealed that the green anaconda is two distinct species, more genetically diverse than humans and chimpanzees.
The world’s heaviest snake has been hiding a big secret.
According to a study published today in the open-access journal MDPI Diversity, the animal known as the green anaconda, or Eunectes murinus, is actually two genetically distinct species. This despite each species looking so similar that even experts can’t tell them apart.
“Genetically, the differences are massive,” says Bryan Fry, a National Geographic Explorer, biologist at the University of Queensland in Australia, and coauthor of the new study.
“They’re five-and-a-half percent different, genetically. Now, to put that into context, we’re about two percent different from chimps,” he says.
Working with giant serpents isn’t easy, but perhaps for different reasons than you’d think.
At weights of more than 500 pounds and recorded lengths of more than 29 feet, the largest anacondas are probably capable of killing and eating a human. However, such incidents have only been reliably documented in Asia, and with snakes known as reticulated pythons.
(Read more about a python that swallowed a woman whole in a rare attack.)
Still, there are other occupational hazards.
While counting scales for his research, Fry says that, sometimes, the most informative areas are the ones closes to the snake’s nether regions. At the same time, anacondas are wont to release their bowels while being handled.
“When you’ve got a big anaconda, it can put about a liter and a half of funk all over you,” he laughs. “But you’re living the dream!”
“This is a very thorough study, and I full trust the genetic results,” says Wolfgang Böhme, an honorary staff member and senior herpetologist at the Museum Koenig in Germany in an email. “The discovery of the deep genetic split within the green anacondas is an important discovery.”
Interestingly, Böhme was less certain about another finding in the study—specifically that the three species of yellow anaconda (E. notaeus, E. deschauenseei, and E. beniensis) should be combined into one (E. notaeus).
This finding was based on the same sort of genetic work done with the green anacondas. However, in this case, Fry and his coauthors argued that the genetic differences between the three current species of yellow anaconda are not great enough to support separate species status.
The question of whether to lump or split is, to some extent, philosophical, says Fry.
“I’m very conservative, and I’m a lumper at heart,” he admits. “So for me, it fits with lumping the yellows together.”
Böhme remains unconvinced and thinks the move to combine yellow anaconda species is “premature”. However, he also has good reason to believe the discovery of E. beniensis as its own species, which only just happened in 2022, remains important in its own right.
Jan 12, 2023 · The species range occupies around 42 million hectares encompassing four countries [35, 57], which makes it unlikely that local harvesting may represent a major threat or cause the extinction of the species. Even so, the anaconda hunting program must continue to be evaluated to ensure it sustainability is kept in the long term.
- 10.1371/journal.pone.0277629
- 2023
- PLoS One. 2023; 18(1): e0277629.
People also ask
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Feb 16, 2024 · species are smaller than E. murinus and are distributed within or adjacent to the distribution of E. murinus. The recently described species Eunectes beniensis, or Beni Anaconda, has a distribution restricted to the Beni region of Bolivia [25,26]. Eunectes deschauenseei, or Dark Spotted Anaconda, is distributed in the northeast of the continent ...
