Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I must admit that I was a bit disappointed in the response when I asked readers yesterday to kick in a few bucks (or pounds) to support the Official Website Charity®, now Feline Friends London, a no-kill and all-volunteer cat rescue organization that re-homes felines taken from the London Streets. I thought that people who read this site regularly and enjoy at least some of it wouldn’t mind paying, say, $5 for ten years worth of entertainment.
A lot of people did donate (and said so in the comments, which enters them in a book contest), and I’m immensely grateful for their response. However, only about 50 people responded in the comments, and I had expected 100. After all, if every subscriber gave just one pound (donations are in pounds), the charity would get $77,781.45! One pound isn’t a lot, is it? (I recognize that some who donated might not have registered with a comment.)
I’ll be repeating this appeal every other day for about a week, and then leave you be. But if you haven’t donated yet, please consider doing so, as it’s a terrific cause and the organization is not flush with cash. You can donate as little as you want (donations at the site below—click on screenshot—start at ten pounds, which is only two Starbucks lattes, but you can write in less, using your credit card).
Please click on the site below (or this link) to donate to the organization, described in my earlier post. The cats thank you, Feline Friends London thanks you, and for myself, well, that goes without saying. If you donate, put your name in either the comments below or at my first post, and you’ll get the chance to win an autographed book with a cat of your choice drawn in it.
Reader Carl Sufit has contributed some additional underwater shots; his commentary is indented.
A few more from Cayman Brac. I have loads of images to go through from past few trips to Bonaire (going public is a good incentive to actually do so), and can consider sending some after I’ve done so. Many phyla and families barely mentioned so far.
Another pretty trigger fish, the Black Durgon, Melichtgys niger, which can appear as a fairly drab black but has iridescent colors when illuminated:
Your basic Southern Stingray (Dasyatis americana), ready to bury itself in the sand, along with some sort of jack (Bar Jack? Caranx ruber):
And, not as wild as ZeFrank’s Bobbit worms, (I think his video also showed some other common marine annelids), the “social” feather duster worm, Bispira brunnea: (the purple is the base/stalk of a Sea Fan (coral) Gorgonia ventalina:
I don’t see the “social” species nearly as often as the the Split Crown Feather DustersAnamobaea orstedii. (This image is from a different trip, with another annelid, Christmas tree worm (Spriobrnachus giganteus) in the background. I’ll send better images of those in the future.
It’s Thursday, March 14, and in ten days I will be arriving in Amsterdam, where I’ll see again the van Gogh and Rembrandt museums (the latter has a swell new exhibition), and Anne Frank’s house, not to mention tucking into a rijsttafel. I hope to eat that dish, shown below, and perhaps some Dutch readers can steer me to the best place to get it in Amsterdam:
I will be giving a (free) public lecture on April 1 in Brussels, and a science talk on my fly work in Louvain the next day. Stay tuned for details. It’s National Potato Chip Day, a comestible infinitely inferior to rijsttafel, but so be it. I will eat the superior equivalent, frites, in both the Netherlands and Belgium.
It’s also Pi Day in the U.S., since we write the date as 3/14. Here’s Pi the Cat, one of my favorite felines, who just recoverd from a near-death illness. I was terribly scared that he would have to be euthanized. But he was saved at the last moment!
And here is a test yesterday of whether Pi was scared of a cucumber. He was. But of course we need a control test in which he encounters a non-snakelike object such as an apple. (Cats don’t like citrus fruits so one can’t use an orange.
It was on this day in 44 BC that Cassius and Casca apparently decided, on the night before Julius Caesar was assassinated, that they would let Mark Antony live. After fleeing Rome, Antony returned and eventually replaced Caesar. On this day in 1794, Eli Whitney was given a patent for his cotton gin, revolutionizing cotton processing (and of course promoting slavery). On March 14, 1885, Gilbert and Sullivan’s operatta “The Mikado” was first performed—in London. And on this day in 1931, India released its first talking film, Alam Ara. The entire movie is here, and its big hit song, “De de khuda ke naam per”, is below, the first love song in Hindi cinema:
A poster:
On March 14, 1942, as Wikipedia reports, “Orvan Hess and John Bumstead became the first in the United States successfully to treat a patient, Anne Miller, using penicillin.” HOWEVER, Wikipedia’s article on the history of penicillin use doesn’t even mention this, though it is on Wikipedia’s entry for Orvan Hess. Once again I find discrepancies on this site, which elsewhere notes other “first patients”. Perhaps Greg Mayer is right, though for four years he’s temporized on his article, “What’s the matter with Wikipedia?” (My emphasis below.)
In 1930, Cecil George Paine, a pathologist at the Royal Infirmary in Sheffield, attempted to use penicillin to treat sycosis barbae, eruptions in beard follicles, but was unsuccessful. Moving on to ophthalmia neonatorum, a gonococcal infection in infants, he achieved the first recorded cure with penicillin, on November 25, 1930. He then cured four additional patients (one adult and three infants) of eye infections, and failed to cure a fifth.
In 1939, Australian scientist Howard Florey (later Baron Florey) and a team of researchers (Ernst Boris Chain, Edward Abraham, Arthur Duncan Gardner, Norman Heatley, Margaret Jennings, J. Orr-Ewing and G. Sanders) at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford made progress in showing the in vivo bactericidal action of penicillin. In 1940, they showed that penicillin effectively cured bacterial infection in mice. In 1941, they treated a policeman, Albert Alexander, with a severe face infection; his condition improved, but then supplies of penicillin ran out and he died. Subsequently, several other patients were treated successfully. In December 1942, survivors of the Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston were the first burn patients to be successfully treated with penicillin.
On this day in 1964, a Dallas jury found Jack Ruby guilty of killing Lee Harvey Oswald, himself the assassin of John F. Kennedy. Ruby died of lung cancer three years later—in the very hospital where JFK had been pronounced dead and Lee Harvey Oswald had died. On March 14 three years later, JFK’s body was interred at his permanent gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery. On this day in 1969, 50 years ago, Edward M. Burke became a Chicago City Council member. He’s still serving, though he’s under indictment. Finally, it was one year ago today that the toy store Toys “R” Us, filed for bankruptcy, done in by online marketing.
Notables born on this day include Johann Strauss I (1804), Victor Emmanuel II (1820), Isabella Beeton (1836), Paul Ehrlich (1854, Nobel Laureate), Casey Jones (1863), Albert Einstein (1879), Sylvia Beach (1887), Hank Ketcham (1920), Diane Arbus (1923), Michael Caine (1933), Billy Crystal (1948), and Simone Biles (1997).
Those who punched out on this day include Karl Marx (1883), George Eastman (1932), Chic Young (1973), and Stephen Hawking (last year).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili sticks up for the scientific rationality of felinekind:
Hili: Do you think there are creationists among dogs?
A: I don’t know. Why do you ask?
Hili: Because there are none among cats.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy myślisz, że wśród psów są kreacjoniści?
Ja: Nie wiem, dlaczego pytasz?
Hili: Bo wśród kotów nie ma.
“AOC” still hasn’t learned how to be a representative. She’s always pushing her agenda, even when it is inappropriate, like here. Until she sheds her hubris, she’s just another social-media “influencer”.
Tweets from Grania. This first dude is smoking! Read more about Armstrong here, and see a one-hour video documentary about him, “Louie Bluie”, here (I’d watch some of it if I were you). He was a polymath: a musician, a painter, and a poet.
Remembering Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong, born 110 years ago in Dayton, Tennessee. Here he is playing fiddle on “Cacklin' Hen” in 1984. Filmed by Terry Zwigoff. pic.twitter.com/URZQ8dNHjB
Woman in park: ‘yours isn’t a thorough-bred Golden Retriever is she?’ Me: ‘erm. She won’t win crufts but she’s KC registered as a Golden’ Woman: ‘her nose is too long’ Me: ‘I’ve learned to love her regardless’
I should have said ‘you’re no oil painting yourself’ damn. DAMN!!!!!
This pair of photos is fantastic, albeit riddled with male alopecia:
In1964, Ringo Starr took a photo of some high school kids who had skipped class to see the #Beatles during their first trip to the US. 50 years later, the group reunited and recreated the photo. pic.twitter.com/pbDz1qevY7
The anaconda in the video posted this morning is real, but it is certainly not 15 m long. Alert readers went digging, and found clues (posted in the comments) as to what the story is. I’ll post on that later, but for now, here’s another anaconda, this one a specimen I saw on display at the San Diego Natural History Museum. How big do you think it is?
Anaconda on display at the San Diego Natural History Museum, 16 January 2019.
This illustrates at least two phenomena, both of which have been problems in determining how big giant snakes can get: the difficulty of estimating size, and the effects of skin stretching. I’ll post my measurement of this snake along with the reveal on the “15 m” one later.
If you go to the website of the biology department of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, where resides the ID creationist Michael Behe, you’ll find this disclaimer:
To my knowledge, this is unique not only in science, but in any academic department, for here you see an entire department disowning the intellectual oeuvre of one of its members. The disclaimer is there because Michael Behe has tenure and can’t be fired, though he spends his life pushing a discredited form of gussied-up creationism. Rather than lose students who might think the entire department approves of Behe’s Biblically-based ideas, and thus embarrass their whole department, they put up the disclaimer. They tolerate him because they have no choice, but they don’t accept his work.
Although I’m unaware of any review in the popular press (save mine in the Washington Post) of Behe’s new book, Darwin Devolves, it has been reviewed in the scientific literature, most notably by Lents, Swamidass, and Lenski in Science. And, of course, all reviews by real scientists have been negative, for ID has been lame and discredited for years, emasculated by theKitzmiller et al. vs. Dover Area School District trial. (Behe testified in that case and embarrassed both himself and fellow IDers). Behe and his Discovery Institute can’t abide this criticism, and have struck back, but their blows are ineffectual. Just today their flaccid house organ, Evolution News, issued four distinct attacks on me alone. I’m bursting with pride!
Now today a new review appeared in the prestigious journal Evolution. The kicker is that it’s by two members of Behe’s own department: assistant professor Gregory Lang, who works on microbial evolution, and assistant professor Amber Rice, an organismal evolutionist. I don’t think they need fear loss of tenure for writing this, as all the department save Behe spurns intelligent design, but it is a delicious irony. You can read their very critical review, which pulls no punches about their creationist colleague, by clicking on the screenshot below (reference at bottom, pdf here).
It’s a good review (by “good” I mean “well thought out and well crafted”, not “approving”), and shows that there are critical thinkers and good writers in that department. It’s also muy negative, and I’ll give one or two excerpts to show that Lang and Rice pull no punches:
Darwin Devolves contains a few factual errors and many errors of omission that have been pointed out by others (Lents and Hunt 2019; Lents et al. 2019), but it is two critical errors of logic that undermine Behe’s central premise that degradative mutations cripple evolution. First, Behe falsely equates the prevalence of loss‐of‐function mutations to the inevitable degradation of biological systems and the impossibility of evolution to produce novelty. By selective presentation of data, he exaggerates the role of degradative processes in evolution. Second, as he has previously, Behe attempts to argue from analogy, equating proteins with machines and convincing us that machines cannot evolve. Calling a flagellum an outboard motor may have some merit as a teaching tool, but it is not reality. Showing that a hammer cannot evolve into a fishing rod tells us nothing about real constraints on protein evolution.
Many of their comments mirror mine and Lents et al.’s, but they add even more about the notion of “irreducible complexity” and Behe’s persistent but flawed analogies between organisms and human-designed machines.
And they faced the same dilemma I did: should I review this travesty of a book and draw even more attention to Behe’s views? But they, like I, decided that Behe needed a scientific rebuttal lest people think his views were acceptable to scientists.
. . . By reviewing Behe’s latest book, we run the risk of drawing attention—or worse, giving credibility—to his ideas. Books like Darwin Devolves, however, must be openly challenged and refuted, even if it risks giving publicity to misbegotten views. Science benefits from public support. Largely funded by federal grants, scientists have a moral responsibility (if not a financial obligation) to ensure that the core concepts of our respective fields are communicated effectively and accurately to the public and to our trainees. This is particularly important in evolutionary biology, where—over 150 years after On the Origin of Species—less than 20% of Americans accept that humans evolved by natural and unguided processes (Gallup 2014). It is hard to think of any other discipline where mainstream acceptance of its core paradigm is more at odds with the scientific consensus.
Why evolution by natural selection is difficult for so many to accept is beyond the scope of this review [JAC: my take is here]; however, it is not for a lack of evidence: the data (only some of which we present here) are more than sufficient to convince any open‐minded skeptic that unguided evolution is capable of generating complex systems. A combination of social and historical factors creates a welcoming environment for an academic voice that questions the scientific consensus. Darwin Devolves was designed to fit this niche.
I don’t think there will be amiable feelings in the biology building when Behe encounters these two. But he’ll be retiring soon—or so I hope, as he’s 67. In the meantime, he’s and the IDers are going to emit lots of tirades about his colleagues on Evolution News, as none of them can tolerate—much less learn from—criticism. In the acknowledgments section, though, Lang and Rice play nice. After taking the guy’s book apart, they applaud his collegiality, demonstrating the maxim of my advisor Lewontin when dismantling someone politely: “give with one hand and take with the other”. To wit:
. . . Finally, we acknowledge Michael Behe—despite our academic differences, we maintain that Mike is an easygoing departmental colleague with whom we continue to share the day‐to‐day tasks of academia.
I can live with that, though I don’t really believe the “easygoing” part.
I never ask readers for money for myself, as I have all that I need. But there are others who need it, and some of those others are cats. So this is an appeal for you to kick in a few bucks (or pounds, if you’re a Brit) to a charity of which I am a patron, Feline Friends London. (Facebook site here.) It’s been going six years and is run by the estimable Barbara Read, who runs a staff of all volunteers who rescue London felines. And their policy is never to euthanize cats so long as they are not terminally ill and suffering.
My cap is out because lately I’ve gotten some lovely emails from readers thanking me for this site and saying that it’s an integral part of their day. I thought, “Well, what if every subscriber (there are 60,000 of them) kicked in a dollar or three towards a cat-rescue agency that uses all the dosh for rescue, and whose helpers do it out of love? If every subscriber gave just 1 pound, that would be 60,000 pounds (nearly $80,000), and think how many cats that could rescue!” In other words, if you coughed up just $1 or $5 or whatever as a thank you to this site, it wouldn’t impoverish you but the total amount of money would be substantial.
Before I give you the donation page, I asked Barbara to tell me a bit about her organization. You can read about it on their webpage (links above), but here’s a more personal view:
A bit about us and myself. I began rescuing cats in 2008 after I adopted my late cat, Shola, then aged 12/13, from a friend, making a split second decision to take her on when my friend was going to return her to the shelter, where she had adopted her 9 years earlier. I have been an animal lover since a toddler but Shola made me keenly aware of the vulnerability of cats and how safe and protected she was compared to cats out on the street. She passed away aged 22/23, in December 2017 and in a very real sense changed my life – being indirectly responsible for every cat Feline Friends and myself have helped.
I began rescue work locally where I live in Stoke Newington and then across the borough of Hackney, organising and taking part in animal welfare events. I became Hackney Council’s volunteer Cat Protection Officer in 2013, and am still the only one in the UK attached to a local authority. I won the Council the RSPCA’s Innovators Award for local authorities in 2014 for my work helping the borough’s cats.
I set up Feline Friends in July 2013 but then put it on the back burner while I ran Cats Protection Central London branch for a couple of years. This was then closed down as CP criticised me for never bring able to say ‘no’ to cats needing help and because I wanted to do things my way and not theirs. I therefore resurrected Feline Friends in spring 2016 and we have become the most successful of the smaller cat rescue organisations, helping cats right across the London area. At the moment we are entirely volunteer-run and have no paid staff. We are one of Battersea Dogs and Cats Homes Animal Partners, and they recently awarded us funding to run a project “Trap, Neuter, Nourish and Sustain: Safeguarding London’s Cats”.
We are a ‘no kill’ rescue and only approve euthanasia on the grounds of quality of life when a cat is dying and their suffering cannot be relieved. We work on a foster basis and take in older cats, who need end of life care, cats with chronic conditions and those with behaviour problems, as well as strays and unwanted pets. We have successfully worked with aggressive cats who have learned to trust and overcome their issues while in our foster care. We also neuter and re-home feral and semi-feral cats to sanctuaries and rural locations, where they will be cared for.
Now for a personal story: readers Laurie and Gethyn recently adopted a pair of black siblings from Feline Friends after the sad demise of their coffee-drinking cat Theo. Here are the moggies they took and a bit about their story:
We were searching online for adult black rescue cats to adopt. When we found Feline Friends, we were interested in Maxie and Minnie, who were the mummy and daddy. They are a year and a half old. Feline Friends conducted a home visit, and as we live in a two bedroom flat, they suggested that we adopt the kittens, who — at seven months old — would be greater able to adjust to living indoors. Mummy and Daddy require access to a garden. Thus did Alcestis Jerry and Octavia Sadie relocate to Wimbledon Village!
Alcestis Jerry (left) and Octavia Sadie.
Now for the touch: if you like this website or read it or benefit in any way from it, I’m asking you to make a donation to Feline Friends. You can do it by clicking on this link or on the screenshot below, which gives a form that, when you fill it in, takes you to the donation page. You donate using your credit card, choosing a specified amount or donating whatever you want. Donations start at £10 ($13.20), but you can donate as little as you want. Even one pound would help. We have so many readers and subscribers that if each of you found it in your heart to give a few pounds, it would be an enormous windfall for this organization. Please consider it.
As a bonus, if you make a donation of any size, just put your name below (no need to enumerate the donation). I’ll have a Secret Judge choose two winners, and each will get an autographed copy of the book of their choice: WEIT or Faith Versus Fact. I will sign it and also draw the cat of your choice in it.
Somebody told me that I should remind readers in case they miss this post, so forgive me if I put up a short reminder every few days for a while. And thank you for any donation you make.
Matthew Cobb sent me and Jerry a Tweet that contained this video, purportedly showing a 15 meter long anaconda (Eunectes murinus) in Brazil. Commenters on YouTube suggest it’s a fake, but I see nothing to indicate that. My Portuguese is very poor: I can hear the narrator say “cobra” (=snake), “anaconda”, and “sucuri”– this last is similar to a Brazilian Portuguese word I know, “sucuriju”, which means, at least roughly, “boa”, and is used in the combination “sucuriju gigante” for really big anacondas. Perhaps a Lusitanophone reader will favor us with a fuller translation. (“flurudha.com”, which appears at the lower right of the video, is a news-of-Albania-in-English site; I don’t know what’s up with that.)
It’s a big snake, but it’s hard to tell how big it is– there are no items of known size to compare it to. If the exact location could be determined, and the width of the stream measured, that could provide a basis for an estimate (although the shore is pretty featureless, and stream width could vary widely over time depending on seasonal rainfall patterns). There are many stories of huge anacondas. The account of Percy Fawcett, a British explorer is well known, having been featured in Bernard Heuvelmans’ work, and illustrated by his son, Brian; it was supposed to be 62 feet long.
From Heuvelmans (1959).
Heuvelmans also credulously records reports of 130 foot long anacondas, which he supposes might be an unknown species, distinct from the anaconda. But how big do anacondas actually get?
This question is intimately tied up with the question of how big reticulated pythons (Python reticulatus) get. The two species vie for the title of world’s largest snake: the anaconda is unquestionably heavier bodied than the slimmer reticulated python; but which gets longer? I’ve compiled a few judgments from the respectable literature immediately available to me.
Author
Anaconda
Reticulated Python
Barbour, 1926
14 m
32 ft. (29 ft. personally)
Ditmars, 1931
25 ft. (19 ft. personally)
33 ft. (24 ft. personally)
Ditmars & Crandall, 1947
26 ft.
33 ft.
Pope, 1955
30 ft.
32 ft.
Bridges, 1966
26 ft. (Bronx Zoo, ca. 1899)
Minton & Minton, 1973
38 ft. (Rondon; Lamon)
33 ft.
Ernst & Zug, 1996
11.5 m (Lamon)
10.1 m
Greene, 1997
10 m
10 m
Santora, 2002
26 ft. (Bronx Zoo, 2002)
Attenborough, 2008
7.5+ m
10 m
Pough et al., 2008
9 m
Vitt & Caldwell, 2009
8m, possibly 11.5 m
10 m
You can see that the authorities disagree, with reticulated pythons being generally credited with a length of 32-33 feet (= 10 m; the Bronx Zoo lengths are of specific animals, not the largest ever), while anacondas are either 30 feet (or less) or 11.5 m. Now there are several problems with knowing the maximum size of a species of large snake, beginning with the fact that the biggest snakes will probably be rare. But once you find one, how do you measure it? It is very hard to measure a live snake– I know from experience. They won’t sit still, keep curving, and might bite you. Now make its length more than 4 times your height! But if you collect the snake, the only practical way of preserving the specimen is as a skin, and skins notoriously stretch. A few cases of comparing the size of the snake and its skin have been reported, and the skin is about 20% longer than the snake.
Generally, claims about the size of animals are based on actual museum specimens, but for giant snakes these are only skins, which are unreliable due to stretching. If measured in the field and not collected, then it is the credibility of the informant that determines whether a record is accepted, since there is no specimen. The maximum size of the anaconda is generally seen to hinge on whether or not we accept the record of Robert Lamon, a petroleum geologist said to have measured one in Colombia that was 11.5 m long, and which was published by Emmet Reid Dunn in 1944, an eminent American herpetologist resident in Colombia at that time:
Mi amigo el señor Robert Lamon, geologo de la Richmond Oil Company, me ha dicho que mato y medio un ejemplar de once metros y medio en los Llanos. Tambien he oido hablar de ejemplares de 14 metros pero la aseveracion del señor Lamon no es de “segunda mano” sino directa y digna de credito. (Translation by GCM: “My friend Mr. Robert Lamon, geologist for the Richmond Oil Company, has told me of killing and measuring a specimen of eleven and a half meters in the Llanos. I have also heard talk of specimens of 14 meters, but the firm declaration of Mr. Lamon is not ‘second hand’, but first hand, and deserves to be accepted.”
A number of herpetologists have further investigated this case, most notably John Murphy and the late Robert Gilmore (the latter actually a mammalogist). Gilmore met Lamon, and corresponded with him in 1954, but Lamon could not recall what his measurement had been. He did attest that he told Dunn about it at the time, so that whatever Dunn had written down would be most reliable. He added the interesting detail that he measured the snake with a 4 m rod (not a steel tape, as some had added to the story). Later, in 1977, Gilmore met some other Colombian petroleum veterans, who cast some aspersions on Lamon’s credibility, but these aspersions must themselves have their credibility contested, being decades old recollections, not contemporary accounts. Gilmore and Murphy (1993) conclude that skepticism is warranted, and Murphy and Henderson (1997:45) explicitly say the measurement is “Probably in error”. We should always, of course, think it possible we may be mistaken, but I lean the other way, and my acceptance of the Lamon record is stronger now than it was yesterday, having investigated, probably as thoroughly as is still possible, the circumstances involved.
Sherman and Madge Minton (1973), besides Lamon’s anaconda, mention some other ca. 38 foot records of anacondas, records that have not been as thoroughly documented or investigated. One of them is attributed to Candido Rondon, the great Brazilian explorer and military officer, after whom the state of Rondonia is named, and who was the co-leader of Theodore Roosevelt’s last expedition (“The River of Doubt“). This seems, to me, to be a record worth pursuing– there is a likelihood that there may be substantial documentation concerning Rondon’s expeditions, as they were official expeditions undertaken as part of his military duties.
The New York Zoological Society (i.e., the Wildlife Conservation Society) has offered a large reward for the live delivery of a 30-foot snake, in good health, to the Bronx Zoo since the days of President Teddy Roosevelt (1910). The reward offer currently stands at $50,000. Although there have been many inquiries and requests to finance giant snake expeditions (which we do not support), there have been no giant snakes presented for the reward.
Samantha the reticulated python at the Bronx Zoo. That’s John Behler on the far left. From the BBC, but a larger b&w version is in the NY Times notice of Samantha’s death.
Reticulated pythons regularly get longer than anacondas, as captive retics in the 25-29 foot range are not uncommonly reported, but I’ve not carefully investigated such claims. Guinness World Records lists a captive record of 25 feet 2 inches, but this is smaller than Samantha. Samantha’s last measurement was probably after her death, so would be a reliable measurement. The Guinness snake, named Medusa, was alive when measured, so might actually be longer, as it is hard to get the “kinks” out of a large snake for measuring, and these would make the measurement come out shorter than in a relaxed snake.
Medusa, Guinness’s record reticulated python. It is not in a zoo; I’m not sure what this place is.
Although wild anacondas are heavier bodied than pythons (and retics are especially slim), I’ve seen captive Indian/Burmese pythons which are long (in the teens of feet) and extremely obese, and which might well weigh more than anacondas of the same length.
Attenborough, D. 2008. Life in Cold Blood. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.
Barbour, T. 1926. Reptiles and Amphibians: Their Habits and Adaptations. Houghton Mifflin, Boston.
Bridges, W. 1974. Gathering of Animals. Harper & Row, New York.
Ditmars, R. 1931. Snakes of the World. Macmillan, New York.
Ditmars, R.L. and L.S. Crandall. 1947. Guide to the New York Zoological Park. 5th, “Platypus”, ed. New York Zoological Society, New York.
Dunn, E. R. 1944. Los generos de anfibios y reptiles de Colombia, III. Tercera parte: Reptiles; orden de las serpientes. Caldasia 3:155-224.
Gilmore, R.M. and J.C. Murphy. 1993. On large anacondas, Eunectes murinus (Serpentes: Boidae), with special reference to the Dunn-Lamon record. Bulletin of the Chicago Herpetological Society 28:185-188. pdf (Provides a good summary of the earlier literature, including important works which, because I did not have copies to hand, are not cited here.)
Greene, H.W. 1997. Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature. University of California Press, Berkeley
Heuvelmans, B. 1959. On the Track of Unknown Animals. Hill and Wang, New York.
Murphy, J.C. and R.W. Henderson. 1997. Tales of Giant Snakes: A Historical Natural History of Anacondas and Pythons. Krieger, Malabar, Florida. full text
Pope, C.H. 1955. Reptiles of the World. Knopf, New York.
