Animal · Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia
Green anaconda
Eunectes murinus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The green anaconda is the heaviest snake in the world, a thick olive-green hunter from the warm, slow waters of South America. Its eyes and nostrils sit on top of its head, so it can watch and breathe while the rest of it stays hidden. It kills by coiling, not by venom.
Picture credit: Bernard DUPONT (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the green anaconda live?
Home: Slow rivers, swamps and flooded grassland.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: females often about 4 to 5 m long. It weighs about 60 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
A green anaconda spends most of its life in water, where its enormous body weighs almost nothing and can move without a sound. On land the same animal is slow and clumsy, so it rarely goes far from a river, a swamp or a flooded meadow. Its olive-green skin with round black blotches breaks up its outline among floating plants. Females are much larger than males: a big female can be over 5 metres long and heavier than an adult human. Anacondas have no venom at all. They seize a fish, a caiman or a capybara with their teeth, throw coils around it and tighten a little with every breath the prey lets out. A meal that size can last for weeks, and the snake barely moves while it digests. Instead of laying eggs, the female keeps them inside her body and gives birth to twenty or more young, each already about half a metre long and able to swim off on its own.
Find it on the globe
Green anaconda is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Is the green anaconda the longest snake?
No, the reticulated python of Asia grows longer. The anaconda wins on weight instead, because it is far thicker for its length and built like a barrel.
How long can it stay underwater?
It shuts its nostrils with small flaps and rests quietly on the bottom for many minutes at a time. Lying still uses very little oxygen, which is why the snake can wait so long for a drink or a meal to come close.
Do anacondas attack people?
Attacks are very rare and there is almost no reliable record of a person being eaten. A resting anaconda would rather slide into the water than face something as large as a human.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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