“She’s very fast,” says a veterinary student who discovered that an anaconda was being chased by males in Ituverava, SP | Ribeirão Preto and Franca

“She is very fast. She started to cross quickly because she was scared. In that, we saw a lot back ”, said Stábile to G1 this Wednesday (7).

The inscription was made on the road that gives access to the dam of the Faculty of Ituverava Dr. Francisco Maeda (Fafram). Stábile and some friends were doing an internship when they heard a university employee call them and ask them to film.

“We ran. When he looked, it was the anaconda crossing from the side of the swamp toward the dam. Then he [o funcionário] He said: ‘Cinema, because we don’t have a cell phone.’ I took out my cell phone and started filming and made the video that everyone saw, ”said Stábile.

According to the veterinary student, the female was between six and seven meters longand the males were smaller. At first, she even thought they were puppies, but then she found out that they were males trying to conquer her.

“In the video, I say it was the puppies, because they were all the same size. Then, talking to the vets, we discovered that it was the males after the female, ”he said.

The biologist Willianilson Pessoa explains that the females are larger than the males because they have a diet destined to feed on larger prey; they also need to account for dozens of pups.

He states that snakes do not have parental care and, therefore, it was not possible that the other animals seen by Stabeli were children of the female.

“The anaconda gives birth to the young, each of the chicks goes his own way and he follows hers. When snakes are found together anywhere in Brazil, it is very likely that they are copulating or reproducing, ”says Pessoa.

Pessoa also highlights that females release a hormone into the environment that causes males to start following it until he agrees to copulate.

“In this process, what can happen is that one of them tries to copulate and does not allow it, since its orifice has a scale that closes the opening. Then, when she allows it, she releases that cloaca,” he said.

Big, heavy and independent

The biologist Cláudio Machado took care of this species for years at the Instituto Vital Brasil, in Niterói (RJ). Explain that the anaconda in the video is a Eunectes murinus, the same species as the famous snake that illustrated the premiere of the telenovela “Pantanal”, broadcast by TV Manchete in 1990 and which will be remade on Globo in 2021.

He states that these snakes are the second largest in the world and the heaviest on the planet, being able to exceed 100 kg and reach up to 7 meters.

Machado says that during this process of “conquering” the females, there may even be a fight between the males – and there is the possibility that more than one of them will copulate with the same snake. Thus, there are cases of litter with more than one parent.

The biologist also states that it is possible for anacondas to reproduce by themselves.

“Now it is known that some anacondas can reproduce independently of the males, as if they created clones of the ovules, and that they can also store sperm for many years to have the young only when the environmental conditions that they consider necessary are good.

Experts warn that anacondas are not poisonous and humans are not part of their diet. Feeling threatened, an animal of this species delivers several boats as a form of defense.

Therefore, be careful when crossing the path of one of them. The orientation is to observe carefully and respect the passage of the animals without interacting, as did the student Antônio Stábile dos Santos, who considers the situation very atypical.

“It’s unusual because you don’t see it anywhere, and it’s not, especially in college, where you see it. So it was very unusual,” he says.

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