Pythons are an extremely useful source of information on ecological health
Amazon researchers have discovered the world’s largest snake – a giant green anaconda – in the Ecuadorian rainforest that split from its close relatives 10 million years ago, although to this day they appear Still pretty much the same.
A video shared online shows the scale of these 20-foot-long (6.1-meter-long) reptiles, with one of the researchers, Dutch biologist Freek Vonk, swimming next to a giant 200-kilogram (441-pound) specimen.
It was thought that there was only one species of green anaconda in the wild, Eunectes murinus, but this month’s science magazine Diversity revealed that the new “northern green anaconda” belongs to a new and different species, Eunectes akiyama.
said researcher Bryan G. Fry.
Fry, an Australian professor of biology at the University of Queensland, has been studying anaconda species found in South America for nearly 20 years. He told Reuters the discovery allowed them to prove that the two species split from each other nearly 10 million years ago.
“But what’s really amazing is that despite their genetic differences, despite their long-standing divergence, the two animals are exactly the same,” he said.
Although the green anaconda snakes are visually very similar, the genetic differences are as high as 5.5%, which surprised the scientists.
“This is an incredible genetic difference, especially when you put it into the context that we are only 2 percent different from chimpanzees,” Fry said.
Fry said pythons are a very useful source of information about the ecological health of the region and the potential impact of oil spills in the area on human health.
He added that some of the snakes they studied in parts of Ecuador were heavily contaminated by oil spills, while pythons and arapaima had accumulated large amounts of petrified metals.
“This means that if arapaima are accumulating these spilled metals, then pregnant women need to avoid them, just like women avoid salmon and tuna and other parts of the world because of fear of methylmercury,” he said.
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