Anaconda

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This article is about the snake. For other uses, see Anaconda (disambiguation).

"Anaconda" is often used to refer only to the green anaconda, Eunectes murinus.

Anacondas are large, nonvenomous boas found in tropical South America. Although the name actually applies to a group of snakes, it is often used to refer only to one species in particular, the green anaconda, Eunectes murinus, one of the largest snakes in the world, and (together with the reticulated python of southeast Asia) possibly the longest.

They live mostly in water, such as the Amazon River. While this snake poses a danger to humans,^{[citation needed]} and there are several ascertained cases of people being killed by it,^{[citation needed]} it does not regularly hunt humans. Its standard prey includes fish, river fowl, and occasionally domesticated goats or ponies that venture near or into the water.

Threat from dangerous Anacondas is a familiar plot in comics, movies and adventure stories set in the Amazon jungle.

Anaconda may refer to:

• Any member of the genus Eunectes, a group of large, aquatic snakes found in South America.
  • Eunectes murinus (the green anaconda), the largest species, found east of the Andes in Colombia, Venezuela, the Guianas, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, and on the island of Trinidad.
  • Eunectes notaeus (the yellow anaconda), a smaller species found in eastern Bolivia, southern Brazil, Paraguay and northeastern Argentina.
  • Eunectes deschauenseei (the dark-spotted anaconda), a rare species found in northeastern Brazil, Coastal French Guiana and Guyana.
• The giant anaconda, a mythical snake of enormous proportions found in South America.
• Applied loosely, any large snake that "crushes" its prey by constricting.^[1]

[edit] Etymology

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary states^[2] the word is probably a modification of the Sinhalese word henakandayā,^[3][4][5] which is used to refer to a small slender green whip snake found in Sri Lanka. However, certain other literature^[6][7] state henakandayā refers to a now extinct constrictor once found there. Richard Boyle (the Sri Lankan English consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary) writes in his book 'Sinbad In Serendib':^[8]

The first reference to the anaconda in English is by R. Edwin (probably a pseudonym) in a letter to the Scots magazine concerning an encounter with a tiger-devouring serpent in then Dutch-held Ceylon. This was published in the 1768 issue under the discursive heading, "Description of the ANACONDA, a monstrous species of serpent. In a letter from an English gentleman, many years resident in the island of Ceylon, in the East Indies."^[9] However, this account of an incident on the outskirts of Colombo is a figment of the imagination, full of the popular misconceptions regarding constrictors in an age of limited scientific knowledge of snakes.

—Richard Boyle

The Oxford English Dictionary gives a first source as John Ray's "List of Indian Serpents" from the Leyden Museum, as "anacandaia of the Ceylonese, i.e. he that crushes the limbs of buffaloes and yoke beasts," but that "anacandaia" is "not now a native name in Sri Lanka, and not satisfactorily explained either in Cingalese [Sinhalese] or Tamil"—though Henry Yule lists "āṇaik'k'onḍa" to means "having killed an elephant" in Tamil.