Sucuri

Citizens of Rio de Janeiro fortified themselves for the worst and visited the Zoological Gardens last week. There, in a caged watertank,lay 24 feet and 352 pounds of mottled horror. Hunters had stalked the jungle for nine months. Wary of their prey they had laid a great bait. At last he had come, eunectes murinus, the snatcher, coiling dangerously out of a dark stream. They took him after he had gorged and lay inert. Natives clustered about chattering, “Sucuri! Sucuri!” (local term for a reptile). They dreaded the monster as do all hunters save immediately after its meal, which occurs only about four times yearly.

This “sucuri” was an anaconda, water-dwelling member of the boa-constrictor family.* Far moreill-tempered than its cousins, the African boas and the pythons of Africa, Asia and Australia, it is the largest snake in the New World, third largest in all the world (after the reticulated and Indian pythons, which sometimes exceed ten yards in length).

*The anaconda is distinguished from other boas by two characteristics which adapt it to aquatic habits: plates, instead of scales, on the head, which enable it to shut its nostrils and remain submerged for some time, like moose, whales, beavers; and bearing its young alive (viviparous) instead of laying eggs (oviparous). Like its cousins it is at home in trees, but more often it lies submerged in a water-hole, with only the eyes above water. It strikes dead with a hammering head blow or seizes its prey in its jaws: secures the carcass in a coil of its body; constricts, crushing the carcass to a pulp; swallows the morsel