Every Big Snake Explained in 16 Minutes
The dark-spotted anaconda is the runt of the anaconda family, and almost nobody talks about it. Maxing out at around 7 feet long with a slim, agile build, it looks like someone shrank a green anaconda and scattered irregular dark-brown spots across its olive body. Named after American ornithologist Rodolphe Meyer de Schauensee, who donated a specimen to the Philadelphia Zoo back in 1924, this snake spends its life in the seasonally flooded swamps and marshes clustered around the mouth of the Amazon River in northeastern Brazil and coastal Guiana. It is nonvenomous, semi-aquatic, and hunts fish, frogs, and small mammals in the murk.
