Last month, while trekking through a Brazilian rainforest, a group of veterinary students encountered an unusual type of impediment. There was a gigantic anaconda straddling the dirt track in front of them — and she wasn’t alone.
One of the students who stopped, Antônio Stábile dos Santos, estimated the female snake to be around 20 feet long. As he got closer, he observed that she was being pursued by a swarm of smaller anacondas.
Santos eventually discovered that the smaller snakes were most likely males fighting for the love attention of their much larger counterparts. But, as you can see, she didn’t seem very interested: it was a sight to behold, to say the least. Santos and the other pupils, however, were not the only ones who had to wait for the snakes to cross.
A lizard had also halted on the roadway, no doubt relieved that the snakes were preoccupied with anything else. It was a spectacle that Santos and the others who spend their time researching animals will never forget. “You don’t see something like this every day, especially at college,” Santos told Globo News. “It was rather odd.”
