Within mere days of capturing the gripping spectacle of a jaguar overpowering a formidable yacare caiman, photographer Chris Brunskill struck gold once more.
On the breezy afternoon of September 29, amidst the lush expanse of southern Brazil’s Pantanal, he immortalized yet another breathtaking encounter: a jaguar wrestling a massive yellow anaconda.
In the verdant heart of southern Brazil, along the winding waters of the Cuiabá River, a key channel within the vast Pantanal wetland complex, another dramatic scene unfolded under the keen lens of photographer Chris Brunskill. It was here, in this sprawling natural theater where Brunskill had previously captured the intense jaguar-caiman encounter earlier in September.
From the unsteady deck of a bobbing boat, Brunskill intently observed the jaguar, its silhouette stark against the high riverbank. The air was thick with anticipation as the majestic predator, with its coat dappled in the soft light, moved with calculated grace. Moments later, the jaguar’s acute senses detected a rustle in the lush undergrowth. With a swift, deliberate motion, the jaguar extended a paw, disturbing the dense greenery, and revealed its unsuspecting target—a sizable yellow anaconda.
The snake writhed down the bank into the river shallows with the jaguar in hot pursuit. Brunskill – snapping pictures from just a few metres away in the boat – said the attack went on for about 90 seconds.
“The snake lunged at the jaguar several times during the confrontation and managed to bite it on the nose more than once before it was eventually subdued by the big cat with several ferocious bites to the mid-section,” Brunskill wrote on Facebook.
Though outsized by their relative the green anaconda (the world’s largest snake), yellow anacondas are plenty big, reaching lengths of 4.6 metres (15 feet), and good-sized individuals are capable of preying on animals as large as caimans, brocket deer, capybara and peccaries.
Pantanal jaguars have been previously documented preying on anacondas, though bigger mammals like capybara, cattle, feral pigs, peccaries or giant anteaters (and caimans, of course) are more typical fare. Boasting superlatively strong jaws, heavy fangs and plenty of predatory facility in the water, jaguars are perhaps the big cats most disposed to chowing on reptiles. They can crush through the shells of freshwater turtles like it’s no big deal, and their trademark killing bite – delivered to the back of the neck or the skull – allows them to subdue potentially dangerous crocodilians and snakes with efficiency. Coastal jaguars have even been recorded killing nesting sea turtles (of a variety of species), hauling their huge marine quarry into beachside jungle and gnawing out the heads, necks and flippers.
The anaconda hunt Brunskill lucked upon is probably representative of how jaguars happen to occasionally catch the large snakes: an opportunistic encounter as the cats scout along riversides and marsh edges and wade through shallow waters.
But do the dining tables ever turn? Though it’s the sort of thing you hear about in the annals of South American wilderness myth, even full-size green anacondas probably don’t make lunches of jaguars with any regularity. That said, these huge boas may try after large cats if circumstances permit. In 2015, biologists studying pumas in the Rio Tietê basin of southeastern Brazil discovered one radio-collared cat – an adult female, 42 kilograms (93 pounds) – in the stomach of a 4.2-metre (14-foot) green anaconda.
It appeared to have been a hard-fought meal: the snake, which died shortly after researchers tracked down the signal from the swallowed transmitter, had apparently suffered a fair amount of injury from the puma in the process of eating it.
Still exhilarated from the success of his caiman sequence, photographer Chris Brunskill was utterly astonished by the even more spectacular jaguar-anaconda encounter along the Cuiabá River. Capturing such a moment was like finding a gem in an already treasure-laden landscape. In awe, he took to social media to share his wonder: “This is by far the rarest of rare events in the life of the jaguar,” he wrote with palpable excitement. “I know several seasoned river veterans who have spent over two decades navigating these waters, yet they’ve never been blessed to witness the incredible scene that unfolded before my eyes last week.”