Paul Rosolie: evaluation

Transcript context

…We walked by it. We walked by it. And he stuck his head out because he thought we’d gone. And then we turned around and I just got a glimpse of him because I was in the front of the line, and he just went right back into his cave. “You guys are not going to touch me.” And so yeah, with the anacondas, it’s been really exciting. And in 2014, JJ and me and Mohsen and Pat and Lee, we ended up catching what at the time was the record for Eunectes Marinas scientifically measured. It was 18 feet six inches, 220 pounds, one of the largest female anacondas on record. And since that time, these guys have been continuing to study the species, continuing to just, again, just add a little bit by little bit to the knowledge we have of the species. And studying green anacondas in lowland tropical rainforest, you’ve seen how hard it is to move, to operate, to navigate in this environment. And so when you think of the fact that in order to learn anything about this species, you have to spend vast amounts of time first locating them, and then finding out a way to keep tabs on them, even if you get lucky enough to see an anaconda by the edge of a stream. To be able to observe it over time, to learn its habits or to put a radio transmitter on it or to take any sort of valuable information from the experience is almost impossible. And so a lot of the stuff that I wrote about in Mother of God, us jumping on anacondas and trying to catch them, and at first it just seemed like something we were doing to just try and see them. But it ended up being that we were wildly trying to figure out methodology that would have scientific implications later on, because now it’s allowing us to try and find the largest anacondas. And people used to say, “There’s no way there’s 25-foot, 27-foot.” Well, there’s just that video of the guy swimming with the twenty-foot anaconda. And so now as we keep going, I’m going, “Well, maybe through drone identification, we could find where the largest anacondas are sitting on top of floating vegetation. And even then, how do we restrain them so that we could measure them and prove this to the world? It’s a side quest, but- So by doing these kinds of studies, you figure out how they move about the world, what motivates them in terms of when they hunt, where they hide in the world as the size of the anaconda changes, so all of that, those are scientific studies?…

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