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giant snake

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Just heard on radio 4 about a 49 foot python captured in Sumartra. If it is true this beats all records and vindicates all those who have claimed to see such snakes in the past. Anyone know anymore?
 
Yup! saw this earlier today.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3354403.stm

'World's longest snake' captured

"Indonesian villagers are claiming that they have caught a python which is almost 15 metres (49 feet) long, according to media reports (...)
It is currently being kept in a zoo in the village of Curugsewu on the island of Java."

(The report states it is actually 14.85 metres long and weighs 447 kilograms.)

"Officially, the longest snake ever caught was a python shot in Celebes in Indonesia in 1912, which was almost 10 metres in length."
 
Well I hope they confirm the size before the python accidently is lost making it unconfirmed like many of the other giant snake reports.
 
This report is in this morning's Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/indonesia/Story/0,2763,1113948,00.html
with a photo of it in the paper.
They state that the snake is 85cm in circumference - this would give it a diameter of only 27cm, extremely thin for a snake of this (alleged) length (perhaps they meant 85cm in diameter).
The other curious statement is that the snake measured 19m when first caught, but 4m had to be severed after a rotten deer was found undigested in its stomach. The only part of a snake which could be amputated without killing it is the tail, and this would hardly be affected by an undigested food item in the stomach. Also, most snakes have a relatively short tail in relation to the body length, so 4m is a bit on the long side (>20% of total body length).
I keep snakes, and would so love this story to be true, but for now I'll take it with a large pinch of salt.
 
In the daily record (Scotland) it mentions in the story about unconfirmed reports of 149 foot snakes, so there is at least one fortean working there.
 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but dont non-poisnous snakes regurgitate food if it starts to go off before they can digest it?. I think poisonous snakes venom starts to "digest" their prey strait away ,so they have an advantage over constrictors?.
 
Michael - true enough, my friend. If a boid is disturbed after wolfing down a large meal, and needs to make a hasty exit, or indeed in the very rare example of a situ where it's consumed a carcass that it came across, and which has turned out to be less fresh than it believed (very rare because snakes almost never eat food items they haven't killed themselves), a snake can and will regurgitate a meal.

Like CallMeKenneth, I provide shelter and succour to a few wriggly punters, so while I in no way presume myself to be an expert, I know a little bit about these fellows.

As CMK says, the idea you could hack off a few metres of serpent without harming the said schlangen is crazy.

But now that the news reports have filtered through to the serious media, and there are photos of the fella on the
BBC, we're left with credible evidence of a seriously huge snake.

Interstingly, the "giant snake" reports favoured by crpytozoological punters over the years have tended to involve the Green Anaconda, from South America, as opposed to the Reticulate Python. Perhaps this is because the Anaconda is far bulkier, and spends much of its time in water. The fact it's often seen in water makes it more likely to be spotted at full stretch, while its bulk creates the impression of even greater overall size.

The Retic, on the other hand, is generally seen curled around branches or holed-up-in-hollows in its native SE Asia, and is anyway quite slender for its length, meaning it has a less imposing form than the Anaconda.

But anyhow, if this snake is verified to be 49ft (and I must say, the photos give that impression), it will blow the current world record out of the water. The current record is 37ft for a Retic - 49ft would totally smash all credible predictions of how large this species (the longest, but not the heaviest) might get to be.

I remember attending a geeky BHS (British Herpetological Society) meeting in the late 80s, where a speaker sagely said that there might be, at best, one Retic every 100 years that grows longer than 35ft.

If he's right, then we've either got spectacularly lucky - or cryptozoology stands a chance after all!

Happy New Year

Captain Chunk.
 
Percy Fawcett reportedly had an encounter with an anaconda approx 60 ft. long or so. unconfirmed 100 ft. anaconda was shot, measured then pushed back into the amazon in Brazil during the 30s as well. this reticulated python is 17 feet longer than the current record so a 60 ft. anaconda isn't out of the question!
 
Bogus.

There're a couple videos on Yahoo.

Top length as far as I can see is low-mid 20 feet, or 8 or so meters.

Combined with the bs being said that it was a "revered as a god" in some nameless local village, it leads me to one conclusion:

Zoo doing poorly. Zoo needs more visitors. Zoo makes up bunch of bs.
 
As usual, the photos don't provide us with anything to use as scale, so it's hard to say - haven't checked the videos out yet. Must admit, it's beginning to sound a bit "de Loy's Ape"ish to me.
 
Yesterday, a Radio 5 Live presenter spoke to a Guardian reporter who had just spent two hours in the cage with said snake.

The hack said that he'd personally measured the snake and it is six and a half metres in length.

So it's certainly no record breaker (but it is good publicity for the zoo).

Why don't they release it now they've had their fun - poor thing.
 
Just goes to show, even what appears to be rock-solid evidence disappears in the face of even cursory investigation. If a zoo full of so-called experts can overestimate the length of a snake by 250% then what hope does cryptozoology have in general? It's getting so that we can't afford to believe anything that we don't actually see with our own eyes...
 
Using the people as a comparison for scale and scrolling my cursor over the length of the snake I get an estimate of around 30' give or take.
No way this critter would survive with part of its guts hacked off either,which doesn't appear to be the case from the photo anyway.
It is an impressive snake though,perhaps a record breaker.
I just wish someone would get an accurate measurement for the sake of scientific documentation.
Maybe after the zoo's made a few bucks off the hype we'll be lucky enough to get the real story.
 
stu neville said:
As usual, the photos don't provide us with anything to use as scale, so it's hard to say - haven't checked the videos out yet. Must admit, it's beginning to sound a bit "de Loy's Ape"ish to me.
Click to expand...
the photograph in the newspaper showed a man standing next to it. the girth of the snaker was bigger than the man. now he could be a 3 ft. midget but it's still a huge snake!
 
It's not. Watch both videos, the AP and the Reuters.

I'm not sure which one, but one of them has a very good perspective on the girth of the snake.

The trainer's hands basically fit all the way around the snake. Thumb to thumb, forefinger to forefinger. That's about 15 inches probably on the trainer.

I originally estimated high 20s, maybe bigger, but the second video (whichever one it was) shows that it isn't nearly a record holder, let alone 50 feet.

P.S. Many of the photos used forced perspective... whether on purpose or not, I don't know. Watch both videos, the pictures ARE deceptive.

P.P.S. "Giant animal, revered as local god, eater of humans"... Someone watched too much king kong.
 
I agree. In terms or record breakers, that snake doesn't figure. I went to see the Cassius, the biggest snake in the world, at Knaresborough some time ago (the snake is dead now) and it made this one look like a midget. Cassius was 28ft and this one looks to be about 30-40% the size.

This is the only photo I could find but you can see the head is around 3 times the size of the tiddler in the photo! (And I don't think he had finished growing when the photo was taken)
 
If in doubt go and measure the thing ;)

Arthur ASCII said:
Yesterday, a Radio 5 Live presenter spoke to a Guardian reporter who had just spent two hours in the cage with said snake.

The hack said that he'd personally measured the snake and it is six and a half metres in length.
Click to expand...

Here is the article (love the last two paragraphs!!):

Stay still, will you?

Last week the reptile world was rocked by the news that a 14-metre python had been discovered in Indonesia. Could a snake really be so long? There was only one way to find out - we sent John Aglionby along with a tape measure

Monday January 5, 2004
The Guardian


"Look, you must understand that a python's length is not constant," explains Darmanto, the owner and handler of Fragrant Flower. Fragrant Flower is the reticulated python found living in a tourism park in central Java which was last week touted as the longest and heaviest snake ever captured - 14.85m and 447kg. "Depending on the weather, on how recently he has eaten and when he last shed his skin, Fragrant can stretch and contract a great deal. A few days ago he stretched himself out halfway round the cage."

This hurried explanation by the man whose large buck teeth, sparkling eyes and animated face lend him more than a passing resemblance to Bugs Bunny is in response to the remarkably unsmelly Fragrant, as he is commonly known, coming up well short when I step into his cage, tape measure in hand.

Indeed, "coming up well short" does not do justice to the disparity between the claimed length and the length I measured. If Fragrant ever extends to 14.85m long he will be the most mind-boggling animal on earth because I measured him at somewhere between 6.5 and 7m.

The imprecise estimate is due to my reluctance to grab hold of his tail and stretch out the beautiful body that is a patchwork of brown, dark yellow and black scales even though Fragrant seems docile enough when his face is hugged, kissed and petted by the unfazed Darmanto.

The snake's unfriendly yellow eyes and the hissing forked tongue that darts in and out of his deceptively small-looking jaws, not to mention my desire to see my wife and four-month-old daughter again and the distance to the nearest competent hospital, mean my courage only extends so far.

Weighing the python is impossible. Judging by a tentative feel of his body while his attention is distracted by children poking their fingers through his cage, I would put it at perhaps 100kg but no more.

"The reason he is not that large now is because he has not eaten for about six weeks and has just shed his skin so his body is quite firm at the moment," explains Darmanto, pushing his index finger hard into the body. "When he's at his full length he's much softer and I can push my finger in much further. And his body is much fatter too, perhaps up to 50cm in diameter."

I poke the body: it seems pretty squidgey and closer to 20 cm across. But locked inside a cage with what is undoubtedly a mammoth and extremely dangerous snake, even if it is not a record-breaker, is neither the time nor the place, I reckon, to tell his protective owner I think he is talking baloney.

So I play along and measure the halfway-round-the-cage stretch instead. This comes to 13.1m. "Are you sure you saw both ends at once and that perhaps he hadn't just moved in a few seconds?" I ask.

Mr Darmanto, who says he can get so close to Fragrant's head because he has inherited "inner strength" from his great-great-grandfather, Nasi Ibrahim, is adamant. "Oh, yes. I was cleaning the floor at the other end so I could see him all," he said. "Fragrant then slipped off the rail and into the pool."

Fragrant's age is the next subject I broach. "Probably around 150," is Darmanto's reply. "Although to be honest I don't know this for certain because it was calculated by an expert from Madiun [a small town in east Java] and I just have to take his word for it."

Fragrant Flower's enclosure is the antithesis of what I had expected this alleged world-record obliterator's home to be. Even though he is kept in a crumbling, under-funded government-owned tourism park 2,300ft up a mountain in central Java, I had imagined a setting worthy of his status. Perhaps a smartly uniformed gateman or two holding doors to a newly built, or at least freshly painted, compound. Certainly voluble staff distributing brochures detailing every aspect of the snake's slither to stardom. But initially I can't even see the pen, even when I followed the signs pointing to the home of "Asia's longest snake".

Sandwiched between a creaky roller-coaster and a public swimming pool in the 16-acre park in Curug Sewu, a village 40 miles south of the city of Semarang surrounded by stunning rice terracing and clove tree plantations, Fragrant lives in a rusting 9.5m by 4.5m cage behind unpainted corrugated iron.

Curious gawpers have to pay a scruffy employee 2,500 rupiah (17p) to enter the muddy enclosure, which is also home to a few mangy-looking monkeys chained to bamboo poles and two slothful mongrels that would most appropriately be named Fragrant's Breakfast and Fragrant's Lunch, as three or four canines a month are Fragrant's diet.

Onlookers are ostensibly kept back from the cage by a rickety bamboo fence. But many, wanting a closer inspection, put their faces up to the wire mesh.

Darmanto's hitherto detailed descriptions suddenly became vague when he is asked to recount when and by whom Fragrant's record-breaking length and weight were measured.

"It was a guy called Mr Alek from a laboratory at Gadjah Mada University," he says, referring to one of Indonesia's most prestigious centres of learning. "He did it some months ago. Unfortunately I don't have any photos with me."

So why have Fragrant's record-breaking statistics been kept secret until last week - 19 months after Darmanto says he caught the python in Sumatra, by hypnotising him into a deep sleep. "Don't ask me," he says. "I'm just the owner. That's for the government to decide."

Agus Rifai, the head of the local government tourism office, who has come with me to meet Fragrant, says his department only acquired the snake a couple of weeks ago from elsewhere in Java. "We're still checking the verification," he says.

Once beyond the range of Fragrant Flower's mighty coils and Darmanto's inner power, I decide to find out exactly how much of a wild python chase I have been on. "Essentially, a python's body size is as unflexible as ours is," explains Richard Shine, professor of evolutionary biology at Sydney University and a world python expert. "[Darmanto's story] is exceedingly consistent. These giant pythons always shrink whenever a tape measure turns up."

Shine says that when he conducted the allegedly first and only detailed field study of reticulated pythons, he examined 2,000 snakes in two locations in Sumatra; the females were much bigger than the males but none measured even seven metres long. "The longest male was only four and a half metres, plus 10% for the tail," he says. "He's undoubtedly got a monster snake there but it's almost certainly a female, not a male. It's impossible to tell from the photos."

Shine says that despite having seen the insides of numerous specimens during his research, he has never encountered any reticulated python that eats dogs. "We found monkeys, pigs and even porcupines but no dogs," he says. Most of the pythons were empty though, corroborating Darmanto's claim that Fragrant has not eaten for weeks. None of the pythons Shine has encountered weighed more than 100kg; he described the allegation that Fragrant weighs up to 447kg as "delightful".

Dave Barker, from Texas, who says his claim to have the world's largest python collection of 2,000 snakes has never been contested, is also doubtful about Fragrant's age. "There's no real way to age snakes but by the number of scars and from the proportion of the size of the head to the body [on photographs of Fragrant on the internet], I would guess it's a young big snake, perhaps five to eight years old." He says the longevity record is probably about 50 years for a python kept in a zoo in St Louis, Missouri.

Apart from the obvious explanation that the Fragrant Flower record is completely untrue and made up to boost visitor numbers to the park, which Agus says have risen 60% in the two weeks since the python's arrival, Barker has two theories to account for the evolution of the record claim. They both centre on an allegation by Darmanto that Fragrant is in fact the spiritual ruler of the Kubu, a remote Sumatran tribe that shuns the outside world, and it took a year of negotiations with the elders before he could take it away.

"If this is a spiritual ruler snake then perhaps it really can stretch and change size," Barker says. "The other is that the true giant snake remains in the jungle with the admiring tribe and it took them the year of negotiations to find another retic[ulated python] large enough to give to the government."
Click to expand...


http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1116074,00.html

Emps
 
Yes, I suppose there is a valid alternative to the snake simply being incorrectly measured, that being that the zoo owner is a retard. And unlike the size of the snake, this observation is supported by much evidence.
 
Once again, my hopes/dreams of monster, giant-sized beasties are dashed upon the rocks of reality......d'oh!

:sob:
 
Desperado said:
Yes, I suppose there is a valid alternative to the snake simply being incorrectly measured, that being that the zoo owner is a retard. And unlike the size of the snake, this observation is supported by much evidence.
Click to expand...

hahaha
 
We will have to perform a simple experiment then, get a young reticulated python, feed it a dog every week for 20 years and measure.

But its a pretty impressive snake even though its not that big.
 
Did anyone see the docu on National geographic a while back about a posh guy who was hunting a 40ft + snake for an NY musuem. They finally tracked one down which was close to that length but the pesky natives who were helping him killed it as soon as they measured it and it fell short. I think it was about 35ft.
 
I saw that documentary, although he was after a 30ft snake and the one they found (and the natives killed) was around 20ft. I'm not sure why they killed it, but I know the guy didn't see any of the prize money.
 
As I recall it was mainly a cultural thing so that the locals got it rather than the 'great white hunter' figure who would otherwise have got the credit.
 
From the fornt page:

World's 'longest snake' comes up short

08 January 2004


KENDAL: It's still a big snake, just not a record-breaker.


When a recreation park in Indonesia put a huge reticulated python on show last week, keepers insisted to reporters it was 15 metres long. That made it the longest ever caught.

But amid growing skepticism of the claim, a photographer working for Reuters returned to the Curugsewu park in the small central Java town of Kendal yesterday with a measuring tape. The snake's true length – around 6.5 metres.

"I have no idea why the snake has shrunk," said one keeper when asked about the discrepancy, as the snake lounged on a tree branch inside its cage.

According to the Guinness World Records, the longest discovered snake was also a reticulated python from Indonesia. It was 10 metres long when found in Sulawesi island in 1912.

In 2002, Samantha, a 7.5 metre snake which was dubbed the largest in captivity, died in the Bronx Zoo in New York. Samantha came from Indonesia's side of Borneo island.

Record-breaking or not, word of the huge snake in Kendal has spread, tripling the number of visitors to the state-run park, normally known just for its scenery and waterfalls.
Click to expand...

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2777946a4560,00.html

I'm not sure if the Reuter's photographer is the guy in the Guardian but if not that seems to be independent confirmation.

Emps
 
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