Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: where do you stand on giant snakes? Where do I
Speaker 1: stand on? And not near the head? That's right, That's
Speaker 1: that's the worst place to stand. Yeah, what about you? Um,
Speaker 1: I've always loved him, um, you know, because I think
Speaker 1: probably from like an early age seeing U Cob the
Speaker 1: Snake and Jungle Book trying to eat mowgli. Um, you
Speaker 1: can't help it be fascinated with the seductive power of
Speaker 1: of any kind of serpent, right, and then the possibility
Speaker 1: they can swallow you whole and it and just how
Speaker 1: inhuman the creature is, no arms or legs, just slithering around.
Speaker 1: That's funny you bring up a jungle Book because related Ricky, Ticky, Tavi,
Speaker 1: Nag and nagaina some of my favorites in action there,
Speaker 1: but also the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad from Kill Bill
Speaker 1: Volumes One and two. Oh yes, which was more like
Speaker 1: the human embodiment of snakes. Yeah, but yeah, certainly just
Speaker 1: the symbolic power of snakes throughout human history can't be denied.
Speaker 1: But because they end up representing so much, you have,
Speaker 1: like your cosmic world serpents in so many different cultures,
Speaker 1: the idea that there's some gigantic primal snake that plays
Speaker 1: into the creation and or destruction of the world. Yeah, exactly, Yeah,
Speaker 1: which we we did an entire episode on which I'll
Speaker 1: include a link to that on the landing page for
Speaker 1: this episode. But but even in popular culture, um, modern
Speaker 1: pop culture, we see giant snakes continue to pop up.
Speaker 1: We we can't help but be fascinated by the uh
Speaker 1: you know, the struggle between stay Conan the Barbarian and
Speaker 1: a giant snake in in Bulsa Dooms Dungeon. That was
Speaker 1: certainly when I was enjoyed watching up. That's only one
Speaker 1: I always enjoyed watching as I was growing up. Um
Speaker 1: Or then, of course there's Anaconda in which digested John
Speaker 1: Voight falls out of the monster serpent. There's also Beetlejuice. Oh, yes,
Speaker 1: with the the sand worming creatures. Well, actually Michael Keaton
Speaker 1: turns into a snake, giant snake on the banister. But yes,
Speaker 1: at the end of the movie or near the end,
Speaker 1: he's consumed by the sandform. And I think Freddy Crueger
Speaker 1: also turned into it like a big snake in eight
Speaker 1: one of the victims in three or four I can't remember,
Speaker 1: dream Warriors maybe. And in terms of mythology too, you'll
Speaker 1: see that Groutslan is an Afrikaans word meaning great snake.
Speaker 1: And by the way, this is from the Mental philost
Speaker 1: article eleven Legendary Monsters of Africa and the monster of
Speaker 1: that name grouts Lang lives in a cave called the
Speaker 1: Wonder Hole and the area of South Africa. And the
Speaker 1: story is that the original broots groots Long was found
Speaker 1: to be too powerful, so the gods subdivided the animal
Speaker 1: into two species, the elephant in the snake. Yeah, however,
Speaker 1: Groups Long or two escaped in we'd have to have two, right,
Speaker 1: and uh, they reproduced. So that's the idea of this,
Speaker 1: and that this monster could grow up to sixty feet long.
Speaker 1: And supposedly it's cave is full of diamonds, but nobody
Speaker 1: knows for sure because Groups Long is guarding it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: who's gonna the only way you're gonna wind up in
Speaker 1: that cave? I guess you. You pass through the other
Speaker 1: side of the snake. Well, And what I love about
Speaker 1: this is that there's this idea that I have on
Speaker 1: my mind, this romantic notion of back in the day,
Speaker 1: everybody's sitting around the fire and talking about groots long,
Speaker 1: this giant snake growing to sixty feet long, indeed so tall,
Speaker 1: tales of of of what snakes can consist of and
Speaker 1: how big they can get. Yeah, getting to the heart
Speaker 1: of our question today. Yeah, indeed, what is the largest
Speaker 1: snake that has ever existed? So obviously, by the way
Speaker 1: we phrase this question, they are kind of two areas
Speaker 1: where going to explore. The first question being what's the
Speaker 1: largest snake alive today, which, as you'll explore, is a
Speaker 1: little more complicated above a question than you might think.
Speaker 1: And then what is the largest snake that has ever lived?
Speaker 1: Taking into an account the the fossil record and what
Speaker 1: we know about large serpents in prehistoric times. And you know,
Speaker 1: what do you mean by large? Do you mean weight
Speaker 1: or a link? That's right? So, uh, to that meet
Speaker 1: this criteria, which you could call. The largest snakes in
Speaker 1: the world presently living are the reticulated python and the
Speaker 1: green anaconda. And in both the cases we are definitely
Speaker 1: talking about the females of the species, because the females
Speaker 1: are larger in both the reticulated python and the green anaconda.
Speaker 1: Now it's worth noting that on March six of this year,
Speaker 1: the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the reticulated python
Speaker 1: and the green anaconda as two of four injury US
Speaker 1: Wildlife pieces and will prohibit import of the snakes into
Speaker 1: the US and its territories, as well as transport across
Speaker 1: state lines. Uh this is because not only are these
Speaker 1: these two snakes some of the largest living snakes, they
Speaker 1: are also traded commercially as pets. And what that means
Speaker 1: is that sometimes these really powerful snakes have been intentionally
Speaker 1: released into the wild, while others will escape enclosures. And
Speaker 1: so if you look at Florida, for instance, where you've
Speaker 1: seen the Burmese python taking over parts of Florida, you'll
Speaker 1: see that the native wildlife is really at risk because
Speaker 1: these snakes, their sides and their strength they make they
Speaker 1: make them apex predators in the environments that they're already
Speaker 1: indigenous too. But put them in one where there are
Speaker 1: lesser predators around, you can see how they would run
Speaker 1: rampant and to just give you an idea of the
Speaker 1: kind of strength that they're sporting. Here, I mean to
Speaker 1: turn to this account by Todd Mexico, writing for an
Speaker 1: multiversity dot Org, he says, um, with reticulated pythons, if
Speaker 1: the antlers, because they go after unculates, are small enough,
Speaker 1: they are simply ingested and digested. However, if the antlers
Speaker 1: are too large on the animals trying to take down,
Speaker 1: the snake can actually break them back to lie alongside
Speaker 1: the body and then consume them. Um. Then he says
Speaker 1: that sometimes, very rarely, that the snake that particulated python
Speaker 1: actually swallows the hind quarters and then when it works
Speaker 1: its way to the antlers, it stops and it allows
Speaker 1: its digestive acids to break down the animals flesh until
Speaker 1: the antlers actually become weak and drop off, essentially decapitating
Speaker 1: the creature with your own digestive fluids. I love that
Speaker 1: this is such a wonderful, grotesque ou thing that I mean,
Speaker 1: that's the reason. Uh, you know, you can't help but
Speaker 1: but love these giant serpents, you know, particularly the constrictors. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's grizzly stuff, and and yes you're attracted, but also
Speaker 1: repulsed by them. Yeah, I'm even when you go to
Speaker 1: the pet store, it's like you don't really want to
Speaker 1: see the cute little mouse eaten by the snake, but
Speaker 1: you can't look away, and yet you probably don't look away.
Speaker 1: All right, So let's uh, let's look at these two
Speaker 1: species and a little more detail. Uh. First, we have
Speaker 1: the Asian reticulated python, Python reticulatis, so called for the
Speaker 1: geometric color pattern on its body. They thrive and steamy
Speaker 1: tropical rainforest throughout Southeast Asia. Uh. They need water, and
Speaker 1: they need tropical environments with temperatures in the range of
Speaker 1: eight degrees fahrenheit, so they're like it hot. Uh. They're
Speaker 1: non social, solitary creatures. They ambush their prey frequently waiting
Speaker 1: in trees. And that's gonna be key when we start
Speaker 1: talking about their their their length and weight, because obviously
Speaker 1: the creature has to crawl up into the into the trees.
Speaker 1: It's not gonna be just super heavy. It has to
Speaker 1: have a certain amount of lightness on its inside. They
Speaker 1: tend to feed on birds and mammals, and as far
Speaker 1: as the mammals go, the smaller ones, the younger ones
Speaker 1: are gonna eat mostly rats, but as they grow, and
Speaker 1: they grow throughout their life, they're gonna shift to larger mammals,
Speaker 1: so porcupines, monkeys, wild pigs, mouse, deer uh. And Now,
Speaker 1: like all reptiles, they have a low metabolic rate, which
Speaker 1: allows them to go without food for a long period
Speaker 1: of time. So it's not a situation where they're having
Speaker 1: to eat a monkey every day, but they score a
Speaker 1: monkey every once in a while. They're good. Right. Um. Again,
Speaker 1: the females grow the largest, and they usually lay twenty
Speaker 1: five to eighty or so eggs. Uh. And they also
Speaker 1: they they provide a certain amount of care and protection
Speaker 1: for the eggs until they hatch, and then once they hatch,
Speaker 1: there on their own. Now, as far as how big
Speaker 1: these uh, these these gals get. Field measurements in survey
Speaker 1: averaged a little under twelve feet or three point two
Speaker 1: meters in the jungles of southern Sumatra, maxing out at
Speaker 1: just shy of twenty eight six point one. Um. You'll
Speaker 1: find less reputable accounts they hit the thirty three and
Speaker 1: forty mark, but we'll get to those shortly. For the
Speaker 1: most part, however, you're going to find the longer reported
Speaker 1: measurements with the reticulated Now in the other corner here
Speaker 1: of the ring, we have unixte miranus, that is the
Speaker 1: green anaconda, and though it's not as long as reticulated python,
Speaker 1: it is the uncontested heavyweight champion of the snake world
Speaker 1: according to the National Zoo. In captivity, they can grow
Speaker 1: to twenty nine ft long, they can weigh more than
Speaker 1: five fifty pounds, and they can have a diameter of
Speaker 1: more than twelve inches. Now, most documented instances of anaconda's
Speaker 1: weights are more in the two hundred to four hundred
Speaker 1: range and grow to about twenty feet in length. So well,
Speaker 1: we can say that this long and fifty is at
Speaker 1: the outer limits of its morphology. Now they're a member
Speaker 1: of the Boa family and they can be found in swamps,
Speaker 1: marshes and slow moving streams in Trinidad, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil,
Speaker 1: northern Bolivia, northeastern Peru, and French Guiana. And no surprise here.
Speaker 1: The anaconda is a great swimmer, super stealthy in the water,
Speaker 1: and part of that is because its weight is being
Speaker 1: held up by the buoyancy of the water, right which
Speaker 1: it allows it to go much faster and it can
Speaker 1: remain underwater for up to ten minutes at a time.
Speaker 1: So anacondas like crocodiles, have eyes and nostrils that are
Speaker 1: designed to poke above the surface of the water, and
Speaker 1: that really helps them to strike very quickly and efficiently.
Speaker 1: So on land they're not so elegant and stealthy, but
Speaker 1: they can sidewine and they use these large j shaped
Speaker 1: coils to pull themselves along, which I think really speaks
Speaker 1: to how incredibly muscular they are. Now they are non
Speaker 1: venomous constrictors. They coil those those muscular bodies around captured
Speaker 1: prey and they squeeze until the animals phyxiates. They can
Speaker 1: unhinge their jaws to stretch their mouths around the prey,
Speaker 1: eating the carcass whole, and they have four rows of
Speaker 1: backwards facing teeth on their upper jaws to help grab
Speaker 1: prey really fastened and swallow it whole. They dine on
Speaker 1: wild pigs, dear birds, turtles, caymans, even jaguars, and on occasion,
Speaker 1: white tailed deer, which can grow to be about a
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty pounds or more in the wild, which
Speaker 1: makes you go, oh, a hundred fifty pounds, and that
Speaker 1: that's kind of on par with humans, So would they
Speaker 1: go after a human? And despite the premise of the
Speaker 1: show Eating Alive, in which naturalist Paul Rosalie offers himself
Speaker 1: to be swallowed whole by an anaconda, there are no
Speaker 1: verified reports of anaconda's ingesting a human being. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just it's gonna be a harder kill to make, write,
Speaker 1: a harder ambush to pull off. And are there a
Speaker 1: lot of humans around in their immediate environment? Um? Now,
Speaker 1: when it comes to maximum sizes for both of these species,
Speaker 1: you might think it would be easy to just find
Speaker 1: a good ballpark figure about how big these these these
Speaker 1: gals can get. Uh. But but you'd be wrong. And
Speaker 1: I found this out when I was putting together an
Speaker 1: article for for How Stuff Works. Um It. It quickly
Speaker 1: becomes a game of like whose figures do you trust?
Speaker 1: And whose whose figures are they trusting? Um And if
Speaker 1: you want to really thorough breakdown of the different accounts
Speaker 1: of maximum size of both the reticulated python and the
Speaker 1: green anaconda, UM, I would recommend you check out John C.
Speaker 1: Murphy's website on record snake Sizes on clue to link
Speaker 1: to that on the page for this episode. UM, because
Speaker 1: you basically, when it comes to these these reports of
Speaker 1: giant snakes, which themselves are rare occurrences in remote locations,
Speaker 1: often tended to by untrained individuals, you see local hearsay
Speaker 1: at times, you see second and third hand accounts. You
Speaker 1: see mere sightings where someone just saw the snake and
Speaker 1: they're giving you an estimation on how long they think
Speaker 1: it was. Um. Certainly just exaggerated accounts, just sort of
Speaker 1: like the I cotta fish this big situation, and it
Speaker 1: grows with the telling right questionable measurement techniques. In some cases,
Speaker 1: they'll be questions about, well did you measure it from
Speaker 1: you know, the from snout to tail or are you
Speaker 1: dealing with the with the decapitated body? Is this the
Speaker 1: hide and it is the hide? Are you stretching it
Speaker 1: out when you're measuring it? And how are you measuring it?
Speaker 1: Are you just walking alongside it and doing paces? Are
Speaker 1: you using rods? Are using measurement tape? Um? All these
Speaker 1: questions end up coming into play. And I would imagine
Speaker 1: too that it's not like going to your vent and
Speaker 1: just dropping your dog on the scale. Right. If you're
Speaker 1: trying to weigh a snake. There's a lot more to it,
Speaker 1: I mean in terms of going to get a handle
Speaker 1: on this and then accurately weigh it. And again, these
Speaker 1: are encounters that are occurring often in remote locations, again
Speaker 1: with with untrained individuals. UM. I'm gonna just roll through
Speaker 1: a couple of encounters that Murphy outlines on his website.
Speaker 1: One is an alleged thirty three foot reticulated python UH
Speaker 1: that was mentioned in the ninety Natural History magazine story
Speaker 1: and the story itself was about a nineteen twelve siding
Speaker 1: and UH. As Murphy points out this, this stat, this
Speaker 1: thirty three foot stat continues to pop up in articles
Speaker 1: on giant snakes, despite his continued efforts to try and
Speaker 1: uh and kill it. Um. Here is what the author
Speaker 1: of the original piece, Harry c Raven, wrote, and you
Speaker 1: can tell us how reputable it sounds. He says, I
Speaker 1: left the schooner and went inland a short distance to
Speaker 1: camp on the mountains, which were covered with virgin jungle.
Speaker 1: The white men at the mind told me of a
Speaker 1: huge python one of their relatives that killed a few
Speaker 1: days before of my arrival, and showed me a very
Speaker 1: poor photograph of it. Taken after it had been killed
Speaker 1: and dragged a camp. Though the print was dull, you
Speaker 1: could see a man standing on the huge body, which
Speaker 1: was about a foot thick. A civil engineer told me
Speaker 1: that it was just ten meters long. I asked him
Speaker 1: if he had had I asked him if he had
Speaker 1: taste off its length, but he said no, he had
Speaker 1: measured it with the surveying tape. So here you see
Speaker 1: a number of factors. Right, it was witnessed by other
Speaker 1: people killed before he arrived. And as Murphy points out
Speaker 1: on his website, where do you get a photo to
Speaker 1: alot that quickly? In nineteen twelve, Sulawesi okay, so photograph, hearsay,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if the methods entirely Yeah, what could
Speaker 1: go wrong with that? I know? And still, as he
Speaker 1: points out, you still see that's that that that length
Speaker 1: of that record length showing up in various articles and
Speaker 1: wiki pages. Another record length that continued to pop up
Speaker 1: throughout the later twentieth century came from the Done Lehman
Speaker 1: record of a green anaconda. So the way this one
Speaker 1: broke down is in nineteen forty four, herpetologist immit Ray
Speaker 1: Read Done published an article on the reptiles of Columbia,
Speaker 1: and it included a statement from his friend and geologist
Speaker 1: Robert Lehman, who was working in the area for an
Speaker 1: oil company. Lehman claimed to have killed and measured an
Speaker 1: eleven point five meter anaconda in eastern Colombia. Raymond Gilmore
Speaker 1: of the US Fish and Wildlife Service later investigated this
Speaker 1: record in nineteen fifty four, and the results were less encouraging.
Speaker 1: Lehman later stated in a in a letter about his
Speaker 1: encounter with the snake. He says, if memory serves me right,
Speaker 1: it required almost three lengths of the rod to obtain
Speaker 1: the dimensions. But I could not swear to this in
Speaker 1: that it may have just been almost two lengths of
Speaker 1: the rod. So again you see somebody's sort of faint
Speaker 1: recollection of how it went down in in a remote location, uh,
Speaker 1: dealing with the un endeavor outside of his field of
Speaker 1: expertise using a rod as a measurement, Yeah, for a
Speaker 1: dead snake. So so hopefully this helps to illustrate just
Speaker 1: a little bit of the problems you get into when
Speaker 1: you're dealing with these these often old accounts of particularly
Speaker 1: large specimens. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break
Speaker 1: and we get back. We're going to venture into the
Speaker 1: sarajn rainforest. Alright, we're back. Alright, Julie, let's jump into
Speaker 1: the time machine, take us back to the hopefully safely,
Speaker 1: to the Sarah Jean Rainforest. Well, the Sarah Hone Rainforest
Speaker 1: once hosted the largest snake that ever existed, or that
Speaker 1: we know about so far. And the reason why we
Speaker 1: know that is because sixty million year old fossils of
Speaker 1: the titan Boa sajus were discovered in a Colombian coal
Speaker 1: mine by a paleontologists led by Jonathan Block of the
Speaker 1: University of Florida and Carlo Sierramo of the Smithsonian Tropical
Speaker 1: Research Institute. So, what we're talking about here, and we
Speaker 1: won't go into too many specifics right now, but we're
Speaker 1: talking about a snake that was longer than a great
Speaker 1: white and bigger than a hippo. Now, the Titan Boa
Speaker 1: was sustained by a neotropical rainforest that would have come
Speaker 1: into existence in the Paleocene epoch, shortly after the extinction
Speaker 1: of dinosaurs. But according to Scott Wing, a paleontologist from
Speaker 1: the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the rainforest had
Speaker 1: a really low plant diversity, and he chalks this up
Speaker 1: to well, it could either be because of a new
Speaker 1: type of plant community that still hadn't had time to diversify,
Speaker 1: or it was still recovering from the events that caused
Speaker 1: the mass extinction of dinosaurs sixty five million years ago. Uh.
Speaker 1: But of course, even though this was a huge creature,
Speaker 1: that does not mean that it didn't have competition, because
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eleven, University of Florida researchers discovered
Speaker 1: the fossils of a twenty foot extinct species in that
Speaker 1: same Colombian coal mine. And this is a freshwater relative
Speaker 1: to modern crocodiles. It is the first known land animal
Speaker 1: from Palatine New World tropics specialized for eating fish, meaning
Speaker 1: that it competed with titan boa for food. And it's
Speaker 1: the second crocodila form that was found in the same cave.
Speaker 1: But of course the the other one was the diet
Speaker 1: was more generalized, so it wouldn't have been competing with
Speaker 1: the titan boa. So although this twenty ft long relative
Speaker 1: to the croc would have been really formidable, uh, it's
Speaker 1: it's a much smaller and more vulnerable offspring. Probably would
Speaker 1: have shown up on Titan BoA's dinner plate. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: were kind of co apex predators in this uh this
Speaker 1: really steamy, dangerous world, tropical environment full of car size
Speaker 1: turtles on one hand, and then twenty ft uh hell
Speaker 1: crocks on the other. And I say hell crocks because
Speaker 1: they named the species after one of the rivers and
Speaker 1: Dante's inferno. Um. But then the Titana Boa itself uh
Speaker 1: palon tagists estimate it's tip tip to tail length came
Speaker 1: in into whopping forty two ft or thirteen meters, and
Speaker 1: it weighed more than a ton um. It would have
Speaker 1: looked something like a modern day Boa constrictor, but it
Speaker 1: would have behaved more like the water dwelling anaconda that
Speaker 1: we described in in the first half of this episode.
Speaker 1: So again, it's it's massive weight is is is supported
Speaker 1: by the buoyssey of the water, and it's using that
Speaker 1: as a means to ambush its prey. Now, palont Is
Speaker 1: really kind of hit the jackpot in actually discovering fossil
Speaker 1: evidence of the Titana Boa because for one thing, you,
Speaker 1: as we've discussed before, the whole fossil game is kind
Speaker 1: of a game of chance in some respects, you know,
Speaker 1: are the conditions going to be just right for the
Speaker 1: preservation of the fossils so that we can actually get
Speaker 1: a glimpse of what what kind of skeletons these creatures
Speaker 1: and primordial age had. Well, in this case, they got
Speaker 1: really fortunate because they found an entire skull, which is
Speaker 1: which is almost unheard of, an entire snake skull, The
Speaker 1: entire Titanoboa skull uh not broken into pieces, but just
Speaker 1: completely contained. They're preserved in the shale mud of this environment.
Speaker 1: And then they were able to collect some vertebrae as well.
Speaker 1: And then by comparing the size of the preserved vertebrae
Speaker 1: fossils with the vertebrae of existing large snakes, they were
Speaker 1: able to extrapolate just how large it would have been.
Speaker 1: So again, forty two ft long, more than a ton.
Speaker 1: Virtually the king and or queen of the of the environment.
Speaker 1: They're unrivaled. Once it reached its adult form, yeah, and
Speaker 1: consider this an order to eat its prey whole. Titan
Speaker 1: Boa had jaw bones that snapped apart and flexible ligaments
Speaker 1: for opening its mouth almost one hundred and eighty degrees,
Speaker 1: which led some very clever people at the Smithsonian Channel
Speaker 1: to wonder because, by the way, the Smithsonian Channel has
Speaker 1: a documentary on the Titan Boa, but it made them
Speaker 1: wonder t Rex versus Titan Boa, who would come out
Speaker 1: on top? And that's because the t Rex this we know,
Speaker 1: has a ferocious bite, a bite force that's twice um
Speaker 1: of a great white m guess. I mean it comes
Speaker 1: down to who has a home turiff, I guess, and
Speaker 1: which one is using the time machine obviously right because
Speaker 1: they didn't exist at the same time. But it's it's
Speaker 1: kind of fun to think about. Yeah. I think it
Speaker 1: goes down in a like a B movie kind of
Speaker 1: way where time travelers go back to check out the
Speaker 1: Titana Boa, they get eaten. Titana Boa clowns into the
Speaker 1: time machine, accidentally knocks the controls, and then it travels
Speaker 1: through time battling various creatures. That sounds oddly like the
Speaker 1: next alien movie in the franchise, perhaps, yeah, I say,
Speaker 1: bring it on. Yeah, alright, so how could it have
Speaker 1: gotten so big? We don't know exactly, of course, And
Speaker 1: by the way, prehistoric largess is not exclusive to the
Speaker 1: Titan Boa. For instance, the plant eating Argentina Saurus is
Speaker 1: thought to have measured more than one hundred feet long
Speaker 1: and weighed over one hundred tons, and the ground sloth
Speaker 1: was the size of today's elephant. Can you imagine? I
Speaker 1: I love to imagine it. We have a one of
Speaker 1: those giant sloth replicas at the local Firm Bank Museum
Speaker 1: here in Atlanta, and every time I get to look
Speaker 1: at it, I'm just like, what would it be like
Speaker 1: to smell this creature in her life? And I always
Speaker 1: think of like, it looks like a rejected Muppet character
Speaker 1: for me, and I love it. It's got that what
Speaker 1: looks to be a smile alright. So one idea for
Speaker 1: the largess is that when the ice ages occurred, warm
Speaker 1: blooded animals increased in size to retain heat. Cold blooded
Speaker 1: ones favored large bodies in warmer climates to better insulate
Speaker 1: them from overheating, and as we see with the Titan Boa,
Speaker 1: it was living in a neotropical rainforest, so that would
Speaker 1: have made sense. Another theory requires that we look to
Speaker 1: the dinosaurs living in the Cretaceous period. Carbon dioxide was
Speaker 1: a lot more prevalent than today, and as a result,
Speaker 1: the temperature was much higher and in some areas of
Speaker 1: the world were carpeted by vegetation. So what does this mean.
Speaker 1: It means that it's a kind of all you can
Speaker 1: eat buffet um and the limits of morphology at that
Speaker 1: time could have been expanding because it's no longer a
Speaker 1: game of okay over time and evolutionary terms, the morphology
Speaker 1: of these creatures has to shrink so that they require
Speaker 1: less food and less energy. Nope, there's plenty of it
Speaker 1: for everyone. It's a buffet. Indeed, when we're looking at
Speaker 1: the size of Titana boah or the green anaconda or
Speaker 1: the reticulated python, the maximum size has everything to do
Speaker 1: with ambient environmental temperature, metabolic rate, and how much stuff
Speaker 1: is there for them to eat. And if you travel
Speaker 1: back to a steamy your time with a little more
Speaker 1: biomass around, you're gonna get bigger snakes. Apparently a steamier time.
Speaker 1: That sounds like um romance, Boustier bus star. Oh yeah, well, hey,
Speaker 1: you know the Adam eve snake. That's all there, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: and snake charmers. Yeah, this doesn't have to do with
Speaker 1: the world's largest snake, but we thought we would roll
Speaker 1: this up for you. If you live in you know,
Speaker 1: South Asia and your snake charmer, you want a king cobra.
Speaker 1: So although they can hear, they're actually deaf to ambient
Speaker 1: noises that the flute would make. Right, So when you
Speaker 1: see them responding to the snake charmer, it is really
Speaker 1: just to the flute, to the movement to the flute,
Speaker 1: and if the snake charmer is actually keeping a beat
Speaker 1: with his foot on the ground, and so they're also
Speaker 1: using those cues to move around. So it has nothing
Speaker 1: really to do with the music of the flute, just
Speaker 1: the shape of the flute, movement of the flute, and
Speaker 1: the sound of the thumping on the ground. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: music isn't that enthralling? All right? You know, we got
Speaker 1: a few minutes here, Let's call over the robot and
Speaker 1: do a little listener mail. All right. We received a
Speaker 1: great bit of listener mail from a listener, Steffen, who
Speaker 1: is a certified neurological music therapist. But he had an
Speaker 1: interesting account of of sleep paralysis to share it with,
Speaker 1: which is we've discussed in the past of sleep paralysis
Speaker 1: is you know when you're you're you're waking up and
Speaker 1: your body still on lockdown from dreaming and you're kind
Speaker 1: of been. You're in the state in between that's really
Speaker 1: prone to hallucination. Uh, he says. Periodically, since I was eighteen,
Speaker 1: I've experienced sleep paralysis, which you mentioned on the podcast. However,
Speaker 1: I've come to learn how to control it. I have
Speaker 1: had many different hallucinatory experiences, including door swinging open, evil presences,
Speaker 1: strong winds entering the bedroom, etcetera, but none compared to
Speaker 1: the tipping point in the summer of two thousand six.
Speaker 1: I returned home in the summer after my sleep paralysis
Speaker 1: reutal freshman year at college. I was taking a nap
Speaker 1: with my girlfriend when I when I became conscious and
Speaker 1: could not move. Here we go, I thought to myself,
Speaker 1: as the hallucinatory experience began completely, black demons with glowing
Speaker 1: yellow eyes entered the room and surrounded the bed. I
Speaker 1: threw myself out of the bed, only to be lifted
Speaker 1: into the air by invisible forces and thrown back into
Speaker 1: the bed like an apple core being tossed out of
Speaker 1: a car window on the freeway. The demons began sinking
Speaker 1: me into the bed as I was forced to suffocate
Speaker 1: my own girlfriend. At the same time, I began shouting
Speaker 1: wake up, wake up to my girlfriend, hoping that she
Speaker 1: could wake up and stop the nightmare. I threw myself
Speaker 1: out of the bed several more times, only to float
Speaker 1: higher above the bed and sink deeper. When thrown back down,
Speaker 1: I came within what felt like inches to death as
Speaker 1: I sunk deeper and deeper into the mattress. Eventually I
Speaker 1: closed my eyes and awoke from my nightmare. I asked
Speaker 1: my girlfriend if she had heard me screaming or moving
Speaker 1: or anything, and she told me no. At this point,
Speaker 1: knowing nothing of sleep paralysis, I actually thought I was possessed. Immediately,
Speaker 1: I went to the computer, began researching, and quickly found
Speaker 1: out that I was experiencing sleep paralysis, typically induced in
Speaker 1: periods of transition in life, stress moving to college being one.
Speaker 1: Of course, I was comforted. I've been fascinated with possession
Speaker 1: in high school and had many debates with my religious
Speaker 1: friends on the concepts of demons and exorcism, so this
Speaker 1: experience was already hiding somewhere in my subconscious. Therefore, when
Speaker 1: I woke up and couldn't move, I became frightened and uh.
Speaker 1: And because I was frightened still in rim sleep, my
Speaker 1: hallucinatory experiences were frightening in nature. As time went on,
Speaker 1: I continued to experience sleep paralysis, but I was no
Speaker 1: longer scared of the experience, and I learned how to
Speaker 1: control my hallucinations. Thank you for reading, and hopefully this
Speaker 1: story will help someone who may be experiencing the terror
Speaker 1: that is sleep paralysis have a wonderful weekend. Yeah, thank
Speaker 1: you for sharing that. I just terrifying. Have you had
Speaker 1: it before? I have not had it, but I've I've
Speaker 1: read enough accounts of it, and certainly Oliver Sacks goes
Speaker 1: into it at depth in his book Hallucinations. And yet
Speaker 1: even if you only experience one k to it in
Speaker 1: your life, and uh, statistics very I think goes high
Speaker 1: as of people have experienced at least one case. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've had it throughout my life pretty sparsely, um in
Speaker 1: the last ten years. But my husband has been a
Speaker 1: little bit freaked out before because he said that I
Speaker 1: was completely still once, but I was going I wasn't
Speaker 1: opening my mouth or anything, but he could hear sound
Speaker 1: being made inside my mouth, and in my dream I
Speaker 1: was full on screaming with my mouth open. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it can it can be a little unsettling, all right.
Speaker 1: We have another listener email here from Brent. He says, Hello,
Speaker 1: I'm a very big fan. You guys do a wonderful
Speaker 1: job explaining the topic you take on in your podcast.
Speaker 1: I was listening to a podcast on hallucinations. My family
Speaker 1: suffered from sleepwalking. As far back as I have been
Speaker 1: able to track, my family, particularly the males, have had
Speaker 1: sleepwalking issues. As I have aged now sixty, my sleepwalking
Speaker 1: frequently has decreased a very seldom, but my son, who
Speaker 1: has thirty, still sleepwalks every night. I've had episodes of
Speaker 1: sleepwalking that I remember struggling with what I was seeing
Speaker 1: and what my mind is telling me I should be seeing.
Speaker 1: When I'm sleepwalking, I see everything and everyone that I
Speaker 1: would if I was awake, except my mind creates more
Speaker 1: images and or smells, textures, and sounds. I could write
Speaker 1: a book about my sleepwalking experiences. My understanding is the
Speaker 1: mind is lost between normal sleeping mode and awake mode,
Speaker 1: allowing the brain to create the show normally done when asleep,
Speaker 1: but allowing the person to talk and respond to people
Speaker 1: and things around them. The person's eyes are open and
Speaker 1: can carry on conversation with people. Would like to hear
Speaker 1: what you can tell me about this, and I've gotten
Speaker 1: my queue and it's been in there for a while.
Speaker 1: I need to get to it. I believe it's called
Speaker 1: Sleepwalk with Me, And this is the account of the
Speaker 1: guy who has had some like extreme sleep walking um
Speaker 1: situations throughout his life where he actually has to sleep
Speaker 1: to h zip himself up into a sleeping bag to
Speaker 1: try to prevent him from escaping. Yeah, that's that's some
Speaker 1: extreme parasomnia for sure. All right, let's do one last
Speaker 1: listener mail. This comes to us from Benjamin. Benjamin says, Hi,
Speaker 1: I stuff to blow your mind crew. I'm a relatively
Speaker 1: new listener coming to your podcast from Other House Stuff
Speaker 1: Works podcast, and I love it already. I recently listened
Speaker 1: to your episode could You Outrun a Fireball, which was
Speaker 1: great as always, but covered the possibility about running wildfire
Speaker 1: or explosion. I will admit reading the title, I had
Speaker 1: imagined a slightly different subject, rather than explosions or wildfire,
Speaker 1: outrunning an actual ball of fire or more precisely, plasma.
Speaker 1: Early in my life I worked as an electronics technician
Speaker 1: aboard a warship in the U. S. Navy. In the
Speaker 1: course of my work, I periodically had to work in
Speaker 1: the vicinity of energized gear live bus bars carrying extremely
Speaker 1: high voltage and high current since operation. Since operation is
Speaker 1: key for a worship worship, we do not always have
Speaker 1: the luxury of turning off the power to conduct repairs
Speaker 1: or maintenance. My crew always took ample precautions for this,
Speaker 1: But Navy ghost stories were common about the dreaded plasma ball.
Speaker 1: As the story goes, a worker near one of these
Speaker 1: high voltage panels accidentally dropped a larger wrench, which touched
Speaker 1: two of the bus bars and caused a short. At
Speaker 1: voltages this high, the arc vaporized the middle of the
Speaker 1: two inch thick steel wrench and created a cloud of
Speaker 1: superheated metal particles of plasma ball. Not only are these
Speaker 1: things extraordinarily dangerous, as they are in order of magnitude
Speaker 1: hotter than any normal fire. As the story goes, it
Speaker 1: chased a man as he ran for his life. The
Speaker 1: explanation they give is that when you run, it creates
Speaker 1: an eddy current or an area of lower pressure behind
Speaker 1: you that the floating ball of plasma is drawn into.
Speaker 1: Though this coutionary tale has a rather gruesome end, I
Speaker 1: thought it would make for a great follow up topic
Speaker 1: about fireballs. I cannot vouch for the scientific accuracy of
Speaker 1: the claim, as it is just a story passed around,
Speaker 1: but the exclamation seems plausible to me. I would love
Speaker 1: to hear your take on it. Thanks, and keep up
Speaker 1: a great show. Been from Virginia. Well, that sounds fascinating.
Speaker 1: I would love to look into the into into the
Speaker 1: possible existence of of plasma balls about aboard navy vessels.
Speaker 1: Plasma balls I mean chasing down unfortunate sailors and burning
Speaker 1: them the embers. I love it. You love the idea
Speaker 1: of the not a lot, but I love the idea,
Speaker 1: the idea of the plasma ball. All right, Hey, in
Speaker 1: the meantime, we've you want to see what other episodes
Speaker 1: we've covered, blog post videos, links out of social media?
Speaker 1: What have you head on? Over stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: mind dot com? That is the mothership. That is uh
Speaker 1: that's the homepage. And if you have thoughts we want
Speaker 1: to hear them. You can send them to us by
Speaker 1: emailing us at blow the Mind at house to works
Speaker 1: dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Speaker 1: Is it how stuff works dot Com