Discovering Wonder
Not an anaconda but a similar species.
Discovering Wonder
K.L. Orion
My first post on Substack from over six months ago was titled Rediscovering Wonder. For those of you who haven’t read it, well read it. It’s linked right there. Now for those of you who haven’t read it and refuse to go read it right now (I completely understand, I do that with things all the time), the summary of it is that I was encouraging the reader to find wonder in the ordinary. Sometimes, the modern world seems like it’s been sucked off its wonder, which is entirely untrue. Which brings me to this post.
I wrote a sequel to that original post, Rediscovering Wonder #2, thinking these might be the first two of a series. Then I kind of dropped the ball on that and never got around to it. Until today with this post, Discovering Wonder. But take note of the two letter change. I am not writing this post to tell you to rediscover wonder in the ordinary. Today, I want to talk about new discoveries that sound absurd to be made in the modern day.
In an age where we’ve begun to explore space, it is easy for one to think that most of the Earth’s mysteries have been solved. Which they very much haven’t. For one thing, one might think all large animal species have been discovered. With that in mind, a headline that’s been floating around recently causes a great deal of shock.
The largest species of snake might have just been identified this year. Green anacondas are a famous species of amazonian constrictor snake that have been known about for a long time. But what we didn’t know until recently was that the species we consider the green anaconda is actually two separate species, the southern green anaconda and the newly identified northern green anaconda. And based on new evidence and new specimens, the northern green anaconda might be the biggest snake on the planet.
Now, from what I can collect, the discovery of this species is a little messy. It appears that this snake wasn’t just discovered out of the blue. Individuals of this species have probably been seen by western scientists before, but physically they are almost identical to southern green anacondas, so no difference was really noticed. The difference was identified when looking at their genetics, which have a 5.5% difference between them and the southern anaconda. For reference, we don’t even have a 2% difference between chimpanzees and us. Some of these genetic samples were recovered from extremely large individuals previously unknown to science, however, meaning this discovery isn’t purely on the genetic side.
And to get an appreciation of their size, these snakes have been documented to reach lengths of at least twenty feet. That’s a big snake.
But alright. A new snake species, no matter how big, in an isolated jungle. What about something bigger? Well, back in 2021, an entirely new whale species was identified in a similar situation.
Not a Rice’s whale, but the nearly identical Bryde’s whale as displayed in my copy of National Audubon Society Guide to Marine Mammals of the World.
We had known about individuals of the Rice’s whale species for a long time. What we didn’t know until 2021 because of genetic analysis was that they were a distinct species from the much more common Bryde’s whale. Here was a six thousand pound, forty-one foot long behemoth we had no idea was a separate species until its genetics were studied.
But as cool as these discoveries are, they also bring up a very important modern problem. Rice’s whale made headlines not only for being a newly discovered baleen whale species in the twenty-first century, but for being one of the most endangered baleen whale species upon its discovery. Less than a hundred individuals are left. And the northern green anaconda probably isn’t doing hot, either. Habitat loss is putting them in a tricky situation.
If we want to save these new species, we have to act now. We just found out they existed. It would be a tragedy to lose them already.
My Sources:
Excellent. Now how do we get people to care?
While I appreciate finding that these snakes are actually different they are also Very large snakes of which I am not very fond. For science sake I understand .