The Biggest Snake In The World

As far as anyone can tell, the history goes something like this: Nature created squids. Then, as sort of an exercise to keep the creative juices flowing, it asked itself "what's the smallest number of legs I could leave on that and still have it come off as terrifying?" Perplexingly, the answer was "one," and that's how we wound up with snakes.

Since then, the slithering deplorables have been haunting our conscious thoughts as, night by sleepless night, we've pondered the many ways that they could get into our homes: through an air vent, or up through the plumbing, or, worst of all, as an impulse purchase made by a spouse who's going through some personal stuff right now.

And of all of them, one is big enough to make you mess your drawers.

The way National Geographic tells it, the heavyweight champion of the snake kingdom is the green anaconda. It's big. It's just preposterously big. The best graphic they could come up with to contextualize its mass is labeled "size relative to a bus."

The anaconda can grow to lengths of up to 29 feet, weigh upwards of 500 pounds, and, as has been remarked upon by many respected zoological experts, don't want none unless you got buns, hon. Employing that old snake trick of unhinging its jaw, it eats, to put it bluntly, basically everything alive. Less succinctly, the Rainforest Alliance lists its diet as "large rodents, deer, fish, peccaries, capybaras, tapirs, turtles, birds, dogs, sheep, aquatic reptiles like caiman, and even jaguars." They are also difficult, but not impossible, to get onto a plane.

For the discerning nightmare collector, we'd also like to point out that the reticulated python can technically grow to be longer than the green anaconda, topping out at 32 feet. That said, they can never match the anaconda for weight, especially since there's one behind you right now wearing a cartoon napkin tied around its neck. Wherever that is.