Oh, My Aching Arse

When last we met, I was lamenting the lack of internet from my laptop and the lack of educational television. I have more than made up for that lack in the last 90 hours. Animal Planet is my narcotic and my anti-drug, my alpha and omega sans caps. It’s the first thing I watch in the morning and the last thing I leave on when I put “sleep mode” on the television. (I have kind of a problem falling asleep in the dark or in silence…I blame living in Alaska for the dark thing—no darkness in summer—and dorm life for the silence.)

Do you know that the Riley’s olive turtle nests by the thousands along the coast of Costa Rica, but only in the evenings of the waxing tide? That in one season 40 million eggs will be laid, but that only about 5% will survive, and of the 2 million hatchlings, about 5% will make it to adulthood? Or that coatis and ghost crabs love to eat the turtle eggs? Or that capuchin monkeys wait until low tide in the mangrove swamps, dig up clams and whack them against branches until the clam gets stressed and loosens up? You do now, and you know why? Because I watch Animal Planet.

What I really love is that this photographer, Austin Stevens (:Snakemaster)—who actually has more experience with snakes than many professional herpetologists, having grown up in South Africa and photographed snakes and other animals since his teen years (he’s Croc Dundee old, not Croc Hunter old)—is in the Amazon for this episode, looking for anacondas, and he’s saying some ridiculous things: He leapt three stories (so approximately 27 feet) off a boat to catch a snake in the water (its natural habitat) because he didn’t have time to take the stairs. Was it an anaconda? No, and he knew it: it was a kind of corn snake, but “it was just gorgeous and I couldn’t miss it.” Then he found a Peruvian tree boa—up a tree over the water, mind you—and leapt out of his canoe, went up the tree, wrestled the boa, and—while trying to get it back to the canoe, where the cameras were, fell about 15 feet into the water. Then he tossed the boa into his canoe, jumped in after it, draped it back over its branch for photos, and said “I hope I find an anaconda less aggressive.” Clearly it’s the snake’s natural aggression, and not the serious manhandling it just received, that make it grumpy. Uhuh.

He’s just caught a small anaconda, only about a meter or so long, and got bit. One thing that he didn’t mention, which he should have, is the amount of bacteria that can be found in a snake mouth. It’s not quite the deadly Petri dish known as the Komodo dragon’s oral cavity (those things have over 100 different bacteria living in there, and can kill and/or make a victim crazy in about 5 minutes) but it’s certainly something that requires serious antibiotics. He also didn’t mention that, as with pretty much all the constrictors, the anaconda’s teeth curve back toward its jaw, and if he were to try and pry the jaws open he would end up sawing and tearing his skin. On those animals you actually have to press the teeth further in, move the entire head slightly forward, and then open the jaws, bringing the teeth out their original punctures. No, what he mentioned is that, by rinsing his wound in the river, he’s summoned up piranhas and will need to be really careful about falling in the water from here on out.

God, I love this channel. Love love love love.

You know, I’ve seen river otters on the banks of the St. Joe river three out of the last four days on the way to campus, and some rabbit…I may need a digital camera. And a pair of snake tongs—you never know when you’ll run across a particularly grumpy garden snake, or when the opossum that you thought was actually dead is really alive and more of an ROUS than a standard

Thinking about it now, too, I’d be willing to bet that the Dutch influence is what gives similarity to the South African, New Zealand and Australian accents. I really like them. I think they sound musical, but without the lilt that lends musicality to, say, an Irish accent or the muffled percussion of a Scottish brogue.

Song of the Moment: "The Bad Touch" ~The Bloodhound Gang