How anacondas hunt for their prey | Paul Rosolie and Lex Fridman

you actually mentioned to me uh just on the topic of anacondas that you've been uh participating in a lot of scientific work on on on the topic so like really in everything you've been doing here you are celebrating the animals you're respecting the animals you're protecting the animals but you're also excited about studying the animals in their environment So you you're actually a co-author on on a paper uh on a couple of papers but one of them is on anacondas and uh studying green anaconda hunting patterns what's that about so um the lead authors of that paper Pat champagne and Carter Payne uh friends of mine and what we started noticing for me began at that story I told you where we were coming across the stream and we saw the Anaconda had had had been positioned just below a culpa and then other people began noticing that Anaconda seemed to always be beneath these culpas where mammals were going to be coming and that that contrasted with what we knew about anacondas because what we understood about anacondas that they're purely Ambush predators and they don't pursue their prey but what we began finding out here and Pat led the process of amazing scientists he worked with the K University for a long time worked with us for a long time and and he he was one of the first to put a transmitter in an anaconda right around here and we were able to see their movements and that's what these papers are showing is that they actually do pursue their prey they do move up and down using the streams as corridors through the forest they actually do pursue their prey they actually do seek out food so I mean think about it it's a it's a giant anaconda obviously it's not it can't just sit in one spot it has to put some work into it and so they're using scent and they're using communication to use the streams so you could be walking in the forest in a very shallow stream and see a sizable Anaconda looking for a meal so in a shallow stream it moves not just in the water but in the sand yeah so it also likes s to borrow a little bit they borrow quite a bit and so these large snakes operate Subterranean more than we think interesting like there's times that you'll go with a Tracker you go with a Telemetry set and it'll say like we'll be over the snake the snake's underground snake has found either recess under the sides of the stream you saw it last night where all the fish have have their holes under the side of the stream there was a there was a six foot dwarf came in right in the Stream right where we were standing he had his cave he goes under there they know they have their system yeah we walked by it we walked by it and he stuck his head out cuz he thought we hadd gone and then we turned around and I just got a glimpse of him cuz I was in the front of the line and he just went right back into his cave you you guys are not going to touch me and so yeah with the ancas it's been really exciting and uh in 2014 JJ and me and Mosen and Pat and Lee we all we ended up catching what at the time was the record for uni Marin scientifically measured it was 18' 6 in 220 lbs one of the largest female anacondas on record and since that time these guys have been continuing to study the species continuing to just again just add a little bit by little bit to the knowledge we have of the species and studying green anacondas in lowland tropical rainforest you've seen how hard it is to to move to operate to navigate in this environment and so when you think of the fact that in order to learn anything about this species you have to spend vast amounts of time first locating them and then finding out a way to keep tabs on them because even if you get lucky enough to see an Anaconda by the edge of a a stream to to be able to observe it over time to learn its habits or to put a radio transmitter on it or to take any sort of valuable information from the experience is almost impossible and so a lot of the stuff that I wrote about Mother of God us jumping on anacondas and trying to catch them and at first it just seemed like something we were doing to learn to to just try and see them but it ended up being that we were wildly trying to figure out methodology that would have scientific implications later on because now it's allowing us to try and find the largest anacondas and people used to say there's no way there 25t 27t well there was just that video of the guy swimming with the 20ft Anaconda and so now as we keep going I'm going well maybe through drone identification we could find where the largest anacondas are sitting on top of floating vegetation and even then how do we restrain them so that we could measure them and prove this to the world it's sort of a side quest but so by doing these kinds of studies you figure out how they move about the world what motivates them in terms of when they hunt where they hide in the world as the size of the anacon change so all of that that's that's those are scientific studies yeah I mean look there's so much that we don't know about this Forest we don't know what medicines are in this Forest we don't know with a lot of the 1500 there's something like 4,000 species of butterflies in the Amazon rainforest and of the 1500 species that are here in this region all of them have a larval stage caterpillars right and each of the caterpillars has a specific host plant that they need to need to eat in order to become a successful butterfly to enter the next life cycle and for most of the species that fill the butterfly book we don't know what those interactions are I recently got to see uh the White Witch which is a huge moth it's it's one of the it's it's one of the two largest moths in the world it's the largest moth by wing span wow huge it looks like a bird big white moth we still I believe I believe that we still don't know what the caterpillar looks like it's 2024 we have iPhones and penis-shaped Rocket chips like we don't know where that moth starts its life yeah we still haven't figured that out

Channel: Lex Clips

Views: 167,044

Keywords: ai, ai clips, ai podcast, ai podcast clips, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, computer science, consciousness, deep learning, einstein, elon musk, engineering, friedman, joe rogan, lex ai, lex clips, lex fridman, lex fridman podcast, lex friedman, lex mit, lex podcast, machine learning, math, math podcast, mathematics, mit ai, paul rosolie, philosophy, physics, physics podcast, science, tech, tech podcast, technology, turing

Id: iqPvx2k2ENE

Length: 6min 31sec (391 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2024