Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Wed, 15 May 2024
Paul Rosolie is a naturalist, explorer, author, and founder of Junglekeepers, dedicating his life to protecting the Amazon rainforest. Support his efforts at https://junglekeepers.org Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - ShipStation: https://shipstation.com/lex and use code LEX to get 60-day free trial - Yahoo Finance: https://yahoofinance.com - BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off - NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour - Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/lex to get $350 off - Shopify: https://shopify.com/lex to get $1 per month trial Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/paul-rosolie-2-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Paul's Instagram: https://instagram.com/paulrosolie Junglekeepers: https://junglekeepers.org Paul's Website: https://paulrosolie.com Mother of God (book): https://amzn.to/3ww2ob1 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (12:29) - Amazon jungle (14:47) - Bushmaster snakes (26:13) - Black caiman (44:33) - Rhinos (47:47) - Anacondas (1:18:04) - Mammals (1:30:10) - Piranhas (1:41:00) - Aliens (1:58:45) - Elephants (2:10:02) - Origin of life (2:23:21) - Explorers (2:36:38) - Ayahuasca (2:45:03) - Deep jungle expedition (2:59:09) - Jane Goodall (3:01:41) - Theodore Roosevelt (3:12:36) - Alone show (3:22:23) - Protecting the rainforest (3:38:36) - Snake makes appearance (3:46:47) - Uncontacted tribes (4:00:11) - Mortality (4:01:39) - Steve Irwin (4:09:18) - God
The following is a conversation with Paul Rosalie, his second time on the podcast. But this time, we did the conversation deep in the Amazon jungle. I traveled there to hang out with Paul, and it turned out to be an adventure of a lifetime. I will post a video capturing some aspects of that adventure in a week or so.
It included everything from getting lost in dense, unexplored wilderness with no contact to the outside world to taking very high doses of ayahuasca and much more. Paul, by the way, aside from being my good friend, is a naturalist, explorer, author, and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the rainforest. For this mission, he founded Jungle Keepers.
You can help him if you go to junglekeepers.org. This trip for me was life-changing. It expanded my understanding of myself and of the beautiful world I'm fortunate to exist in with all of you. So I'm glad I went and I'm glad I made it out alive. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
We got ShipStation for fulfillment, Yahoo Finance for investors, BetterHelp for mental health, NetSuite for business management software, 8sleeve for naps, and Shopify for selling stuff on the internet. Choose wise, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfreeman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads.
As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by ShipStation. It's a software designed to save you time and money on fulfillment, shipping stuff that you sell on the internet.
It integrates with Shopify and wherever else you sell stuff and allows businesses, medium, large, to just ship stuff.
I'm a huge fan of logistics and supply chains and looking at that incredibly complicated network of how one package gets from point A to point B. Part of that is the theoretical computer scientist in me because when you simplify that problem and formulate it as a graph theory problem, then you can perform all kinds of optimizations on it, which takes me back.
to some of my favorite courses on the theory and the practice. So numerical optimization, when you're talking about nonlinear programming, and then the more theoretical stuff with convex programming. A particular kind of formulation of an optimization problem can be easy to solve or hard to solve.
When I look at this world of logistics and shipping stuff from point A to point B, where there's like a million point As and a million point Bs, combinatorial madness of that, it's really exciting that there is systems that enable that all to work. Anyway, I'm glad ShipStation exists and I'm glad they're solving this tricky but extremely important problem.
Go to ShipStation.com slash Lex and use code Lex to sign up for your free 60-day trial. That's ShipStation.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Yahoo Finance, a site that provides financial management reports, information, and news for investors.
I use it for the cool little feature of it letting you add your portfolio and thereby letting you monitor it and get news about real agent things. So they have a TD Ameritrade account and mutual fund there, which I guess got switched over to Charles Schwab. So there's a really nice interface that lets you monitor that.
But of course, as part of that interface, you can also see news of the crazy stuff that's going on in the markets. It gives you an insight in what the people who really have money invested in the success of companies are thinking about, where they're excited about, where they're cynical about, all that kind of stuff.
It's a nice lens that we should see the world, one that contrasts with a more kind of political and geopolitical lens, which I often look at, and also contrasts with the historical lens. You know, I read a lot of history books, and there, time is slowed down. The ephemeral ups and downs of every day are not as important.
But of course, when you're living in the moment, in the day, this week, the ups and downs of the world are extremely important. And especially if you have money invested in certain small slices of that world. So I use Yahoo Finance for monitoring that perspective on the world. For comprehensive financial news and analysis, go to yahoofinance.com. That's yahoofinance.com.
This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need to match with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. It works for individuals, it works for couples. I remember seeing numbers, crazy numbers, like 350 million messages, chat, phone, video sessions. Over 35,000 licensed therapists. over 4.4 million people that got help.
Talking about a network. So I was just talking about the logistics of shipping stuff from A to B. Here's the logistics of the human psyche. The collective intelligence and the collective psyche of the human species seeking to explore the shadow of the individual minds. But in so doing, exploring the collective shadow of our species. It'd be cool to visualize all that.
Anyway, we're just individuals. We don't have a way to take the perspective of the species. We only have our own mind, our own conscious mind and the subjective view that it provides of the world. So for that subjective view, It's good to clean the lens, so to speak, every once in a while, and that's what I think talk therapy does.
And BetterHelp is super easy, discreet, affordable, available everywhere, so you should definitely try it at betterhelp.com slash lex, and if you go there, you'll save it in your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
As I was deep in nature, disconnected completely from the world, and the sounds of the urban world, no machinery, no people, nothing, just nature. You can hear water, you can hear the wind, you can hear the animals, the insects, the little and the big, and just that, no people. So, as I was in that, I got a chance to really think about the productive world, let's say, the world of companies.
And it is indeed, out of the many things that make me happy, it is one of the things that makes me really happy, and that is to build, to create stuff in this world that helps people, whether that is as an individual programmer or on a larger scale by starting a company. All of that makes me truly happy.
And somehow in the jungle, full of gratitude to be able to exist on this beautiful earth, I also was full of gratitude for all the cool things that humans have built. But running a company is tricky, and that's what NetSuite helps with. In fact, over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. You can take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com slash lex.
That's netsuite.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep, and its new and amazing Pod 4 Ultra. One of the things when I was in the jungle, I mean, there's a few creature comforts that are taken away when you're out in nature, especially when you're deep out in nature.
And of course, one of the things you remember is the ability to have a bed to go to that's not full of insects and all that kind of stuff, but a bed that can be cool. Man, it would be amazing to get the A-sleep bed out. into the middle of the jungle, because it's hot out there. And to be able to cool down, which I do, with Eight Sleep would be a really cool experience.
Anyway, they've upgraded from Pod 3 to Pod 4. So Pod 4 does 2x the cooling power. And they also added a super cool thing called Pod 4 Ultra, which has an extra base that goes between the mattress and the bed frame. that can control the positioning of the bed so it can elevate you, say, to like a reading position.
That's a really, really cool idea on many fronts, including like you have this integrated system that does the sensing of the sleep time and the sleep phase and the HRV and heart rate and all that kind of stuff. It does the cooling of both sides of the bed separately, and now we can control the positioning of the bed. It's crazy. I really love it when products keep rapidly evolving, improving.
That's really exciting to me. Go to 8sleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store. I used it in just a few minutes to create an online store, lexfreeman.com slash store, to sell a few shirts.
It can be a small store, it can be a gigantic store, and it all is super easy, and they have a lot of third-party apps that are integrated seamlessly in.
For example, including on-demand printing, so I can just add a shirt there, and then you have a bunch of companies that do on-demand printing that print the shirt and ship the shirt and take care of the fulfillment and all that kind of stuff, and all of it is seamlessly integrated, super easy to monitor.
Once again, there's a kind of theme in this discussion of networks, of networks of human buying and selling, shipping, communicating, all of that. And I'm just so glad that people have created...
systems, products, services, many of which are available online to connect humans together and let humans do their human things and help them flourish and enjoy life in all the ways that life can be enjoyed in the 21st century. Thank you to Shopify and thank you for all the sponsors of this podcast that are helping create systems of that nature.
Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Paul Rosalie. Where are we right now, Paul? Lex, we are in the middle of nowhere. It's the Amazon jungle.
There's vegetation, there's insects, there's all kinds of creatures. A million heartbeats, a million eyes.
So really, where are we right now? We are in Peru, in a very remote part of the western Amazon basin. And because of the proximity of the Andean cloud forest to the lowland tropical rainforest, we are in the most biodiverse part of planet Earth. There's more life
per square acre per square mile out here than there is anywhere else on earth not just now but in the entire fossil record i can't believe we're actually here i can't believe you actually came and i can't believe you forced me to wear a suit that was the people's choice trust me all right we've been through quite a lot over the last few days we've been through a bit let me ask you a ridiculous question
What are all the creatures right now, if they wanted to, could cause us harm?
The thing is, the Amazon rainforest has been described as the greatest natural battlefield on Earth because there's more life here than anywhere else, which means that everything here is fighting for survival. The trees are fighting for sunlight. The animals are fighting for prey. Everybody's fighting for survival.
And so everything that you see here, everything around us, will be killed, eaten, digested, recycled at some point. The... jungle is really just a giant churning machine of death and life is kind of this moment of stasis where you you maintain this collection of cells in a particular dna sequence and then and then it gets digested again and recycled back and renamed into everything
And so so the things the things in this forest, while they don't want to hurt us, there are things that are heavily defended because, for instance, a giant anteater needs claws to fight off a jaguar. A stingray needs a stinger on its tail, which is basically a serrated knife with venom on it to deter anything that would hunt that stingray. Even the catfish have pectoral fins that have razor fins.
long steak knife sized defense systems then you of course the jaguars the harpy eagles the piranha the candiru fish that can swim up a penis lodge themselves inside it's the amazon rainforest the thing is as you've learned this week nothing here wants to get us with except for an exception of maybe mosquitoes Every other animal just wants to eat and exist in peace. That's it.
But there is, each of those animals, like you described, have a kind of radius of defense. So if you accidentally step into its home, into that radius, it can cause harm. Or make them feel threatened.
Make them feel threatened. There is a defense mechanism that is activated. Some incredible defense mechanisms. I mean, you're talking about... 17-foot black caiman, crocodiles with significant size that could rip you in half, anacondas, the largest snake on Earth, bushmasters that can grow up to be 9 to I think even 11 feet long, and I've caught bushmasters that are thicker than my arms.
So for people who don't know, bushmasters, snakes, what are these things? These are vipers. I believe it's the largest viper on Earth. Venomous. Extremely venomous, with hinged teeth, tissue-destroying venom, Like, if you get bitten by a Bushmaster, they say you don't rush and try and save your own life. You try to savor what's around you. Look around at the world. Smoke your last cigarette.
Call your mom. That's it.
So that moment of stasis that is life is going to end abruptly when you interact with one of those. Yeah.
I even have... Even this...
This seemingly... Can I just pause at how incredibly beautiful it is that you could just reach to your right and grab a piece of the jungle?
It's like even this seemingly beautiful little fern. If you go this way on the fern, you're fine. As soon as you go this way, there's invisible little spikes on there if you want to... Oh, I see. I feel it. See that? It's like everything is defended.
If you're driving on the road and you have your arm out the side or if you're on a motorcycle going through the jungle and you get one of these, it'll just tear all the skin right off your body. It's kind of doing that to me now. So what would you do?
Like we're going through the dense jungle yesterday. Yeah. And you slide down the hill, your foot slips, you slide down, and then you find yourself staring a couple feet away from a Bushmaster snake. What are you doing? You're, for people who somehow don't know, are somebody who loves, admires snakes, who has met thousands of snakes, has worked with them, respects them, celebrates them.
What would you do with a Bushmaster snake?
Face-to-face. Face to face, this has happened. I've been there. It's nice. I've come face to face with a Bushmaster and there's two things, there's two reactions that you might get. One is if the Bushmaster decides that it's vacation time, if it's sleeping, if you just had a meal, they'll come to the edges of trails or beneath the tree and they'll just circle up.
Little spiral, big spiral, big pile of snake on the trail, and they'll just sit there. And one time there was a snake sitting on the side of a trail beneath a tree for two weeks. This snake was just sitting there, resting, digesting his food out in the open, in the rain, in the sun, in the night. Didn't matter. You go near it, barely even crack a tongue.
Now, the other option is that you get a Bushmaster that's alert and hunting and out looking for something to eat and they're ready to defend themselves. And so I once came across a Bushmaster in the jungle at night and this Bushmaster turned its head towards me, looked at me and made it very clear, I'm going to go this way. And so I did the natural thing that any snake enthusiast would do.
And I grabbed its tail. Now, 11 feet later by the head, the snake turned around and just said, if you want to meet God, I can arrange the meeting. I will oblige. And I decided to let the Bushmaster go. And so it's like that with most animals. A jaguar will turn and look at you and just remind you of how small you are.
Like, what did you see in the snake's eyes? How did you sense that this is not the right, this is gonna be your end if you proceed?
His readiness. I wanted to get him by the tail and show him to the people that were there and maybe work with the snake a little bit. as an 11-foot snake, the snake turned around and made it very clear, like, not today, pal. It's not gonna happen. Is it in the eyes and the movement and the tension of the body? It was the movement and the S of the neck.
It was as if you pushed me and I went, let's go, make my day. Yeah. Like, he just looked a little bit too ready. Yeah.
he's like i love this okay all right so you know you just know you just know whereas like the snake you met last night yeah beautiful snake such a calm little thing he just focuses on eating baby lizards and little snails and things and that snake has no concept of defending itself it has no way to defend itself so even a even something the size of a blue jay could just come and just peck that thing in the head and swallow it and it's a helpless little snake so it's
It's really, it kind of depends on the animal. It depends on the mood you catch them in. Each one has a different temperament. The grace of its movement was mesmerizing.
Curious almost. Maybe I'm anthropomorphizing, projecting onto it.
But it was... The tongue flicking was a sign of curiosity. He was trying to figure out what was going on. He was like, why am I on this treadmill of human skin? You know? They're just trying to get to the next thing, trying to get hidden, trying to get away from the light.
Also, the texture of the scales is really fascinating. I mean, it's my first snake I've ever touched. It's so interesting. It was just such an incredible system of muscles that are all interacting together to make that kind of movement work and all the texture of its skin, of its scales. What do you love about snakes?
From my first experience with a snake to all the thousands of experiences you had with snakes, what do you love about these creatures?
I think it's, when you just spoke about it, that's the first snake you've met. And it was a tiny little snake in the jungle. And you spoke about it with so much light in your eyes. And I think that because we've been programmed to be scared of snakes, there's something wondrous that happens in our brain. Maybe it's just this joy of discovery that there's nothing to be scared of.
And whether it's a rattlesnake that is dangerous and that you need to give distance to, but you look at it from a distance and you go, whoa. or it's a harmless little grass snake that you can pick up and enjoy and give to a child. They're just these strange legless animals that just exist. They don't even have eyelids. They're so different than us. They have a tongue that senses the air.
And they, to me, are so beautiful. And I've my whole life been defending snakes from humans. And they seem misunderstood. I think they're incredibly beautiful. There's
every color and variety of snakes there's venomous snakes there's tree snakes there's huge crushing anacondas it's just of the 2600 species of snakes that exist on earth there's just such beauty such complexity and such simplicity they're just they're just to me to me um i feel like i feel like i'm i'm friend with snake and and they rely on me to protect them from my people
Friend with snake.
Me friend snake.
Me friend snake. You said some of them are sometimes aggressive, some of them are peaceful. Is this a mood thing, a personality thing, a species thing?
What is it? So as far as I know, there's only really two snakes on Earth that could be aggressive because aggression indicates offense. And so a reticulated python has been documented as eating humans. Anacondas, although while it hasn't been publicized, they have eaten humans.
every single other snake from boa constrictor to bushmasters to spitting cobra to grass snake to garter snake to everything else every single other snake does not want to interact with you they have no interest so there's no such thing as an aggressive snake once you get outside of anaconda and reticulated python aggression could be trying to eat you that's predation but
For every other snake, a rattlesnake, if it was there, would either go escape and hide itself or it would rattle its tail and tell us, don't come closer. A cobra will hood up and begin to hiss and say, don't approach me. I'm asking you nicely not to mess with me. And most other snakes are fast or they stay in the trees or they're extremely camouflaged, but their whole MO is just don't bother me.
I don't want to be seen. I don't want to be messed with. In fact, all I want to do is be left alone. And once in a while, I just want to eat. And by the way, When you see a snake drink, your heart will break. It's like seeing, it's the only thing that's cuter than a puppy.
Like watching a snake touch its mouth to water and just, you just see that little mouth going as they suck water in and it's like, it's just so adorable watching this scaled animal just be like, I need water.
In a state of vulnerability. Yeah. But bro, there's nothing cuter than a little puppy with a tongue. A baby ball python.
All right.
Baby king cobra. What's it take you for? Baby elephant. So what are they? They're like at a puddle and they just take it in.
They can be at a puddle and they just take it in. Or one time in India, I was with a snake rescuer and we found this nine foot king cobra, this god of a snake. They're Ophiophagus hanna is their Latin name. And they're snake eaters. They're the king of the snakes, the largest venomous snake. And the people that call, called the snake rescuer, cause that's a profession in India.
Um, you know, it had gotten into their kitchen or their backyard. And so we showed up and we got the snake and the snake rescuer. He knew he looked at the snake and he went to me. He said, you know, why do you think the snake would go in a house? And he was quizzing me. And I actually went, you know, I don't know. Is it warm? Is it cold?
You know, like sometimes cats like to go into, into the warm, warm cars in the winter. And he was like, he's thirsty. He goes, watch this. He took a water bottle. poured it over. Now the snake is standing up. Snake stands up three feet tall. This is a huge king cobra with a hood, terrifying snake to be around. He leans over to the snake and the snake is standing there trusting him.
And he takes a water bottle and pours it onto the snake's nose. And the snake turns up its nose and just starts drinking from the water bottle. Human giving water to snake. Big, scary snake. But this human understood. Snake gets water. Snake gets released in jungle. Everybody's okay.
So sometimes the needs are simple. They just don't have the words to communicate them to us humans. Yeah. And is it disinterest or is it fear? Almost like they don't notice us? Or is it where the unknown aspect of it, the uncertainty, is a source of danger?
Well, animals live in a constant state of danger. Like if you look at that deer that we saw last night, it's stalking through the jungle, wondering what's going to eat it, wondering if this is the last moment it's going to be alive. It's like animals are constantly terrified of that this is their last moment.
Yeah, just for the listener, we're walking through the jungle late at night. So it's darkness except our headlamps on. And then all of a sudden, Paul stops. He looks in the distance. He sees two eyes. I think you thought, is that a jaguar or is it a deer? And it was moving its head like this. Like scared or maybe trying to figure it, trying to localize itself, trying to figure out.
Trying to see around. You're doing the same to it. The two of you like moving your head. Yeah. And like deep into the jungle. Like, I don't know. It's pretty far away through the trees. You can still see it.
30 feet or so, yeah.
That's the thing to actually mention. I mean, with the headlamp, you see the reflection in their eyes. It's kind of incredible to see a creature, to try to identify a creature by just the reflection from its eyes.
Yeah, and so the cats, sometimes you'll get like a greenish or a bluish glow from the cats. The deer are usually white to orange. Caiman, orange. Nightjars, orange. Snakes can usually be like orange moths. spiders sparkle. And so you have all these different, as you walk through the jungle, you can see all these different eyes.
And when something large looks at you like that deer did, your first thing is, what animal is this that I am staring back at? Because through the light, you kind of get, you see the reflection off the bright light off the leaves. And I couldn't tell at first, because actually those big bright eyes, it could have been an ocelot, could have been a jaguar, could have been a deer.
And then when it did this movement, that's what the cats do. They try to see around your light. I thought maybe Lex Friedman's here. We're going to get lucky. It's going to be a jag right off trail.
Your definition of lucky is a complicated one. Yeah. It's a fascinating process when you see those two eyes trying to figure out what it is. And it is trying to figure out what you are in that process. Let's talk about caiman. We've seen a lot of different kinds of sizes. We've seen a baby one, a bigger one. Tell me about these 16-foot-plus apex predators of the Amazon rainforest.
The big, bad black caiman, which is the largest reptilian predator in the Amazon except for the anaconda. They kind of both share that notch of apex predator.
They were actually hunted to endangered species level in the 70s because they're they're leather black scale leather But they're coming back They're coming back and they're huge and they're beautiful and I was I was walking near a lake and I never understood how big they could get except for I was walking near a lake last year and I was following this stream, you know, it's like when you found a little stream and it's just a little trickle of water and all of a sudden this river otter had been running the other direction on the tree on the stream River otter comes up to me and I swear to God this animal looked to me and went hey
And I went, hey, he was like, didn't expect to see me there. And he turned around, he like did a little spin, started running down the stream. Then he turned around and you could tell he was like, let's go. And I, you know, I'm not anthropomorphizing here. The animal was asking me to come with him. So I followed the river otter down the stream.
We started running down the stream and the river otter looks at me one more time is like, yo, jumps into the lake. And I'm like, what does he want me to see? Now in the lake, there's river otters doing dives and freaking out and going up and down and up and down. And they're very excited. They're screaming, they're screeching.
All of a sudden, and I've never seen anything like this except for in like Game of Thrones, this croc head comes flying out of the water. All of the river otters were attacking this huge black caiman, 16 feet, head half the size of this table. And she was thrashing her tail around, creating these huge waves in the water, trying to catch an otter.
And they're so fast that they were zipping around or biting her and then going around. And this otter, swear to God, interspecies, looked at me and went, watch this. We're fucking with this caiman. It was amazing. And I, for the first time I got to stand there watching this incredible interspecies fight happening. They weren't trying to kill the caiman. They were just trying to mess with it.
And the caiman was doing his best to try and kill these otters. And they were just having a good time in that sick sort of hyper intelligent animal, like wolf sort of way where they were just going, you can't catch us.
Yeah, like intelligence and agility versus like raw power and dominance. I mean, I got to handle some smaller caiman and just the power they had, you know, you scale that up to imagine what a 16 foot, even a 10 foot, any kind of black caiman, the kind of power they deliver. Maybe can you talk to that? Yeah. The power they can generate with their tail, with their neck, with their jaw.
Alligators and caiman and crocodiles have some of the strongest bite forces on earth. Think a saltwater crocodile wins as the strongest bite force on earth. And you got to hold about a, what was it? A four foot spectacle caiman. And you got to feel, I mean, you're a black belt in jujitsu. How do you compare the explosive force you felt from that animal compared to what a human can generate?
It's difficult to describe in words. There's a lot of power. And we're talking about the power of the neck. I mean, there's a lot. It can generate power all up and down the body. So probably the tail is a monster. But just the neck and, you know, not to mention the power of the bite.
And the speed too, because the thing I saw and got to experience is how still and calm, at least from my amateur perspective, it seems calm, still, and then from that sort of zero to 60, you could just go wild. Just thrash it. And then there's also a decision it makes in that split second, whether as it thrashes, is it going to kind of bite you on the way or not?
And that's where of the four species of caiman that we have here, you see differences in their personalities as a species. And so you can like, just like, you know, like generally golden retrievers are viewed as a friendly dog. Generally, not every single one of them, but as a rule. Spectacle caiman. Puppies. You released one in the river and it did nothing. Didn't bite one of your fingers.
It just swam away. We dropped one in the river and what did it do? It chose peace. Now I had a smooth fronted caiman a few weeks ago and this is probably about a three and a half footer, not big enough to kill you, but very much big enough to grab one of your fingers and just shake it off your body. Just death roll it right off.
And as I was being careful, totally different caiman than the one that you got to see. This one has spikes coming off it. They're like, like, like leftover dinosaurs. It's like they evolved during the dinosaur times and never changed. They have spikes and bony plates and all kinds of strange growths that you don't see on the other smoother caiman.
And I tried to release this one without getting bitten. And I threw it into the stream, gently into the water, just went, wah, and tried to pull my hands back. And as I pulled my hand back, this caiman in the air turned around and just tried to give me one parting blow and just got one tooth, whack, right to the bone of my finger. And a bone injury feels different than a skin injury.
So you instantly... And it just reminds you of, that's a caiman with a head this big. And it hurt. And I know that it could have taken off my finger. Now, if you scale that up to a black caiman... It's rib crushing, it's zebra head removing size, you know, just meat destroying. It's incredible, nature's metal sort of, you know, just raw power.
So what's the biggest crock you've been able to handle? We were doing caiman surveys for years and we would go out at night and you want to figure out what are the populations of black caiman, spectacle caiman, smooth fronted caiman, dwarf caiman. And the only way to see which caiman you're dealing with is to catch it.
Because a lot of times you get up close with the light and you can see the eyes at night, but you can't quite see what species it is. For instance, this past few months, we found two baby black caiman on the river, which is unprecedented here. We haven't seen that in decades. So it's important that we monitor our croc population. So I started catching small ones.
In Mother of God, I write about the first one that me and JJ caught together, which was probably a little bigger than this table. And probably mid-20s bravado and competition with... other young males of my species, led to me trying to go as big as I could. And I jumped on a spectacle caiman that was slightly longer than I am. And I'm 5'9", so I jumped on this probably six-foot croc
And quickly realized that my hands couldn't get around its neck and my legs were wrapped around the base of its tail. And the thrash was so intense that as it took me one side, I barely had enough time to realize what was happening before it beat me against the ground. My headlamp came off. So now I'm blind in the dark, laying in a river in the Amazon rainforest, hugging a six foot crocodile.
And I went, JJ! As I always do. But in that moment, before I even let go, I knew I couldn't let go of the croc because if I let go of the croc, I thought she was going to destroy my face. So I said, okay, now I'm stuck here. If I just stay here, I can't release her. I need help. But I was like, I'm never, ever, ever, ever going to try and solo catch a croc this big again.
I was like, this is, this is, I knew in that moment, I was like, this is good enough.
So anything longer than you, you don't control the tail. You don't have, you have barely control. than anything really.
Yeah, and that's a spectacle caiman. A black caiman is a whole other order of magnitude there. It's like saying like, oh, you know, I was play fighting with my golden retriever versus I was play fighting with like, you know, what's the biggest, scariest dog you could think of? The dog from Sandlot, a giant gorilla dog thing, like a Malamute, something huge. What are they called? Mastiffs.
Yeah, Mastiffs. I mean, you mentioned dinosaurs. What do you admire about black caiman? They've been... here for a very, very long time. There's something prehistoric about their appearance, about their way of being, about their presence in this jungle.
With crocodiles, you're looking at this mega survivor. They're in a class with sharks where it's like, they've been here so long. When you talk about multiple extinctions, you talk about the sixth extinction, Earth's going through all this stuff, the crocodiles and the cockroaches have seen it all before. They're like, man, we remember what that comet looked like. And they're not impressed. Yeah.
They have this, they carry this wisdom and their power.
Yeah.
In the simplicity of their power, they carry the wisdom. Yeah.
And they're just sitting there in the streams and they don't care. And even if there's a nuclear holocaust, you know that there would just be some crocs sitting there dead-eyed in that stagnant water waiting for the life to regenerate so they could eat again.
It's going to be the remaining humans versus the crocs and the cockroaches. And the cockroaches are just background noise. Yeah, they'll always be there. Sons of bitches. You know, we're talking about individual black caiman and caiman and different species of caiman, but whenever they're together and you see multiple eyes, which I've gotten to experience, it's quite a feeling.
There's just multiple eyes looking back at you. Of course, for you, that's immediate excitement. You immediately go towards that. You want to see it. You want to explore it. Maybe catch them, analyze what the species is, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Can you just describe that feeling when they're together and they're looking at you? So head above water, eyes reflecting the light.
Yeah. So the other night, Lex and I were in the river with JJ surviving a thunderstorm. We're in the rain and we had covered our covered our equipment with our boats. And the only thing that we could do was get in the river to keep ourselves dry. And so we were in the river at night, in the dark, no stars, just a little bit of canopy silhouetted with all this rain coming down.
It was such a din, you could hardly hear anything. And all the way down river, I just see this Cayman eye in my headlamp light. And I started walking towards it because I was like, this is even better. We can catch a Cayman while we're in this thunderstorm in the Amazon river. And when JJ went, Paul, it's too far. JJ very rarely, very rarely, like he'll make a suggestion.
Like he'll usually go like, maybe it's far. But in that situation, deep in the wilderness, unknown came in size. He went, Paul, it's too far. Don't leave the three of us right now. Yeah. We're too far out to take risks. We're too far out to be walking along the riverbed at night because then, you know, right here at the research station, if you step on a stingray, you get evac'd. Out where we went-
Nothing. So for me, seeing those eyes, I think I've become so comfortable with so many of these animals that I may have crossed into the territory where I feel so comfortable with many of these animals that they just don't worry me anymore. I mean, I looked at you in a raft while you had a sizable body. probably about 12 foot black Cayman right next to your raft.
I watched its head go under the bubbles. It was all coming up right next to your raft as he was just moving along the bottom of the river. Cause he looked at me, went under and then my raft passed and yours came over him. So now I'm looking back and your raft is going over this black Cayman and I'm going, I'm not worried at all. I was not worried. I was not worried that the Cayman would freak out.
I was not worried that he would try to attack you. I knew 100% that came and just wanted us to go. So you could go back to eating fish.
Yeah.
That's it. Man, it's humbling.
It's humbling these giant creatures. And especially at night, like you were talking about. And for me, it's both scary and just beautiful when the head goes under. Because like underwater, it's their domain. So anything can happen. So what is it doing that its head is going under? It could be bored. It could be hungry, looking for some fish.
It could be maybe wanting to come closer to you to investigate. Maybe you have some food around you. Maybe it's an old friend of yours and just wants to say hi. I don't know.
I have a few on the river, old friends. Okay. Um, no, when we see their heads go under, it's just, they're just getting out of the way we're, we're shining a light at them and they're going, why is there a light at night? I'm uncomfortable. Head under. So these caiman, again, you think of it as this big aggressive animal, but I don't know anybody that's been eaten by a black caiman.
And the smaller species, smooth-fronted caiman, dwarf caiman, spectacle caiman, they're not going to eat anybody. Again, at the worst, if you were doing something inappropriate with a caiman, like you jumped on it and were trying to do research and it bit your hand, it could take your hand off. But that's the only time.
I've been walking down the river and stepped on a caiman and the caiman just swims away. And so in my mind, caiman are just these, they're peaceful dragons that sit on the side of the river. And so to me, they are my friends.
And I worry about them because two months ago we were coming up river and on one of the beaches was a beautiful, about five foot black caiman with a big machete cut right through the head. The whole caiman was wasted. Nothing was eaten. But the caiman was dead. What do you think that was? Curious humans. Just committing violence? Yeah. Just loggers. People who aren't from this part of the Amazon.
Because a local person... would either eat the animal or not mess with it. Like Pico would never kill a caiman for no reason because it doesn't make any sense. So these are clearly people who aren't from the region, which usually means loggers because they've come from somewhere else.
They're doing a job here and they're just cleaning their pots in the river at night and they see eyes come near them because the caiman probably smells fish. And then they just whack because they want to see it. And they're just curious monkeys on a beach. And again, me friend of caiman, I protect from my type.
That said, you know, you protect your friends and you analyze and study your friends. But sometimes friends can have a bit of a misunderstanding. And if you have a bit of a misunderstanding with a black caiman, I feel like just a bit of a misunderstanding could lead to a bone crushing situation.
But not for a little five foot caiman. And I think that's incredibly speciesist of you. A ball of humans or a ball of caiman? No, like all my friends do the same thing. They go, you swim in the Amazon rainforest? You know, you swim in that river? And I go, yes, every day. We, you know, backflips into the river. We've been swimming in the river how many times?
With the piranha and the stingray and the candiru and the caiman and the anacondas, all of it in the river with us. And we just do it. And what's that for you? So what, what allows you to doing that, to do that knowing and having researched all the different things that can kill you, which I feel like most of them are in the river. What allows you to just get in there with us?
Well, I think it's something about you where you become like this portal through which it's possible to see nature is not threatening, but beautiful. And so in that you kind of naturally by hanging out with you, I get to see the beauty of it. There is danger out there, but the danger is part of it. Just like there's a lot of danger in the city. There's danger in life.
There's a lot of ways to get hurt emotionally, physically. There's a lot of ways to die in the stupidest of ways. We went on an expedition to the forest, just twisting your ankle, breaking your foot. getting a bite from a thing that gets infected. There's a lot of ways to die and get hurt in the stupidest of ways in a non-dramatic came and eating you alive kind of way.
Yeah. It strikes me as unfair because humans were still in our minds so... so programmed to worry about that predator, that predator, that predator. What predator? We've killed everything. Black caimans are coming off the endangered species list. We exterminated wolves from North America. I actually heard a suburban lady one time tell her son, watch out, foxes will get you. Foxes.
Yeah.
They eat baby rabbits and mice. Well, in the case of apex predators, I think when people say dangerous animals... They really are talking about just the power of the animal. And the Black Camel have a lot of power. A lot of power.
And it's almost just a way to celebrate the power of the animal. Sure. And if it's in celebration, then I'm all for it because my God, is that power. Like the waves of fury that you saw. Like when that tail, I mean, you saw the tail of the spectacle, that perfect, amazing thing with all those interlocking scales that works. So it's like a perfect creation of engineering.
And then when you have one that's this thick, And all of a sudden that thing is moving with all the acceleration of that power. Whoa, the volume of water, the sound that comes out of their throat. They're such, they're dragons.
We talked about the scales of the snake with like, they came in just the way it felt was incredible. Just the armor, the texture was so cool. I don't know, like the bottom one came in and had a certain kind of texture. And it just all feels like power, but also all feels like designed really well. It's like exploring through touch, like a World War II tank or something like that.
It's the engineering that went into this thing.
Yeah.
That like... The mechanism of evolution that created a thing that could survive for such a long time. It's just incredible. This is a work of art. The defense mechanisms, the power of it, the damage it can do, how effective it is as a hunter, all of that. You can feel that just by touching it.
Do you ever see the mashup where they put side by side the image of, I think it's a falcon in flight next to a stealth bomber, and they're almost the exact same design. It's incredible. What's the equivalent for a croc? Like you said, maybe a tank. Maybe a tank. More like an armadillo turtle. Yeah, like hippos. Yeah, there may not be a war machine equivalent of a crocodile.
It would have to have like a... big jaw element to it.
In the water, I mean, we talked also about hippos. Those are interesting creatures from all the way across the world. Just monsters. Yeah. Hippos and rhinos. Hippos are bigger, usually, or rhinos are bigger. Rhinos. Rhinos, after elephants, is the largest white rhinos. They can be terrifying too, again, when you step into the defense.
Absolutely, but I have to tell you, after being around so many rhinos, I have rhino friends, black and white rhinos, and they're all sweethearts. And I mean, I mean sweethearts. And I mean, when you look at a rhino, It's like a living dinosaur. I know it's a mammal, but somehow it screams dinosaur because it seems like Pleistocenic and from another age with the giant horn.
And they're so much bigger than you think. Like they're minivan sized animals. Like we're not taller than they are. at the shoulder and they have the strange shaped head and the huge horn and they sit there eating grass all day. So if a rhino is dangerous to a human, it's because the rhino is going, don't hurt me. Don't hurt me. Don't, don't hurt my baby. And then they're like, you know what?
I'll just kill you. It'd be easier because you're scaring me right now. You're too close to that rhino.
Yeah.
And so like there again, I just think it's funny because humans were so quickly to go, which snakes are aggressive? There are no aggressive snakes. You know, rhinos can be dangerous. if provoked, otherwise they're peaceful, fat grass unicorns. They're really pretty calm.
We had these incredible giant animals and the largest animals on our planet, the black caiman, the rhinos, the elephants, all the big, beautiful stuff is becoming less and less. And it almost reminds me like in Game of Thrones, they're like, yeah, in the beginning, they're like, yeah, there used to be dragons. And it was like this memory. And it's like, yeah, we used to have mammoths.
And we used to have stellar sea cows that were 16 feet long, manatees. And there were things we used to have, the Caspian tiger that only went extinct in the 90s, our lifetimes. And that's mind blowing to me. That has haunted me since I'm a child. I remember learning about extinction and I went, wait, you're telling me that
I remember being a kid and going, by the time I grew up, you're saying that gorillas could be gone. Elephants could be gone. And because we're doing it. And then I just, that I remember, I remember looking at the nightlight being blurry because I was crying. Yeah. I was so upset. Oh, and it was Lonesome George, that turtle, the Galapagos tortoise where there was one left.
And they said, if we just had a female, he could live. And as a six, seven, eight-year-old, that destroyed me. We're all just starting to get laid, including that turtle. Including that turtle for a few hundred years. Dude.
So for young people out there, you think you're having trouble, think about that turtle.
Think about that turtle. Yeah. You know, there's a turtle that Darwin and Steve Irwin both owned. Yeah. Yeah. I heard about that turtle. Man, they live a long time. Yeah. They've seen things. They've seen things. There's a great like... internet joke where they're accusing him of being incongruous with modern times. They're like, he did nothing to stop slavery. He didn't fight in World War II.
Cancel the turtle.
Yeah, cancel the turtle.
Oh, shit. What a world we live in. So it's interesting, you mentioned black caiman and anacondas are both apex predators. So it seems like the reason they can exist in similar environments is because they feed on slightly different things. How is it possible for them to coexist? I read that anacondas can eat caiman, but not black caiman.
How often do they come in conflict? So anacondas and caiman occupy the exact same niche. And they're born at almost the exact same size. And unlike most species, they don't have sort of a size range that they're confined to. They start at this big. Baby caiman are this big. Baby anacondas are a little longer, but they're thinner and they don't have legs. So it's the same thing in terms of mass.
And... They're all in the streams or at the edges of lakes or swamps. And so the baby anacondas eat the baby caiman. Baby caiman can't really take down an anaconda. They're going for little insects and fish. They have quite a small mouth. So they, again, it's in their interest to hide from everything. A bird, a heron can eat a baby caiman, pop it back.
Mm-hmm.
And so they have to survive, but the anaconda and the caiman kind of joust as they grow.
Can you actually explain how the anaconda would take down a caiman? Like, would it first use constriction and then eat it, or what's the methodology?
Yeah, so anacondas have kind of a, I don't know, like a three-point... constriction system where their first thing is anchor. So like jujitsu. So the first thing is latch on to you. I like how I'm writing this down. Like, all right, this is jujitsu, like a masterclass here. This is for when you're wrestling an anaconda, just in case.
And you'd be like the coach on the sideline screaming.
You got him, Lex. Don't let him take the back. Yeah. All right. So one time me and JJ were following a herd of collie peccary and JJ's teaching me tracking. So we're following the hoof prints through the mud and we're doing this and I'm talking about no backpacks, just machetes, bare feet, running through the jungle. And we come to this stream and JJ's like, I think we missed him.
You know, I think they went. And I'm like, no, no, no, they went here. Look. And not because I'm a great tracker, because I can see, you know, a few dozen footprints, hundreds of individual footprints right there. And I'm going, no, no, they just crossed here. And JJ was like, you know what? We're not going to get eyes on him today. He was like, it's okay. He's like, we did good.
We followed him for a long time. And I was like, cool. And then I was trying to gauge, like, can I drink this stream? And I see a culpa. And a culpa is a salt deposit where animals come to feed because sodium is a deficiency that most herbivores have here. And all of a sudden I just hear like the sound of a wet stick snapping, just that bone crunch.
And I looked down and there's about a 16-foot anaconda wrapped around a freshly killed peccary, wild boar. And what this anaconda had done was as all the pigs were going across the stream, the anaconda had grabbed it by the jaw, swiped the legs, wrapped around it, bent it in half, and then crushed its ribs.
And that's what the anaconda do, whether it's to mammals, to caiman, it's all the same thing. It's grab on. They have six rows of backwards facing teeth. So once they hit you, they're never going to come off. You actually have to go deeper in and then open before you can come out. All those backward facing teeth. So they have an incredible anchor system.
And then they use their weight to pull you down to hell, to pull you down into that water, wrap around you. And then start breaking you. And every breath you take, you go, and you're up against a barrier. And then when you exhale, they go a little tighter and you're never going to get that space back. Your lungs are never going to expand again.
And I know this because I've been in that crush before JJ pulled me out of it. And so this pig, the anaconda had gotten it. And as the pig was thrashing and the anaconda was wrapping around, it had bent it in half. And I just heard those vertebrae going. And so for a caiman, it's the same thing. They just grab them, they wrap around it, and then they have to crush it until there's no response.
They'll wait an hour. They'll wait a long time until there's no response from the animal. They'll overpower it. Then they'll reposition, probably yawn a little bit, open their jaw, and then start forcing that entire... Now, here's the crazy thing. is that an anaconda has stomach acid capable of digesting an entire crocodile where nothing comes out the other side.
And when you see how thick the bony plate of a crocodile skull is, that that can go in the mouth and nothing comes out the other side. That's insane. And so it always made me wonder, on a chemistry level, how you can have such incredible acid in the stomach that doesn't harm the anaconda itself.
and someone said but it's able to digest oh it's some kind of mucus oh like the mucus there's a lot oh interesting there's levels of protection from the anaconda itself but it seems like the anaconda is such a simple system as an organism like that simplicity taking a scale it could just do the can swallow a caiman digested slowly i know but my question was how how on earth is it
physically possible to have this hellish bile that can digest anything, even something as, as, as horrendous as a, as a came in scales and bones and all the hardest shit in nature and then not hurt the snake itself. And I had a chemist explained to me that it's probably some sort of mucus system that, that lines the stomach and neutralizes the acid and keeps it floating in there.
But my God, that must be powerful stuff.
So what does it feel like being crushed, choked by an anaconda?
When an anaconda is wrapped around you and you find yourself in the shocking realization that these could be your last moments breathing,
you are confronted with the vast disparity in power that there is so much power in these animals so much crushing deliberate reptilian ancient power that doesn't care they're just trying to get you to stop they just want you to stop ticking and there's nothing you can do and there's i find it very awe-inspiring when i encounter that kind of power when you
even if it's that you see you know you see a dog run you know you ever try to outrun a dog and they just zip by you and you go wow you know or you see a horse kick and you go oh my god if that if that hoof hit anyone's head it'd knock them three states over and it's like it's like there there is muscular power that is so far that like you said that explosive that we we dream of doing it like imagine if like a muay thai kickboxer could could harness that sort of cayman power that smash
Um, and so it's, it's just awe inspiring. I think it's really, really impressive what animals can do. And we're, we're all, you know, we're all the same sort of makeup for the most part, all the mammals, you know, we all have our skeleton skeletons look so similar. We all have like, you know, if you look at like a kangaroos, biceps and chest, it looks so much like a, like a, like a, a man's.
And if same thing goes for a bear or you ever see a naked chimp, there's like chimps with alopecia. Oh, shit. Oh, they're shredded. It looks like a bodybuilder. It's got cuts and huge, huge everything. It's got pecs, and they got that face that's just like... Just let me in. What now? Where's your wallet?
Do something. But yeah, but there's the specialization of a lifetime of doing damage to the world and using those muscles. It just makes you that much more powerful than most humans because humans, I guess, have more brain, so they get lazy. They start puzzle solving versus using the biceps directly.
Well, yes and no. And I have this question, okay? So I, you know, that whole you are what you eat thing. Now, we one time here had two chickens. And one of them was a wild chicken, like from the farm, had walked around its whole life finding insects. And the other chicken was like factory raised. And so we cut the heads off of both of them and started getting ready to cook them.
Now, the factory raised chicken was like... a much higher percentage of fat, had less muscle on its body, was softer tissue, a lighter color. The farm-raised chicken had darker, more sinewy muscles, less fat, was clearly a better made machine. And so my question is, Is that what's happening with us?
You know, like if you go see a Sherpa who's been walking his whole life and pulling, you know, and walking behind musk oxes and lifting things up mountains and breathing clean air and not being in the city versus someone that's just been chowing down at IHOP for 40 years and never getting off the couch. Like, I imagine it's the same thing that you become what you eat.
Yeah, I mean like you and I were like half dead running up a mountain. Meanwhile, there's a grandma just like walking and she's been walking that road and she's just built different. With her alpaca on her shoulders. With a baby. They're just built different when you apply your body in a physical way your whole life.
Yeah. Like, you can't replicate that. Like, just like that chimp has those, from constantly moving through the canopy, constantly using those arms. Just like if you're, you know, if you see an Olympic athlete or you hug Rogan. Exactly the same. You just go, why is there so much muscle here?
That's exactly what I feel like when you give him a hug. This is definitely a chimp of some sort. How does that, just the constriction of the anaconda, just the feeling of that, are they doing that based on instinct or is there some brain stuff going on? Like, is this just like a basic procedure that they're doing and they just really don't give a damn? They're not like thinking, oh, Paul,
This is this kind of species. It would taste good.
Or is it just a mechanism to just start activating and you can't stop it? With an anaconda, I really think it's the second one. I do think that they're impressive and beautiful and incredibly arcane. I think they're a very simple system, a very ancient system. And I think that once you hit predation mode, it's going down no matter what. This stupid mosquito. I'm going like this.
And every time he just flies around my hand, like I'm a big, slow giant. And he just goes around my hand and then he goes back to the same spot. Like, and I'm like, no. And then he comes right back to the same spot. It's like, it's like, he's just going, fuck you.
Now here's the question. If the mosquito is stupid and you can't catch it, what does that make you? Fuck.
and stupid dude i flicked a wasp off me the other day it flew back like 12 feet and in the air corrected and then flew back at my face it made so many correct like calculations and corrections and decided to come back and let me know about it and it was like that was probably went back to the nest said guess what happened today this bitch-ass kid from brooklyn tried to flick me and i showed him what's up i had him running they had a good chuckle on that one
You actually mentioned to me, just on the topic of anacondas, that you've been participating in a lot of scientific work on the topic. So 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 and their environment. So you're actually a co-author on a paper
on a couple of papers, but one of them is on anacondas and studying green anaconda hunting patterns.
What's that about? So the lead authors of that paper, Pat Champagne and Carter Payne, 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 been positioned just below a copa.
And then other people began noticing that anacondas seemed to always be beneath these culpas, where mammals were going to be coming. And that contrasted with what we knew about anacondas. Because what we understood about anacondas is 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 Acadia University for a long time, worked with us for a long time. And 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 giant anaconda. Obviously, 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 the shallow stream, it moves not just in the water, but in the sand. Yeah. So it also likes 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. Snake's underground. Snake has found either a recess under the sides of the stream. You saw it last night where all the fish have their holes under the side of the stream.
There was a six foot dwarf caiman 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 because he thought we'd gone. And then we turned around and I just got a glimpse of him because I was in the front of the line and he just went right back into his cave.
You guys are not going to touch me. And so, yeah, with the anacondas, it's been really exciting. And in 2014, JJ and me and Mohsen and Pat and Lee, we all, we ended up catching what at the time was the record for Eunectes marina scientifically measured. It was 18 feet, six inches, 220 pounds, 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 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 stream, 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 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's 25 foot, 27 foot.
Well, there's just that video of the guy swimming with the 20 foot 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.
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 anaconda change. So all of that, 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 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 the white witch, which is a huge moth. It's one of the two largest moths in the world. It's the largest moth by wingspan. 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 ships. Like, we don't know where that moth starts its life. Yeah. We still haven't figured that out.
By the way, the rocket ships are shaped that way for efficiency purposes, not because they wanted to make it look like a penis. Speaking of which, I've ran across a lot of penis trees while exploring. Have you? And make me very... I know it's not just a figment of my imagination. I'm pretty sure they're real.
In fact, you explained it to me and they make me very uncomfortable because there's just a lot of penises hanging off of a tree.
Yes.
I don't know what the purpose is. I don't know who they're supposed to attract, but it certainly makes...
But certainly Paul really enjoys them. Yeah. Well, clearly you've done some research and you've noticed a lot of them.
I haven't even seen them. There was a time where I almost fell and to catch my balance, I had to grab one of the penises of the penis tree and unforgettable. Anaconda, the biggest, baddest anaconda in the Amazon versus the biggest, baddest black caiman. Because you mentioned they're like, there's a race. If there's a fight, this is UFC and Cage who wins underwater.
This is the biggest and the baddest. The biggest and the baddest. that you can imagine given all the studies you've done of the two animals, species.
You're talking about an 18-foot, several hundred-pound black caiman versus a 26-foot, 350-pound anaconda. Yeah. I think it's a death stalemate. I think the caiman slams the anaconda, bites onto it, the anaconda wraps the caiman, and then they both thrash around until they both kill each other, because I think the caiman will tear him up so bad. And the caiman's not going to let go.
The caiman's never going to let go, but then he's going to realize that he's also being constricted, so then he's going to stop, and he's going to keep slamming down on that anaconda, and the anaconda's just going to keep constricting, but if the caiman can do enough damage before the anaconda... Again, it's almost like a striker versus a jujitsu. Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
You know, if you can get enough elbows in before they lock you.
How fast is the construction?
So it's pretty slow. No, it's incredibly quick. So it's you take the back and get me in choke hold. It's that. I have maybe 30 seconds, maybe on the upward side, if you haven't cinched it under my throat. But if you've gotten good position- It's over. Is there any way to unwrap the choke, undo the choke, defending? Not unless you have outside help.
Unless you have another human or another 10 humans coming to unwrap the tail, help you. But for an animal, like if a deer gets hit by an animal, no way. They don't stand a chance.
So the black caiman would bite somewhere close to the head and just try to hold on and thrash?
Yeah. I don't think a large black caiman... Here's the thing. Every fisherman knows this. The biggest fish, they're smart. Yeah. And more importantly, they're shrewd. They're careful. A huge black caiman that's 16 feet long isn't going to be messing with a big anaconda. They won't cross paths because while they technically occupy...
the same type of environment, that black caiman's gonna have this deep spot in a lake, and that anaconda's gonna have found this floating forest-like sort of black stream backwater where it's gonna be. And they'll have made that their home for decades, and they'll already have cleaned out the competition. So maybe if there was a flood, And they got pushed together.