Reptilia · Squamata
Eunectes murinusLinnaeus, 1758
Anaconda
Photograph by MKAMPIS, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons
An active by day or night, meat-eating snake from the Neotropic region, reaching 670 cm nose to tail.
Also called Green Anaconda.
Reptilia › Squamata › Boidae › Eunectes
- Grows to
- 6700mm
- greatest recorded
- Eats
- Carnivorous
- Active
- Cathemeral
- Lives up to
- 31.8years
Longer than 98% of all boas anyone has measured.
The bar is the rank itself: its length is the share of the family this animal exceeds. The chart below is the family’s real spread, on a logarithmic scale because body length here runs from 109 to 6,700 mm. The solid rule is this animal. Every bar is a count of real species, and nothing on this figure is estimated.
What is known
39 sourced facts, each taken from a named scientific dataset. How to read these.
Cited from a dataset unless a row is marked otherwise.
Two of these figures disagree
Body mass (a typical adult) is given as 97,500, and Body mass (greatest) as 51,471.5 — but a typical adult cannot outweigh the heaviest one ever recorded. They come from different sources and both are shown exactly as those sources give them.
Standing in the world
- Still living
- Extant
- Conservation status
- Least Concern
- Status assessed · the year the Red List last looked
- 2014
The animal itself
- Limbs
- None
- Venomous
- No
- Longest recorded life
- 31.8years
Stark et al. 2020
Size
- Length snout to vent · greatest recorded
- 4770mm15 ft 8 in
- Length snout to vent · adult female mean
- 3627mm11 ft 11 in
- Length nose to tail · greatest recorded
- 6700mm22 ft
- Hatchling length · snout to vent
- 547mm21.5 in
- Hatchling length · nose to tail
- 645mm2 ft 1 in
- Body mass at hatchingmeasured
- 177.8g6.3 oz
- Body mass · greatestcomputeddisputed
- 51,472g113 lb
- Body mass · a typical adultdisputed
- 97,500g215 lb
10000 mm total length (Feldman et al. 2016), Rivas 2000 (Table 3-1: max SVL 477 cm, max TL 521 cm, mean female SVL 2751 mm, mean TL 3110 mm, "(Silvia) was 522.8 cm in TL and 459.8 cm SVL."), "The largest female I found was 97.5 kg"), max 6.7m (Murphy 2020 based on Mole 1924), max measured 24 feet (Murphy and Henderson 1997 Table 3-1), Tarkhnishvili et al. 2022 (32 females 1295-3630 mm, mean 2111 mm SVL, 33 males, 1350-2460, mean 2021 mm SVL), Rivas 2023 (n = 823 mean Total length 263.6±83.cm, range 64.5-522; SVL n = 813, mean 228.0±75.0 cm, range 54.7-477 cm; mass n = 794, mean 11437.1±13316.2, range 107-97000 g; female and male measurements include juveniles), max 8.1 m (Reed 2005), Pizzatto and Marques 2007 (female SVL: 3626.7 ± 720.2 range 2963-4480, N = 6; males 2256.2 ± 407.1, range 1335-3329, N = 35), Rivas 2023 (max SVL is either just shy of 480 cm (fig. 4) or just over 500 (fig 3), n = 660!)
snakes only in this source
computed from length by a family-level allometric equation, not weighed
AnAge rates this record "acceptable"
How it lives
- Diet
- Carnivorous
- How it hunts
- Sit and wait
- Active
- Cathemeral
- Where it lives
- Semi-aquatic
- Habitat
- Forest, Savanna, Wetlands
- Biome
- Tropical & Subtropical Moist Broadleaf Forests
- Region
- Neotropic
- Mainland or island
- Mainland
- Highest it lives · above sea level
- 850m
- Range size
- 11,215,334km²
carnivore (see Pinto‐Coelho et al. 2021, da Frota et al. 2021)
Sit (Murphy et al. 2003)
da Frota et al. 2021
Murphy et al. 2003, da Frota et al. 2021
0-240 (O'Shea 2018), 0-850 (Señaris & Rojas-Runjaic 2020), max 200 (Reed 2005)
Breeding
- Reproduction
- Viviparous
- Average clutch
- 30eggs
- Eggs or young per clutch
- 17–82eggs
- Mean clutch
- 63.7eggs
- Clutches in a year
- 1per year
- Clutches a year
- 0.4–0.79per year
- First breeds at
- 42months
- Age at first breeding · female
- 912days
Feldman et al. 2015
mean 63.7 (Meiri et al. 2019), 82 n=1 (Murphy et al. 2003), 20-40 (O'Shea 2018), 17 (Garcia and de Almeida‐Santos 2021, n = 1), max 82 (Reed 2005), Pizzatto and Marques 2007 (49-82, mean 63.7)
Naming and history
- Suborder
- Serpentes
- Infraorder
- Alethinophidia
- Subspecies
- No
- Described by
- Linnaeus
- Moved to another genus · since it was first described
- Yes
- Described in
- 1758
- Type locality
- America”
Keeping one
22 ft × 11 ft × 16 ft 6 in(670 × 335 × 503 cm)
Minimum length × width × height, for one animal. Bigger is always better.
The standard sizes snakes as a fraction of total length: 1 × 0.5 × 0.75.
Mindestanforderungen an die Haltung von Reptilien (Sachverständigengutachten), German Federal Ministry for Nutrition, Agriculture and Forestry, Animal Welfare Division, 10 January 1997. The standard states these floor areas are recommendations rather than binding limits.
From this animal’s own total length of 22 ft (6700 mm), at 1 × 0.5 × 0.75 times it, following the German federal welfare standard — how this is worked out.
No preferred body temperature has been recorded for Anaconda. Rather than repeat a number from a care sheet, this page leaves it out.
Feeding
A prey item should be between the same width as the widest part of the snake's body and about 1.5 times that width.
Widely used across snake husbandry references. An alternative formulation gives prey at 10-15% of the snake's body mass. This is established practice, not a measurement.
3026kJ per day
Worked out for an animal of 51,472 g, the heaviest recorded for Anaconda — so it is the top of the range, not a figure for a particular animal. Weigh yours and the number will be lower.
An upper estimate, not a feeding target, and not veterinary advice. The equation covers only what an animal burns staying alive, so a growing, gravid or recovering animal needs more — and it was measured on wild animals, which move far more than one in an enclosure. Body condition and a vet who knows the species are what a feeding decision should rest on. Where this comes from.
What nobody knows
These are not gaps in our research. No scientific dataset records them for this species — and saying so is information you cannot get from a reference that simply leaves a field out.
- — Length snout to vent · adult male mean
- — Length snout to vent · adult mean
- — Female length · mean, nose to tail
- — Length nose to tail · adult male mean
- — Length nose to tail · adult mean
- — Largest female · snout to vent
- — Largest male · snout to vent
- — Largest female · shell length
- — Largest male · shell length
- — Largest juvenile · snout to vent
- — Largest juvenile · shell length
- — Egg length
- — Egg width
- — Body mass · adult female, mean
- — Preferred body temperature · chosen in a laboratory gradient
- — Body temperature when active · measured in the wild
- — Eats arthropods
- — Eats vertebrates
- — Eats plant matter
- — How the young develop
- — Gestation or incubation
- — Hatchling length · smallest recorded
- — Hatchling length · largest recorded
- — Mature from · youngest recorded
- — Mature by · oldest recorded
- — Size at maturity · smallest recorded
- — Size at maturity · largest recorded
- — Fangs
- — Body temp in the wild · lowest mean recorded
- — Body temp in the wild · highest mean recorded
- — Colour on the back
- — Pattern on the back
- — Pupil
- — Sex decided by
- — Population trend
- — Red List criteria
- — Active season · shortest recorded
- — Active season · longest recorded
- — Density · lowest recorded
- — Density · highest recorded
- — Home range · largest recorded
- — Active in
- — Lowest it lives · above sea level
Others in Boidae
Take this data
Everything on this page is available as data under CC BY 4.0 — use it freely, credit it, no permission needed.
This species as JSON · the whole dataset
Cite this page
The Reptile & Amphibian Encyclopedia (2026). Eunectes murinus. Retrieved 2026-09-08, from https://www.allanglescreatures.com/species/eunectes-murinus
@misc{eunectes_murinus_2026,
title = {Eunectes murinus},
author = {{The Reptile & Amphibian Encyclopedia}},
year = {2026},
url = {https://www.allanglescreatures.com/species/eunectes-murinus}
}Sources
- Meiri, S. (2024). SquamBase — a database of squamate (Reptilia: Squamata) traits. Global Ecology and Biogeography. Public domain (CC0).
- AnAge, Human Ageing Genomic Resources (de Magalhães et al.), used under CC BY 3.0.
- Oskyrko, O. et al. (2024). ReptTraits: a comprehensive dataset of ecological traits in reptiles. Scientific Data. Used under CC BY 4.0.
- Catalogue of Life (dataset 3LR), used under CC BY.