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Has anyone noticed the rash of giant snake attacks in Indonesia? These alarming stories of giant snakes follow a very ancient (and horrifying) narrative pattern: a lone villager or traveler chances across an enormous predatory reptile from 20 to 30 feet in length. Mayhem ensues. Usually the human survives and fights off the monster with a machete (or with aid from a torch wielding mob), but sometimes the human vanishes…only to be found being slowly digested inside a reticulated python.
Taken from an individual human perspective, it is hard not to think of the pythons as the insatiable villains of such stories, but the real narrative is more complicated. Palm oil is made from fruit of the palm oil plant, a tropical generalist. Not only is this oil a lucrative (and delicious) additive to desserts and other processed foodstuffs, it is also extensively used in cosmetics, shampoo, and soaps. Indonesia has the third largest rainforest in the world, but palm oil growers are destroying these forests at an unprecedented rate. Indonesia’s tropical rainforests are vanishing even more quickly than the rainforests in Brazil or the Congo. These forests are cut down and replaced with palm oil plantations, enormous monocultures where most traditional rainforest animals cannot live, however rats can and do live there on the oily palm fruit. The pythons are hunting rats in these plantations because their forests were destroyed.
Humankind the great hive organism is swallowing these forests whole (in the form of delicious candy and aromatic toiletries). The animals which live there are likewise being eradicated. Indeed the most recent giant python to attack a villager who molested it was literally cut into pieces, fried, and devoured by hungry villagers. It makes one wonder if the Saint George and the Dragon pictures were not so much about humankind surmounting evil as about the tragedy of deforestation in medieval England.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHqSNStGL8w
What with all the excitement and commotion, it is easy to overlook some of life’s simple pleasures…like watching this enormous python slither across a golf course in Zimbali, South Africa. The python apparently lives near (or just plain is) a water hazard, but every once in a while, he takes a constitutional crawl around the course for exercise and to see what is going on. Of course, just like it does not allow text below pictures, or images which expand to be wider than the window, WordPress prohibits video embeds (unless I pay a hundred dollars a year) so you will have to navigate away from this page to Youtube. I pasted the link above.
I feel like there is surely some sort of larger picture here. The elements seem to go together: a snake in the garden; an apex predator indolently slithering around the golf course; an invasive species invading another creature’s territory…and building an extravagant game there (wait…are both scary creatures native Africans?). However, I cannot quite find the links (snicker) between these elements.
Green Tree Python (Morelia viridis) by bpfischer
The day has completely slipped away from me (as is the way of Mondays in January) but–even though I haven’t written a proper blog post–I wanted to share some photos of an extremely fancy tropical tree python with you. The green tree python (Morelia viridis) is found in southern Indonesia, New Guinea, and the Cape York Peninsula of Australia, all of which sound far preferable to the cold gray pall of Brooklyn. The snake has a long slender body which measures from 1.5 to 1.8 meters (about 5 to 6 feet) and has a pronounced head with a heavy square nose/muzzle.
Green Tree Python (Morelia viridis) by Shannon Plummer
The species is arborial and is notable for coiling up into a saddle position when sleeping or resting. Green tree pythons feed mostly on tree-dwelling mammals (which they catch by hanging their necks and heads into an S-shape and imitating vines) and smaller reptiles which live up in the rainforest. As with the green vine snake, the sinuous almost abstract beauty of the green tree python always makes me think of lush tropical forests on far-away continents and its exquisite green/yellow/chartreuse color reminds me of the beauty of nature.
Apollo and Python (J.M.W. Turner, 1811, oil on canvas)
The giant Burmese pythons invading South Florida are back in the news. We have examined the disturbing progress of these tropical apex predators in a previous post. Unfortunately the stiff winter of 2010 was not enough to slow their relentless progress. It is now reported that the renegade serpents have caused mammal populations throughout the everglades to crash. This upsetting news article indicates that populations of raccoons, opossums, and white-tailed deer are down by more than 90%. Researchers couldn’t find any rabbits or foxes at all. Native, domestic, and invasive birds have also been hit hard by the snakes. Not only are the pythons excellent predators in land, water, or trees, but mammals and birds have lost their evolved response to giant snakes (the last native boa constrictors went extinct 16 million years ago).
Humankind is ingenuous at killing things when there is an incentive to do so. Perhaps the fashion industry could revive python skin (in an environmentally sensitive way that did not involve slaughtering endangered snakes overseas). Or we could take a cue from the sun god Apollo and just go on an infuriated killing rampage. The ancient Greeks admired and venerated snakes in a way which we do not, but one of the main myths about Apollo involves the story of how he killed a giant underworld python and remade the creature’s lair into the locus of sun worship and prophecy in the ancient world.
Zeus dallied with the goddess Leto who became pregnant with twins. Vengeful Hera could not directly punish Zeus, but she took out her wrath on Leto by sending a monstrous python to hound the expectant goddess from all terra firma (and from anywhere the sun shone). Finally Leto found refuge on Delos, a floating island which Zeus covered with clouds. She gave birth to twins: Artemis, (Diana in Roman) the virgin goddess of the hunt; and Apollo, sun god and deity of beauty, prophecy, and enlightened art. Apollo represented the apex of classical beauty and virtue at a time when martial skill and revenge were paramount virtues. As soon as he grew to manhood he took his divine golden arrows and hunted for the python which had tormented his mother. He hunted the underworld monster to Delphi where the python lived wrapped around the Omphalos, the navel of the earth. In single combat he shot an arrow of divine agony into the creature’s throat, causing the snake to die at the center of the world in terrible pain.
The python was sacred, the offspring of mother Earth herself. Even for an Olympian god such a deicide was a tremendous sin. Zeus decreed that Apollo must serve eight years of menial service as a slave to atone for killing the Python. After this period was over, Apollo rededicated the Python’s oracular shrine to himself as the foremost center of augury in the ancient world. A yearly Greek holiday Septerla was established to commemorate the god’s triumph over the chthonic snake and every four years the Pythian Games were held at Delphi. The Pthian games were second only to the Olympics in fame and prestige.
