Sgt. Brian Adams, of the Osceola County Sheriff's Office, at left, and Osceola County Animal Control Officer Scott Shindoll hold the 12-foot green anaconda found at East Lake Fish Camp.
By Juliana A. Torres Staff Writer The 12-foot green anaconda snake found at East Lake Fish Camp Wednesday probably could have lived happily in East Lake Tohopekaliga for years, said George Van Horn, the director of Reptile World Serpentarium, where the snake will live now. “I figured, if he had managed to continue on for more years, it would have gotten a lot bigger and he could have become a real behemoth and been a legend,” Van Horn said. “Not the Loch Ness monster but the Toho Monster.”
	George and Rosa Van Horn, operators of Reptile World Serpentarium in St. Cloud, stand over the the captured anaconda.

Van Horn said he knew someone came into the store before previously and told a story about a big snake that was seen by Chisholm Park. 

“It could have been this very snake,” Van Horn said.

The serpentarium owner said he thought the anaconda was male and that it was not a recent escapee from life as a pet.

“I think he’s been living in the wildlife probably for quite some time. He’s got some battle scars on him,” he said. “He may have been living in Lake Toho for some years.”

As long as it’s healthy, the anaconda will become Reptile World’s newest attraction, joining the dozens of other snakes already on display at the serpentarium. Van Horn said he hopes to pair it with a much smaller female anaconda he acquired less than a year ago. The female anaconda wasn’t found in the wild. Van Horn said the serpentarium has collected a number of different snake species found in the area over the years, but never an anaconda.

“It’s probably the first anaconda found loose in Florida,” he said.

The mounted patrol unit from the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office found the snake Wednesday morning at the camp, on the north side of East Lake Tohopekaliga. The unit was doing exercises, walking their horses over grates when they saw the snake, holed up against the cold weather in the storm drainage grates that led to a retention pond about 10 to 15 feet away.

“It quite possibly could have been a dangerous situation but that anaconda was dormant,” Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Twis Lizasuain said.

Because of the cold snap in the weather, the reptile had gone into brumation, a state of dormancy reptiles use similar to hibernation. The deputies were able to get the snake out and handle it easily, Lizasuain said. Osceola County Animal Control transported the snake to the serpentarium.

The cold, however, was not the snake’s only problem. Officials could tell it had recently eaten, mostly likely right before the temperatures dropped, Van Horn said, and the snake’s prey had gone undigested when the snake’s metabolism slowed. The risk then is that the carcass will start to rot, and the resulting bacteria would hurt the snake.

On Thursday morning, the anaconda regurgitated a goose, for its betterment, Van Horn said, though he added that one of the neighbors near where the snake was found told him that a prize goose of hers had recently disappeared.

The Sheriff’s Office’s discovery shed some light on reports from residents near East Lake Fish Camp, who had noticed a decrease in a chickens and ducks and geese over the last several months, Lizasauin said.

“It explained possibly why there were animals disappearing,” she said.

Van Horn said at first he thought officials had rescued the anaconda and saved its life. However, by Thursday, as the warm weather retuned, and the snake became more active in the sunlit enclosure set up for him at the front of the serpentarium, he had a different theory.

“I’m thinking if they hadn’t apprehended him in that drain, he would have warmed up today and he might have been right back in the lake and been on his merry way,” he said Thursday. “I realized, you know, if an anaconda gets away, it’s going to be a lot harder to find because they’re going to be in the water, they’re going to be at the edge of the lake. You’ll never see them.”

Green anacondas, usually found in tropical South America, are non-venomous and prey on fish and animals near the water. In their habitat, only an anaconda’s eyes and nose would stick up over above the water, Van Horn said.

“Unless they track up on land, nobody’s ever going to encounter them,” he said.

In any case, Van Horn said he’s thrilled to have the huge snake at the serpentarium.

“We’re very happy that it ended up here,” Van Horn said. “These guys surprise you. He’s just come through one of the longest cold spells we’ve had in some time and he’s seems to be doing OK.”