THE ISLAND (Colombo, Sri Lanka) 25 December 13 Starvation cited as reason for anaconda to swallow mate (Ifham Nizam)
A female anaconda swallowed its mate, at the Dehiwela Zoo recently, because the animals had not been fed for more than two weeks, insiders said.
Acting Zoo Supervisor Premasiri Peries has told officials that there was a lapse on their part. However, even in their wildest dreams they had not thought that it would cost them the male anaconda, sources said.
The question remains why a diet of 15 chickens, fed once in two weeks, in 2008, had come down to four in the recent past, especially when the animals were growing at a faster rate.
Insiders also said that Zoo was minus a curator for years, thus, nobody was there to oversee the proper feeding of animals.
Officials blamed the semi-starvation diets animals were put through to save money for the swallowing of the male green anaconda by his decade-old partner on December 19.
The anacondas responsible for more than 100 broods in the past five years were generally affectionate to each other.
Some Zoo workers claimed that each giant snake had been given just one chicken per week.
In July this year, 30 new baby green anacondas were born. Twenty of them would be transferred to exhibit cages from August, while the remaining ten would be kept inside due to space constraints.
Unlike on the previous three occasions, they were confident that all 30 baby anacondas would survive.
The adult pair of Anacondas arrived in 2003 from the Czech Republic and this was their fourth brood.
The mother anaconda first gave birth in 2008, where all 23 baby anacondas died within weeks, 22 animals were born in 2009 and 18 babies in 2011. A handful of those that survived were sent to the Mysore Zoo in India on an Animal Exchange Programme.
The mother Anaconda is now more than 18 feet long and can grow up to 30 feet and the dead male was about 15 feet.
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