Yako Mama · 10:00am Jun 7th, 2016
Last year I found a documentary about how the natives in The Amazon talk about giant water snakes called Yako Mammas that are 100 - 200 feet long and up to six feet wide. The Yako Mama is said to expand itself while submerged, gorging in massive amounts of water and with it, any fish or eels etc within 100 feet of its mouth. After that it sticks its head above water and shoots out the excess water like a water cannon, and can knock monkeys off tree branches into the water where it gets them too.
So far we don’t have concrete proof that they exist, but there are also European explorers who have claimed to have seen it, and the places where the natives claim Yako Mama’s live do not have hippos or crocodiles. (Keep in mind, the Amazon river averages 350 feet deep and often a couple miles across; plenty of room for a monster snake to hide.)
More convincing evidence might be that African tribes in the Congo also claim that a similar snake lives in their rivers; and both these nations have stories of the giant snakes before they had the ability to communicate or swap stories. (The Africans also claim that these things can eat elephants.)
I think it would be rather awesome if God made some snakes like this; but rather than debate whether they’re real in our world, let’s assume snakes like this do exist in a fictional world. What would society do with them?
The tribes of the Amazon and Congo seem to simply stay far away from the snakes and run if they see them; and maybe that’s the smart thing but that’s also boring.
If we somehow put poisoned pellets in a cow and left it on the bank we might poison them, and claim large patches of rivers with good fishing for ourselves; but it would probably leave giant corpses rotting at the bottom of the river. If we could hunt them on land however, we could also get a LOT of good meat and leather off one. How would you choose to hunt or trap something that big, with minimal risk and resources?
Maybe you find some when they’re babies and train them; and methods like the rope around an elephants neck might work for the snakes. If we were keeping them as pets, what would they be for?
Use them as war animals? They would have terrific scare value and the sight of them might turn man and beast running, but I don’t think they’d be that dangerous in a fight if fear wasn’t an issue. Snakes are designed to fight one thing; so if your enemy had a dragon or something it might take that out, but I don’t think it would deal well with a dozen brave guys surrounding it, or volleys of arrows. (Depending on if you could use its water cannons as artillery.)
A green anaconda a fraction of this size can squeeze with 90psi, and a total crushing force of about 200 times its own body weight. Maybe we can train them to pull 2 chained logs together and they can provide the pulling power to operate a large crane if we want to build stone hedge or something.
Maybe we have a city like Venice or Tenochtitlan with canals for streets, and we can have a few Yako Mamas that act as the fire brigade.
Are these creatures more ceremonial, or religious in nature? If you have one of these coiled up in the throne room, that’s going to make a lasting impression on visitors. If the Emperor has a few of these that get shown off in ceremonies, or the high priest has one of these at a temple etc that is going to inspire awe in the population and give you a feared and respected status; even if the creature itself didn’t do much.
Then again; if you’re going to have a 100 + foot snake living in the basement of your castle, how big of an aquarium are you going to need for that? It would need a lot of carefully designed space, a lot of food and a lot of specialized equipment and generally be a very expensive luxury.
Can you get snake oil off them?
What would you do with a Yako Mama?
It also seems like a pokemon.
Having done some research and playing with math; I think taking care of a 200 ft snake weighing about 100 tones would be a bit ridiculous with the size of enclosure you would need for it. A 120 ft, 60 tone, snake on the other hand might be feasible.
For reference: an elephant is more in the 5 tone range.