While first featured here seven years (and two weeks) ago in another of my numbered weekly posts, the original slide is older than that, dating from 2005. It is a captive shot of course, since I’ve never been to South America where such reptiles hail from, but believe me, I’d be very interested in seeing a place where snakes hail. This is an emerald tree boa (Corallus caninus,) and was an exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. Still might be.
Or it might not, even if it’s still there. Four years after I took this image, a new species was introduced based on geographic and morphological differences, the Amazon Basin emerald tree boa (Corallus batesii.) I’m not sure which this is, and I certainly don’t have a full-body shot for better comparison, but based on a characteristic listed by Wikipedia, C. batesii has smaller snout scales – and this one appears to have smaller scales than one of the images of the emerald tree boa they show. So I might have never featured the emerald tree boa, only the Amazon Basin emerald tree boa.
Which means that C. caninus is one of quite a few (at least half a dozen) species that I have not yet featured within a post. I mean, we’ve seen this image once before (well, it’s been more than that for me,) but what have we actually seen? Are we looking at an emerald tree boa, or simply a collection of colored dots that bears some resemblance to one if you account for two-dimensionality and monitor calibration? Are you, the reader, even there? These questions will likely remain unanswered, and are too philosophical to bother with anyway…