One of the world’s leading experts on the largest species of snake lives and teaches in Las Vegas, N.M.Jesus Rivas is an associate professor of biology at New Mexico Highlands University, but he ventures to South America annually to capture and study anacondas, giant snakes that kill their prey by constriction. He has put tracking chips on more than 1,000 snakes as part of his research.Rivas, 51, hails from Caracas, Venezuela. Both his parents were professors, and he knew a career in academia was in his future. He received his doctorate from the University of Tennessee in 2000 and joined the faculty at Highlands in 2010.“I like being in a place where I don’t stick out like a sore thumb,” he said.He started studying anacondas after a batch of more than 2,600 snake skins ended up in Holland in the early 1990s.n an attempt to prevent the indiscriminate killing of the snakes, government officials decided the best option was to create a legal market for anaconda skins. But to do that, they needed to learn more about the snakes’ population, something that hadn’t been studied.
It was 1992, and Rivas’ friend and colleague, John Thorbjarnarson, said they could do the job. Rivas had studied lizards and other reptiles in school, but never the green anaconda. He feared he wouldn’t be able to find the creatures.
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