A team of Florida biologists have captured a female Burmese python that weighed more than 210 pounds and was 18 feet long . She was captured in the Picayune Strand State Forest outside of Naples. It is the largest Burmese python ever recorded in the state. It took up to three people to carry the huge snake.
The giant snake was captured in December, slaughtered and put on ice in a freezer until April. Rebecca Dzombak of National Geographic magazine traveled to a laboratory in Naples to watch investigators perform a necropsy. The carcass took about 48 hours to thaw, and Dzombak said in his article that “the smell does not improve with time.”
A surprise inside
Upon opening the tremendous specimen, they discovered that, hidden in its body, there were 122 proto-eggs, the largest number ever found inside a python.
The researchers also took various measurements of the snake, noting that its head measured nearly six inches from the tip of its snout to the back of its skull. However, the eggs had not yet been fertilized. The python had hoof cores and bits of skin in its digestive tract, which the researchers say indicates its last meal was an adult white-tailed deer.
These types of snakes are native to Southeast Asia, but have been wreaking havoc in Florida since the 1970s. The snakes came to Florida as pets, but owners discarded them into the wild, where they began to multiply and grow to enormous lengths . The death of the female python was not in vain, as it will help researchers learn more about these creatures that have eluded scientists since they arrived in the United States.
Burmese pythons have been linked to nearly 90 percent declines in some native mammal species, according to estimates by the United States Geological Survey , and once they’re over 6 feet long, the snakes have no natural predators in the wild. nature.
