This snake bit off a bit more than it could chew.
Wildlife biologists from the Conservancy of Southwest Florida recently released a set of images showing a Burmese python they captured in Collier-Seminole State Park in 2015.
The researchers were combing the park in April of that year when they came across an 11-foot female swallowing a baby deer whole.
WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES
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Wildlife researchers caught a 31.5-pound Burmese python in the middle of eating a 35-pound baby deer back in 2015
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They stumbled upon the python swallowing the fawn whole in Collier-Seminole State Park
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Researchers recently released photos of the incident as part of a report on the invasive species of Asian snake
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Now that the Burmese python is threatening the deer population, they could upset the ecosystem even further. Above, another picture of the snake, which was euthanized
When they later weighed the snake and its prey separately, they discovered that the fawn actually weighed more than 4lbs more than the snake.
The python weighed 31.5lbs while the fawn weighed 35lbs – the largest Burmese python-to-prey ratio documented to date – and perhaps the largest one for the whole species of python as well.
Once the snake was moved to an open area, it started to regurgigate its meal, but the scientists say it would have been able to keep it down it if hadn’t been disturbed.
The snake was subsequently caught and euthanized.
The Conservancy recently released images of the find, which they write about in an upcoming article in the March 2018 issue of the Herpetologist Review.
The biologists say that the incident is a sign that the invasive species of Asian snake is threatening the deer population in Florida – which could disrupt the ecosystem of the Everglades even more.
The Burmese python is not native to the Americas. It started showing up in Florida in the 1970s, when people who owned them as pets released them into the wild.
The Conservancy launched a program five years ago to try and get the python population under control in the area. Researchers tag pythons and then those pythons lead them to other snakes during breeding season. Last month, hundreds of adult Burmese pythons were caught in southwest Florida during this cull.
The South Florida Water ɱaпagement District also pays snake hunters to kill the pythons and gives bonuses for taking out snake nests with eggs.