iStockphoto / Utopia_88
As a born-and-raised Floridian I make a point of never getting complacent when it comes to wildlife and always reminding myself that I live on the frontier of a real-life Jurassic Park here in Southwest Florida that instead of being filled with dinosaurs is crawling with massive alligators, snakes, and other creatures. This video of an alligator swimming with a Burmese python in its mouth is a fantastic reminder of how nature is metal here in the Sunshine State.
There wasn’t much information in the video posted below to Reddit but I was able to do some deep digging and the Burmese python/alligator video was also shared to the incredibly popular Facebook group ‘Alligators of Florida‘ where someone says this was filmed in the Shark Valley loop of Everglades National Park. They claim the alligator is around 12ft in length which, if we’re being honest here, seems like a stretch.
But let’s assume for a moment that alligator is, in fact, 12 feet long then that means this invasive Burmese python is truly massive…
The longest one ever caught in Florida was a 19-footer captured in July of last year and that snake was nabbed in the Big Cypress National Preserve…Where Phish played on the Y2K/1999 New Year’s Eve… Imagine seeing Phish jam out in the Florida Everglades and something like this comes slithering along:
Burmese python learns that in the Everglades, sometimes you eat the bar and sometimes the bar eats you
byu/GrapeGrabber inflorida
If that video isn’t loading, you can see it here on Reddit.
It is unclear just how big the snake it. Given the shape of it, the Burmese python appears to be bloated. That would suggest the snake has been dead for a little while.
For context, here is what the state record 19-foot Burmese python looked like shortly after it was caught in Big Cypress and brought to the Conservancy of Southwest Florida. This snake is an absolute UNIT and the largest ever captured in Florida but it does look smaller than the one in the video above:
Sadly, it appears as if there was no way for anyone to take measurements on the Burmese python in the video above so we will never know just how large it is. But from where I’m sitting, that’s the size of a dinosaure.
More recently, field biologists in Florida found a 115-pound Burmese python eating a 77-pound deer. That finding led to the revelation that these invasive snakes are capable of biting off much larger chunks than previously thought.