That’s what a 17-foot-long snake looks like.
The Florida Everglades are practically overrun with Burmese pythons. The snake, native to Southeast Asia, isn’t supposed to be in Florida, but thanks to consumers releasing exotic reptiles into the wild, Florida is the world capital for invasive reptiles. The python has been a Florida resident for 30 years now, and it’s perhaps more comfortable there as it is in its native Burma. Florida wildlife officials have discovered a 17-foot-7-inch-long python in the Everglades. The 165-pound snake is the largest ever captured.
“This thing is monstrous, it’s about a foot wide,” said Kenneth Krysko, of the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida. ”It means these snakes are surviving a long time in the wild, there’s nothing stopping them and the native wildlife are in trouble. They were here 25 years ago, but in very low numbers and it was difficult to find one because of their cryptic behavior; now, you can go out to the Everglades nearly any day of the week and find a Burmese python. We’ve found 14 in a single day.”
In addition to being amazingly large, the snake was also very, very fertile. Scientists found a staggering 87 eggs inside the snake’s oviducts, meaning that it is both the largest snake ever discovered in the Everglades AND it was carrying the most amount of eggs of any snake ever caught in Florida’s swamps. For those of you that find snakes like this one fascinating, you can discover all about the slithering serpents in our Sssnake Science program! Click here to find a HTHT location in your neighborhood!