A Couple of Python Stories

[taiwan_girl]

The first is about a teenager who won the contest in the Florida everglades to kill the most Burmese Python snakes.

https://abc11.com/burmese-python-challenge-snakes-captured-florida-ecology-bergeron-everglades-foundation/12385309/

What is he going to do with his winning money?"Concepcion said he may use some of his earnings to buy a powerful lighting setup for his truck, which will help him spot more snakes." LOL

The second story is about a woman from Indonesia who was found in the stomach of a python that ate her!!!!!! :eek

Woman Eaten by Python

[George K]

@taiwan_girl said in A Couple of Python Stories:

The second story is about a woman from Indonesia who was found in the stomach of a python that ate her!!!!!! :eek

Saw that earlier today. Can you imagine, being constricted like that, so that every time you breathe out, you can't breathe back in as much. Until, you can't breathe at all?

At least the snake had the common courtesy to swallow her whole.

[Horace]

@taiwan_girl said in A Couple of Python Stories:

The second story is about a woman from Indonesia who was found in the stomach of a python that ate her!!!!!! :eek

Let's not jump to conclusions. Her body may have been placed in the stomach of the python while the python slept, in an attempt to frame the python for her murder. I will await more information before judging.

[Catseye3]

When asked how she tasted, the python said, "Meh, I've had better."

[Doctor Phibes]

@Catseye3 said in A Couple of Python Stories:

When asked how she tasted, the python said, "Meh, I've had better."

The woman, on the other hand said " 'tis but a scratch!"

[Horace]

Klaus will be disappointed in this thread.

[Aqua Letifer]

@Horace said in A Couple of Python Stories:

Klaus will be disappointed in this thread.

I, too, thought this was going to be about tuples.

[taiwan_girl]

https://www.popsci.com/environment/burmese-python-mouth-size/

Bartoszek and colleagues recently got hands on to measure a trio of captured snakes measuring 15-, 17-, and 19-feet-long. Although previously examined pythons have been documented with mouth gape diameters as wide as 8.7 in, the largest of the study’s pythons could extend their gape to 10.2-in-wide.

[taiwan_girl]

Biologists A.J. Sanjar and Michael Cove part a curtain of vegetation and stride into the shadows of a dense forest in Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge to check on a line of possum traps.

A metal trap sits 20 yards into the woods. Inside, a fuzzy white possum, seduced by cat food, sits, befuddled.

Sanjar determines the animal is large enough for a collar — they want animals that weigh 3 pounds or more — and gently carries the cage back to the truck. The possum doesn’t know it, but she’ll be returned to her home in a few hours, fitted with a collar that will tell Sinjar when she dies.

The collar accounts for a grim possibility: A possum meeting its end in the coils of a large invasive Burmese python. The tracker would sit in the snake’s belly, and Sanjar would be able to find the snake and euthanize it, removing it from an ecosystem that’s home to two endangered mammals.

and

Back in 2022, Dixon and Cove, who works for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, made a rather macabre discovery, but one that has turned out to be a silver lining in the war against the Burmese python.

They were studying the movements of raccoons and possums, but the mammals they were tracking kept getting eaten by the highly destructive Burmese pythons, which had colonized Key Largo in the early 2000s.

When they trekked into the woods to retrieve the expensive GPS collars, they discovered that the collars — still in the snakes’ stomachs — were leading them to some very large snakes. They euthanized the snakes, removing them from the ecosystem.

Taking big breeder pythons out of native ecosystems is a victory for any Florida biologist. Cove and Dixon wondered if tracking mammals could become another weapon against the Burmese python’s seemingly unstoppable invasion.

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2026/04/19/possums-vs-pythons-how-floridas-only-marsupial-became-a-weapon-against-invasive-snakes/