South Florida resident Carl Nicholson of Everglades Metropolis not too long ago posted an incredible video that reveals a big alligator swimming off with a lifeless (and equally giant) Burmese python. Because the gator pushes the python towards a wild and tangled Florida shoreline, Nicholson says within the video that the incident occurred on the 29 Canal in South Florida. This area is understood for its abundance of native alligators and invasive pythons.
In the video you may also hear Nicholson say: “That’s a giant gator and he can’t even take it down. He’s attempting although.”
It’s unknown whether or not the gator killed the python in an epic wrestle between two apex predators, or if the gator merely discovered the snake lifeless and was benefiting from a free meal.
However battles between the 2 top-tier Florida reptiles is nicely documented, and there are many movies and experiences about such encounters. Alligators have dominated Florida’s waterways since time immemorial. However in the previous few many years, invasive Burmese pythons have reached the highest of the meals chain in south Florida.
Pythons have elevated in quantity exponentially, and have unfold from the Everglades to the south, east, west, and north. Present estimates of the statewide python inhabitants vary from 30,000 and 300,000 snakes. Wherever they slither they are often counted on to take their share of rabbits, deer, turtles, raccoons, possums, and birds, together with another wildlife species they’ll coil themselves round. Some research have discovered that pythons can cut back small mammal populations by virtually 90 p.c.
Florida Predator vs. Pythons
Burmese pythons are among the many largest snakes on this planet, able to rising to twenty ft. The greatest python caught and formally recorded in Florida measured 17 ft, 7 inches. Florida alligators are big, too, with the state document measuring over 13 ft lengthy, weighing greater than half a ton. Nonetheless, researchers say that when a python reaches about six ft in size it has no pure predators within the wild. If that’s true, it’s probably that the snake within the video above was discovered lifeless, and never killed by the gator.
Biologists and conservationists are after all cheering for native predators in python nation. Final summer season researchers with the USGS captured path digital camera images and movies of a bobcat tangling with a 120-pound feminine python that was defending her nest.
The bobcat and python fought to a standoff, however then the bobcat got here again to raid the nest when the snake was gone. Over the course of a number of days, it picked the nest clear. This was the primary time a bobcat had been documented preying on python eggs.
“We’re hoping to see if extra natives are capable of acknowledge pythons as a meals merchandise as an alternative of it solely being one-way predation,” lead researcher Andrea Currylow advised the Miami New Occasions. “If that’s what’s actually taking place, that’s so loopy! The capability of this ecosystem to rebound is basically thrilling.”
