The Florida Everglades are home to some of the most diverse wildlife in the country.
A trip there is a chance to see nature in its rawest form.
And a Florida biologist caught one scary video of a hungry beast in the Everglades.
Florida biologist found a Burmese python eating an entire deer in the Everglades
The Burmese python was brought to the United States as a pet from Southeast Asia in the 1980s.
Many of the snake owners in Florida began to release them into the wild at the Everglades after they became too big to care for.
A Burmese python can grow more than 16 feet long as an adult and weigh more than 100 pounds.
The Conservancy of Southwest Florida has been tracking and removing these snakes from the wild for 12 years.
Biologists Ian Bartoszek and Ian Easterling have not seen much in the wild that shocks them.
“So when Ian started yelling with excitement, I knew something was up,” Bartoszek told Outdoor Life.
The biologists were tracking a male Burmese python outside of Naples, Florida with the hope it would lead them to a pregnant female that they could remove.
Bartoszek followed the snake to a retention pond.
“We turned the corner, and Ian yells, ‘She’s got…she’s got a deer!” Bartoszek exclaimed.
They saw the female python swallowing a whitetail deer.
“We see this large female python, and she’s about halfway through swallowing a full-sized whitetail deer,” Bartoszek recalled. “Once it realized we weren’t a threat, [the snake] proceeded to finish its meal. And it’s hard to describe unless you’ve seen it with your own eyeballs, but this was as real and primal as it gets … We watched it engulf this animal all the way down to the tips of its hooves and swallow it whole.”
This was a shocking sight for the biologists because no one based in Florida had ever seen a python swallow a whole deer.
Florida’s phyton problem is even worse than imagined
Bartoszek suspected that this was happening, but he never had proof until then.
“For me, personally, I’ve been beating this snake drum for over a decade now, telling people, ‘Hey, this is a thing. They’re eating our deer on a large scale,’” Bartoszek said. “A lot of those people took a while to catch up. But this is what we’re seeing in real-time.”
Burmese pythons have no natural predators in Florida.
They have managed to decimate smaller mammal populations in the Everglades like rabbits, possums, and raccoons.
“Our native wildlife did not evolve with a large apex-predator snake in the equation, and they don’t have the situational awareness for how to deal with that, so they’re vulnerable,” Bartoszek stated.
Bartoszek and Easterling held down the female python and forced it to cough up the white-tail deer which weighed 77 pounds.
The python weighed about 115 pounds and was a hair under 15 feet long.
“This just reinforces what we know,” Bartoszek explained. “And if anybody’s on the fence about what these animals are doing in South Florida, they are clearly eating their way through the food web of the Everglades. And that includes whitetail deer.”
Burmese python hunters are trying to keep them from wreaking havoc on the native wildlife.
DeSantis Daily will keep you up-to-date on any new developments in this ongoing story.
