A 22-year-old found a 5.79-meter-long Burmese python in Florida, the largest snake ever spotted, according to a local association, in this US state, where the species is considered invasive.
The specimen was located 70 kilometers west of Miami in the Big Cypress National Reserve during an expedition aimed at curbing the advance of these invasive snakes, among the largest in the world. 22-year-old Jake Waleri posted a video to Instagram of an amateur fisherman pulling a snake by its tail on the side of the road before subduing it with the help of another man.
The captured animal weighed more than 50 pounds and was transferred to the Southwest Florida Conservancy, an environmental organization that studies Burmese pythons.
“We had a feeling these snakes could be this big and now we have proof,” biologist Ian Easterling, the center’s biologist, said in a statement, calling the size a record. In 2020, a Burmese python measuring 5.71 meters was caught in Florida.
The Burmese python, which was brought from Southeast Asia at the end of the last century, found an ideal ecosystem for breeding in the Everglades, a vast subtropical wetland in the south of the peninsula. This narrow snake has no natural predators and feeds on reptiles, birds and other mammals such as raccoons.
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