Watch: Alligator Swims Away With Big Useless Python

South Florida resident Carl Nicholson of Everglades Metropolis lately posted an incredible video that reveals a big alligator swimming off with a useless (and equally massive) 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 thought 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 useless and was benefiting from a free meal.

However battles between the 2 top-tier Florida reptiles is nicely documented, and there are many videos and reports about such encounters. Alligators have dominated Florida’s waterways since time immemorial. However in the previous couple of 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 every other wildlife species they will coil themselves round. Some research have discovered that pythons can cut back small mammal populations by nearly 90 %.

Florida Predator vs. Pythons

Burmese pythons are among the many largest snakes on the planet, able to rising to twenty ft. The biggest 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. Nevertheless, researchers say that after 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 useless, and never killed by the gator.

Biologists and conservationists are after all cheering for native predators in python nation. Final summer time researchers with the USGS captured trail camera photographs and videos 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 a substitute of it solely being one-way predation,” lead researcher Andrea Currylow instructed the Miami New Times. “If that’s what’s actually taking place, that’s so loopy! The capability of this ecosystem to rebound is actually thrilling.”