It’s not typically that you simply see an entire snake inside one other snake, however an x-ray that Zoo Miami lately shared to Fb reveals precisely that. The x-ray picture reveals a 43-inch cottonmouth that ate a 39-inch Burmese python within the Florida Everglades.
You’ll be able to see the curving backbone of the python stretched out contained in the engorged cottonmouth. The picture additionally reveals the radio transmitter that was connected to the python when it was consumed.
Researchers have the transmitter to thank for the invention. In keeping with a examine revealed final December, this was considered one of two separate situations the place biologists tracked down a cottonmouth that had eaten a python. The primary occasion occurred in August 2020, and the second occurred in Might of the next 12 months.
In Might 2021, researchers with the Conservancy of Southwest Florida had been monitoring a feminine Burmese python that was round 10 months previous and roughly 39 inches lengthy. They tracked the sign from the python’s radio transmitter to the bottom of a giant cypress tree in Large Cypress Nationwide Protect, the place they got here throughout a roughly 43-inch-long cottonmouth with an “apparent meals bolus” (i.e., a full stomach). Researchers assumed that the cottonmouth had eaten the radio transmitter together with the python, they usually confirmed this by capturing the cottonmouth, taking an x-ray, after which releasing it.
The researchers continued to trace the cottonmouth, and weeks later, it “expelled” (i.e., crapped out) the transmitter.
Why the X-Ray Issues
Florida wildlife biologists spend a whole lot of time learning Burmese pythons and documenting the injury they inflict on native ecosystems. The snakes develop so massive that they haven’t any actual pure predators, and that is precisely why biologists get so excited once they see native critters killing them.
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Earlier this 12 months, researchers within the Everglades documented a bobcat tangling with a 120-pound feminine python and stealing its eggs. It was the primary recorded video of a local predator taking up a Burmese python within the wild.
The invention of a number of cottonmouths consuming pythons in Florida is yet one more instance of the state’s native wildlife studying to battle again. Within the examine that documented the snake-on-snake predation that occurred in 2020 and 2021, the authors listing American alligators, Gulf Coast Indigo snakes, bobcats, and “presumably Florida black bears” as different native species that can often prey on Burmese pythons.
