African Snake in Florida

[longknife]

Probably someone's pet. And they got tired of feeding it. Read the story @ Snake in the Grass Huge Everglades Python Shows Invasive Issue

 

[hortysir]

The Glades are loaded with Boas, Pythons, and any variety of amphibious/reptilian "pets"

 

[waltky]

Snakes alive!...

Can a snake eat a human?
Wed, 29 Mar 2017 - While pythons can eat large prey, an adult man was long thought to be too big.

The 25-year-old was seemingly attacked and swallowed at a palm oil plantation near his village in West Sulawesi. But the extraordinary case has prompted a number of questions.

How could it do it?

Reticulated pythons of this size - it was reported to be 7m (23ft)-long - are very powerful. They wrap themselves around their prey and crush it, killing it by suffocation or cardiac arrest. Eating it is another matter. Pythons do not chew their food, they have to swallow it whole, but their jaws are connected by very flexible ligaments so they can stretch around large prey. Even so, there are limits. "The restricting factor is human shoulder blades because they are not collapsible," Mary-Ruth Low, conservation & research officer for Wildlife Reserves Singapore and a reticulated python expert, told the BBC. So while reticulated pythons - the longest snakes in the world - have attacked humans very occasionally in the past, experts have long questioned whether they could ingest an adult man.

What about other large animals?

"Pythons are almost exclusively mammal feeders," Ms Low points out, though they do occasionally eat reptiles, including crocodiles. Typically they eat rats and other small animals, she says, "but once they reach a certain size it's almost like they don't bother with rats anymore because the calories are not worth it." "In essence they can go as large as their prey goes." That can include animals as large as pigs or even cows. Sometimes the size of the meal can be misjudged. In 2005 a Burmese python tried to swallow an alligator whole - it burst in the process and both died, their bodies later being found by Florida rangers.

Indonesia is home to some of the world's biggest snakes - this 14.85m, 447kg python was caught in a forest in Sumatra​

But these opportunistic hunters can be surprisingly picky too. If they don't see suitable prey, they can go long periods on very little food until they see something big enough. But humans are still not normally on the menu. In 2002 a ten-year-old boy was reportedly swallowed by a python in South Africa, but even that case did not involve an adult or a reticulated python - the species said to have been involved in the Indonesia incident.

So is this a first?[/b]