An unlikely team of five strangers banded together and took down a nearly 200-pound invasive Burmese python in the Florida Everglades on Friday — and it could be one of the largest snakes the state has ever seen.
Mike Elfenbein, a wildlife conservationist, posted photos of the massive snake on his Instagram, writing: “This snake ate a lot of native wildlife to get this big. She ate her last meal!”
Burmese pythons are “one of the most concerning invasive species” in Southern Florida, where the snakes have established a breeding population, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The voracious predators have been linked to 90 per cent declines in certain mammal populations in the area, including raccoons, opossums, bobcats, rabbits and foxes.
Python hunting is actively encouraged in the state through an annual competition called the Florida Python Challenge. In general, hunters don’t need a permit to kill Burmese pythons, though they must be killed humanely in accordance with anti-cruelty laws, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
Elfenbein says that the snake he bagged, with the help of his teenage son and three strangers, weighed in at a whopping 198 pounds and measured 17 feet and two inches long.
“It took five of us to control her, glad to have removed her from our Everglades where she can no longer eat our wildlife,” Elfenbein wrote.
The heaviest Burmese python ever caught in Florida weighed in at 215 pounds, according to the Conservancy of Southwest Florida.
“It was more than a snake, it was a monster,” Elfenbein, 45, told CBS News in an interview.
Elfenbein said he was in Big Cypress National Preserve with his teenage son hunting for pythons when they spotted the huge serpent slithering across a gravel road.
Three other hunters — Trey Barber, Carter Gavlock and Holden Hunter — saw the snake at the same time, as it stretched out across nearly the entire length of the road.
“We were strangers,” Elfenbein said. “But the five of us knew we had to capture this thing.”
The five men wrestled with the snake for more than 45 minutes, Elfenbein said, calling the python a “formidable opponent” who had “zero fear” of her captors. The snake kept lifting her enormous body off the ground, “trying to constrict” the hunters, he added.
Elfenbein phoned professional python hunter Amy Siewe for help euthanizing the snake.
Recalling the phone call she received at 10 p.m. that Friday night, Siewe told CBS: “If Mike is calling me right now, it has to be a python.”
She rushed over to their location and said the snake looked like “the fattest python I had ever seen.”
Using a captive bolt gun, Siewe killed the snake. She says she’s bagged 530 pythons since 2019.
Siewe then brought the python to the Conservancy of Southwest Florida to register its measurements. Ian Bartoszek, a researcher at the conservancy, told CBS that, at 198 pounds, this female Burmese python is the second-heaviest ever caught in the state.
At 17 feet and two inches, the snake is also up there with the longest pythons ever caught in Florida, but that crown belongs to a python that measured 19 feet.
Bartoszek added that researchers found the remains of white-tailed deer hooves inside the python’s stomach, a reminder that these snakes are “big game hunters.”
“We often see the remains of deer inside pythons. Their impact throughout the good web of the Greater Everglades ecosystem cannot be understated,” he added.
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