Environment |

An epic python battle? A big gator ends up with an even bigger snake in its mouth

Editor’s note: Bill Kearney of the South Florida Sun Sentinel recently headed out to the Everglades, when the unexpected happened. 

It was the seventh alligator we’d seen on the two-mile bike ride through the sawgrass swamp of Everglades National Park. But this one was different. Very different.

In the alligator’s mouth, and draped to his side and twisted underneath his chin was an invasive Burmese python — a big one, thick, rotund, probably twice as long as I am tall.

Were they fighting? Still struggling?

As my 4-year-old son and I dismounted from our bikes, and I walked closer, but not too close, they were motionless. Maybe they were both dead.

The alligator was about 8 feet long, and the python certainly longer, maybe 12 feet, wrapped, folded and chewed, and half submerged.

They were stuck in what looked like the aftermath of an epic swamp battle along the 15-mile bike trail loop at Shark Valley, in Everglades National Park.

I’d come here because my son and I had been cooped up in the house through four straight days of rain and 25 mph winds. But today the sun was out, and so were the gators.

In the two miles of bike path that we’d covered, we’d seen those half a dozen gators basking on the shoulder, along with anhingas and turtles and stunning great blue herons as still as trees.

And now, what had been hypothetical — that massive snakes are invading Florida’s ecosystems and hiding in plain sight — suddenly became viscerally real.

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Eventually the gator opened its eyes for a moment and shut them, still alive, but motionless, and laying awkwardly as if injured. A few flies lighted upon the snake. Other bikers came by and gasped. A tram full of visitors from Europe and Asia took pictures and surely wondered about this strange place.

Three rangers came out to see as well. One said the gator looked spent.

When the wind shifted we all got a whiff of something dead — maybe the snake?

The mystery of the dead python

But what really happened? Had there been a furious fight, the python wrapping around the gator’s heavy torso and the gator thrashing the snake until it went limp, or had the gator merely scavenged something already dead?

Would the gator, who looked very much worse-for-wear, survive the night? Would another gator come along and steal his prize?

To find out, I spoke with park biologists Kevin Donmoyer and Mark Parry, who work with both pythons and alligators.

Donmoyer, who coordinates the park’s invasive animal control, said that the snakes are so good at hiding that the chances of seeing one along the bike trail in broad daylight are near zero. In fact, seeing one in an alligator’s mouth might be the only way to spot one during the day.

Donmoyer manages a team of professional python hunters to cruise the park’s roads at night, when pythons are more active, and use spotlights to find them in the underbrush or shallow water. They euthanize whatever snakes they catch. He said the Shark Valley bike path is one of the more popular routes.

Mammal populations in the park have been decimated by the pythons — in some areas, populations of medium-size mammals such as racoons, possums, foxes and bobcats have been reduced by more than 90%. The longer the snakes have been in an area, the more the mammal populations have declined, Donmoyer said.

The snake’s breeding range, which started at the southern tip of Everglades National Park in the 1970s and ’80s after enough of them had escaped or been released via the exotic pet trade, has reached as far north as Lake Okeechobee and the suburbs of Fort Myers, but the impact there is less severe than in areas like Shark Valley.

“There has been a drop off of mammal populations near Shark Valley,” Donmoyer said. “It’s essentially in the middle of their range.”

Last week, a park guest saw a python eating an egret, and sent a picture to Donmoyer.

“So often, that’s the kind of pictures I get,” he said. “It’s always great to get a photo of an alligator with a python,” he said when I sent him my photos.

Gators aren’t the only native predators who can kill pythons. In a recent study, researchers found that cottonmouth, indigo and black racer snakes all prey on python hatchlings that measured about 24 inches in length at birth.

Researchers also found evidence that pointed to bobcats and hawks doing the same. The study stated that it’s possible that other predators, such as river otters, Everglades mink, coyote, raccoon, gray fox and possums, could eat baby pythons as well.

But the window of opportunity is very brief. Invasive pythons can grow to 7 feet in a year’s time, making them far too large for most native Florida predators, with the exception of gators and humans.

How would a gator win a fight with a bigger python? “Sometimes they don’t,” Parry said. “A couple years ago in Shark Valley a battle went on for about 24 hours and both of ‘em went their separate ways, and it was like, did anybody win that one?”

Cold may have been key

As for how this alligator may have caught his python, cloudy cold weather could have played a factor. “Alligators are sluggish (in cold weather) but pythons are even more sluggish. I doubt it was cold enough that that python was cold-killed.”

But the gator may have had an advantage if the snake was trying to warm up after four cloudy, rainy days.

Parry said that during the legendary cold snap of 2010, when ponds in the Everglades had frost along their shorelines, he and other researchers documented “maladaptive behavior” in American crocodiles and invasive pythons, both of which are tropical species living in subtropical Florida.

“They would actually bask when the water was warmer than the air, and the alligators were all in the water,” he said. “The air temperature was 20 degrees below the water temperature, but the sun was out, so they’re like, ‘I guess I should be out basking.’” Many of the pythons died because of their basking instinct.

How would a gator eat something that large? They eat smaller prey whole. Parry has seen them consume smaller snakes gulp-by-gulp, as if downing one long piece of spaghetti, but with a snake this big, he said they would have to tear it into smaller pieces.

It’s a violent affair, Parry said. “They’ll raise their head really high in the air, and they’ll whip their head, and that whipping is what shakes the prey apart.”

At kill sites he’s seen the aftermath — intestines flung 20 feet high and hanging from trees.

If they did indeed fight, it could have been a long, drawn-out battle of attrition. Both species tire quickly, Parry said, since they are cold-blooded. They have bursts of energy, then recover. “They’re not designed for endurance like we are,” he said. “This battle could have been going on for hours before you got there.”

It also could have happened the day before. “They don’t always eat prey right away,” Parry said. “That alligator looks like he’s recovering. Sometimes they will actually take a large kill and carry them around, and we think it’s kind of a dominance thing, to say, ‘Hey, look what I did.’”

When I told Parry I had smelled decaying flesh, he said it could mean the gator scavenged the snake, but there also could have been something else dead in the area.

“Alligators do scavenge,” Parry said. “But it could have very well been a live basking python (when the gator found it.)”

Back to civilization

After 45 minutes of loitering at the gator-python site and chatting with rangers, my son and I pedaled back to the parking lot, spotting the same six sunbathing gators who hadn’t moved an inch, as well as more of the turtles, anhingas and herons we’d expected. My son got to brag to the bike rental manager that he’d seen an alligator that killed a “giant pyton!” and we headed back to Miami.

The next day I called Shark Valley to get an update on the situation.

Some rangers had ridden bikes out the two miles to check the area.

The gator and python were gone.

Bill Kearney covers the environment, the outdoors and tropical weather. He can be reached at bkearney@sunsentinel.com. Follow him on Instagram @billkearney or on X @billkearney6.