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WFTV (Florida) 05 October 05 Python Eats Gator, Stomach Ruptures - Snakes, Gators Compete In Everglades
Miami: A python's eyes were apparently bigger than its stomach.
Scientists in Florida are puzzling over a Burmese python that scarfed down a six-foot alligator before its stomach ruptured.
They found the carcasses in an isolated part of Florida's Everglades National Park. Photos show the gator's hind legs and tail sticking out of the 13-foot snake's ruptured gut.
The Miami Herald reported that scientists can't figure out how the snake got the critter down. The snake's head is also missing.
Experts say the clash is interesting, but it also shows the exotic snakes are competing with gators to top the food chain in the Everglades.
Park biologist Skip Snow said he's documented 156 python captures in the last two years.
Python Eats Gator, Stomach Ruptures

MIAMI HERALD (Florida) 05 October 05 It's alien versus predator in Glades creature clash - A giant exotic snake's fatal mistake of trying to swallow an alligator has provided scientists with strange new evidence that pythons are continuing to spread in the Everglades. (Curtis Morgan)
A meeting between two of the largest and fiercest predators in the Everglades -- a Burmese python and an American alligator -- ended in a scene as rare as it was bizarre.
The 13-foot-snake and six-foot gator both wound up dead, locked so gruesomely it is hard to make heads, tails or any other body part of either creature.
When the carcasses were found last week in an isolated marsh in Everglades National Park, the gator's tail and hind legs protruded from the ruptured gut of a python -- which had swallowed it whole.
As an added touch of the macabre, the snake's head was missing.
For scientists, exactly how the clash occurred is a compelling curiosity. More importantly, the latest and most extraordinary encounter provides disturbing evidence that giant exotic snakes, which can top 20 feet in length and kill by squeezing the life out of prey, have not only invaded the Everglades but could challenge the native gator for a perch atop the food chain.
''It's just off-the-charts absurd to think that this kind of animal, a significant top-of-the-pyramid kind of predator in its native land, is trying to make a living in South Florida,'' said park biologist Skip Snow, who has been tracking the spread of the snakes.
Pythons, likely abandoned by pet owners, have been seen in the Everglades since the 1980s. But in the past two years alone, Snow has documented 156 python captures, a surge that has convinced biologists the snakes are multiplying in the wild.
The growing population of big, scary predators also raises questions about threats to native species and whether anything indigenous -- gators, for starters -- might be capable of consuming and potentially controlling one of the world's largest snake species.
The latest find was spotted floating in a spike rush marsh in the Shark River Slough on Sept. 26 by Michael Barron, a helicopter pilot flying park researchers to tree islands. It was examined the next day by Snow.
The discovery was important for a number of reasons.
For one, it showed the snakes are capable of living anywhere in the Everglades, Snow said. Most earlier finds have been on park fringes, roads or parking lots.
''This is the first we have documented Burmese pythons really in the heart of the slough,'' Snow said.
It also confirmed that snakes and gators, while typically consuming less troublesome mammals, turtles and birds, have an appetite for each other -- at least when the opportunity presents itself.
The first observed encounter in the park occurred three years ago when awestruck onlookers at the popular Anhinga Trail boardwalk witnessed a tussle between a 10- to 15-foot snake and six- to nine-foot gator. That fight, which lasted an estimated 24 hours, ended in an apparent draw, with both swimming off and vanishing.
Earlier this year, Snow documented a gator killing and consuming a python. The latest encounter showed that a hungry adult snake can eat a sizable gator.
Such clashes, though spawned by damaging incursion by an exotic species, can't help but fascinate both the public and scientists, said Frank Mazzotti, a University of Florida wildlife professor and expert on crocodiles and gators in the Glades.
''We've got not only two big things, but two charismatic mega-fauna -- the Burmese python, invader of the Everglades, and the American alligator, monarch of the Everglades,'' he said.
Mazzotti said size would probably dictate which species would win most encounters, and scientists could only speculate why this one ended in double deaths.
Snow's detailed field notes provide some evidence the snake was the attacker -- there were wounds on the gator's head and ''large wads of alligator skin'' in what remained of the snake's digestive tract.
He was so intrigued that he e-mailed photos and notes to other experts around the country.
So far, several theories abound, none of them pretty and all speculative because once on the scene, Snow quickly abandoned plans to load the bloated, badly decomposed carcasses on the chopper.
''We decided there was no way we were going to do that,'' he said. ``Something was going to go wrong and it was going to be nasty.''
Instead, he performed a ''floating'' necropsy in the water.
While unusual, it's not unheard of for a snake to consume prey that proves too hard or large to digest. Things like claws, hooves or bones can damage the snake's internal organs. The bulk of a victim can put pressure on the snake's lungs, essentially suffocating it from within.
Slowed by the extra weight, the snake might have been attacked by another gator, which could explain a missing python head.
Joe Wasilewski, a South Miami-Dade biologist and expert gator and crocodile tracker, examined the photos and surmised the gator wasn't quite dead when the snake swallowed it snout-first.
That's not uncommon, he said. ''That [gator] could have been kicking its hind legs and ruptured the snake's stomach wall,'' Wasilewski said.
Mazzotti said a similar scenario could have happened even if the gator were dead because of a quirk of its nervous system. Until a gator's spinal cord is severed and literally stirred into jelly with a special tool, he said, ``a dead alligator gives a remarkably good imitation of being alive. One of the things they do is they move their legs like they're walking. Those claws are pretty sharp. It could tear through the [snake's] skin.''
Mazzotti said it's also plausible the snake scavenged a dead gator. Then time, decay and heat could explain what happened next: a nasty blowout of the snake body.
''You've got a deteriorating carcass, you've got a buildup of gases, you've got sharp claw points . . . ,'' he said.
Snow said a few wags even suggested the deaths were weird enough to fit into the plot of the new TV series Invasion, which involves aliens descending into the Everglades from strange lights during a hurricane.
The carcasses were found a week after the show debuted, he said. ``I've heard some jokes that maybe it was the lights.''
It's alien versus predator in Glades creature clash

PALM BEACH POST (Florida) 11 October 05 Alligator's demise adds teeth to long, winding list of snake tales (John Pacenti)
The photo is a gory oddity right out of Ripley's Believe It or Not: a 13-foot Burmese python that swallowed a 6-foot American alligator, only to burst open because its eyes were a bit too big for its stomach.
The photo and accompanying stories of the epochal death match in the Everglades have been published and aired worldwide, stirring people's primeval fears and chatter among biologists who study the strange beasts.
"Monstrous fight in deadly swamp," a headline trumpeted in Australia. Days after the story broke, it continued to be one the top e-mailed stories from Florida newspaper Web sites.
On Monday, pythons and their kind appeared to have been on rampage in recent days: In Miami-Dade County, another python gobbled a pet Siamese cat; in Putnam County, a rattlesnake bit and killed a fire marshal despite being shot multiple times.
Across the Atlantic, London's The Daily Mirror breathlessly reported that a 12-foot "child killing" python was on the loose — spotted by a street sweep. Of course, it hadn't eaten Oliver Twist but animal experts acknowledged it was quite capable of it.
Fearful fascination with snakes spans not just the globe, but the ages. Almost every culture has integrated the reptiles into their lore or religion: Christianity has the tempestuous snake in the Garden of Eden, ancient Egypt's Cleopatra committed suicide with an asp, and Greek mythology had snake-coiffed Medusa. The python takes its name from a Greek mythical she-serpent born from primordial slime.
Some scientists believe the trepidation may have been hard-wired into our brains from the days when humans were prehistoric prey. Such feelings are stirred when we hear of a battle in the Everglades where a python and bull gator square off to be king of the swamp.
"What you are looking at is a battle of titans," said Walter Meshaka Jr., a herpetologist who writes about Florida's exotic reptiles.
"It's fascinating and exemplar of everything that is wrong with southern Florida where a once federally protected monster species like the American alligator battles another monster species that has invaded from another part of the world. It gives you a feel of primeval biology of large animals eating each other that's different than a hawk catching a mouse."
Burmese pythons — natives of Asia — took up residence in Florida's River of Grass after pet owners abandoned them, probably dismayed at how big they get in a short period of time. More than 150 have been removed from the Everglades; the number still out there is anybody's guess because they blend into the tropical scenery so well.
The carcasses of the alligator and python were spotted by helicopter pilot Michael Barron on Sept. 26, as he flew some researchers over the remote Shark River Slough. Photos show the large snake with a ruptured gut, the alligator's long tail and legs protruding from its underbelly.
Pythons are constrictors, suffocating their prey and then swallowing it whole. But if they eat something too large, they can suffocate themselves.
Barron's discovery quickly captivated the world. "I never thought it was going to get this big," he said.
The article was a top hit on The Palm Beach Post's Web site throughout last week, getting more than 15,000 page views. The python eating the cat was the Post's top Web story on Monday.
National Public Radio's Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me program featured Florida author Carl Hiaasen, known for spicing up his novels with anecdotes about poodle-eating gators and snakes. It seems that truth is even stranger than his fiction.
"Now it's turned out to be an epidemic," said Hiaasen, adding that such weird stories seem to attract people to Florida. "If you moved to Topeka, you're not going to have stories about pythons who are trying to eat alligators."
The Everglades bout has scientists scratching their heads: Was the alligator dead when the python swallowed it whole? If not, did the gator try to crawl its way out of the stomach? Did the python suffocate because of the gator's tough hide or its girth and then explode from internal gases as the two animals decomposed?
"It's a mystery," said Lori Oberhofer, an Everglades National Park wildlife technician. "The size of alligator was somewhat of a surprise."
The photo shows the python's head missing, leading some to speculate that the two beasts might have been posed by some creative poacher. Barron, though, said he found the jawbone and figures that other critters ate the serpent's noggin.
Snake experts said the photo depicted something unusual but not unbelievable. Others said it was odd for a python to go after a cold-blooded gator, as they prefer warm-blooded prey. Some speculate that a sunning alligator may be warm enough for the snake.
"Pythons are opportunistic. It's easy for them to sense warmth," said Keith Lovett, director of living collections at the Palm Beach Zoo at Dreher Park. "The movement of the alligator may attract the python's attention.... The fact that it took down an alligator is an impressive feat."
Some herpetologists couldn't believe that such an epic struggle actually occurred.
Bruce Dangerfield, director of the Treasure Coast Herpetological Society in Vero Beach, said he couldn't see the snake swallowing a snapping alligator.
"Most of the time, an alligator would win even with a snake 13 feet long. It would simply bite him in half," Dangerfield said. "It possibly could have been a dead alligator it swallowed."
Richard Bartlett, who has authored field guides to Florida snakes as well as books on pythons, said he believes a python could consume an alligator only to immediately regret it. "Alligators are notoriously difficult to kill. There could have been some reaction left in the animal," he said.
Bartlett said he is not surprised that the story has enraptured the snake-fearing world.
"I think anything that has to do with snakes is going to be popular," Bartlett said. "There is a lot of mysticism involved with snakes, especially with constrictors, and now the Everglades is fast becoming well-known for its population of Burmese pythons."
Alligator's demise adds teeth to long, winding list of snake tales