COLLIER COUNTY, Fla. (WFLA) — Deep in Florida’s Everglades, it is apparently a cat-eat-snake world.
The invention of a useless 13-foot, 52-pound Burmese python led wildlife officers on a pursuit of the offender, NBC affiliate WBBH reports.
Conservancy of Southwest Florida biologists have been looking for the snake, named Loki, as a part of a monitoring program that leads researchers to burrows crammed with dozens of the invasive reptile’s eggs. They discovered their “MVP: Most Helpful Python” with its head and neck gnawed off and its physique partially buried.
The partial burial, a habits known as “caching,” pointed to one thing uncommon.
“There’s solely two issues that may do this, to my data — a bobcat and a panther,” Ian Bartoszek, a wildlife biologist on the Conservancy, instructed WBBH.
With the assistance of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, researchers arrange a path digicam. This revealed the offender, who returned to the scene of the crime. It was a bobcat.
“A 25-pound cat killed and cached a 52-pound python? That’s a win for the house workforce. All of us have a tendency to love animals that punch above their weight class. Right here was a local animal pushing again towards an invasive apex predator,” Bartoszek instructed WBBH.
The invasive snake species snacks on bobcats, deer, alligators and native snakes. It has no pure predators – or, not less than that is what biologists believed.
“The Everglades is preventing again. That provides me hope,” Bartoczek mentioned.
