Cold snap in Florida made Burmese python puke up a whole deer
Difficulty digesting large meals may limit where these temperature-sensitive snakes can call home — and that might be a good thing in places where they're invasive.
A Burmese python in Florida's Big Cypress National Preserve vomited up an entire white-tailed deer after temperatures in South Florida dipped below 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) late last year, well below the cold-blooded creature's comfortable range. While pythons are known to vomit their meals in cold laboratory settings, scientists had never caught the elusive snakes doing it in the wild — until now. The unusual observation, made in late November 2024, is described in a study published in July in the journal Ecology and Evolution.
"Almost every day is a surprise," Mark Sandfoss, senior author of the study and a biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), told Live Science. "Pythons are constantly doing things I never imagined, but this is such a beautiful moment where science and basic principles line up with field observations."
Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus) have been an invasive species in Florida since the late 1970s. Despite this decades-long presence, they are largely understudied, and there are gaps in knowledge about the snakes' biology and how they interact with native species, such as deer. Deer numbers are declining in the preserve, which is concerning because they form an important part of the diet of local predators, like Florida panthers (Puma concolor coryi). To learn more about how often snakes eat deer and how quickly they digest them, scientists at the preserve spent a year tracking the digestion of several large female pythons — those deemed most likely to eat a deer.
One snake under observation had a large lump in its stomach, indicating that it had eaten something deer-sized. Over the next several days, though, this lump did not appear to get any smaller. After a cold night, when temperatures dipped to 48.9 F (9.4 C) in the preserve, scientists revisited the snake. They found it lump-free, swimming in the shallow water of a willow swamp near a minimally digested white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) that it had vomited up.
https://www.livescience.com/animals/snakes/cold-snap-in-florida-made-burmese-python-puke-up-a-whole-deer
A 61 pound Whitetail! OMG! Better not let your kids stray into the swamp.
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