Video Shows Florida Python Eating Adult Whitetail

A group of biologists in South Florida saw first-hand that invasive Burmese pythons are capable of swallowing native white-tailed deer whole.

During a study conducted from the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, scientists learned that Burmese pythons are capable of consuming larger prey than believed, such as a 77-pound white-tailed deer that they observed a large female python consuming.

According to NBC Miami, the study was published in the Journal of Reptiles & Amphibians and the data collected proved these invasive snakes have a bigger gape than the prior largest diameter recorded, up from 8.7 inches in prior studies to 10.2 inches in the new one. The measurements equate to a circumference of 32 inches.

Thanks to wide jaws and elastic skin, pythons can consume prey that is six times larger than other snake species. “This means that more animals are on the menu,” the conservancy said in a press release.

Biologists measured the maximum gape for the study.

They worked with three Burmese pythons measuring 19, 17, and 15 feet long.

“These snakes resemble overachievers by sometimes testing the limits of what their anatomy allows rather than being slackers that eat only ‘snack size’ prey,” Dr. Bruce Jayne from the Department of Biological Science at the University of Cincinnati said.

The deer consumed by the python in the study was 66.9% of the snake’s mass.

The conservancy’s team has removed nearly 770 pythons over the last dozen years, and has radio tagged and tracked 120 snakes in an effort to better understand them. Jayne said that if each of the snakes ate one deer as big as they can swallow, it would come out to close to 13,000 pounds of deer.

“Watching an invasive apex predator swallow a full-sized deer in front of you is something that you will never forget,” Bartoszek said. "The impact the Burmese python is having on native wildlife cannot be denied. This is a wildlife issue of our time for the Greater Everglades ecosystem.”