Slithering into the record books
Largest Burmese python ever found in Florida weighed 215 pounds and was 18 feet long
Ian Bartoszek had two pet Burmese pythons of his own when he was a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the 1990s. He’d take them to school as hatchlings and track them when they got loose in his room.
Decades later, his job is to track, kill and study them. And he’s good at it.
Now, Bartoszek and his team of python trackers have caught the most massive python ever recorded in Florida: an 18-foot female snake weighing 215 pounds and carrying 122 eggs.
“Things come full circle,” Bartoszek said. “This animal met me halfway. I think I was primed to work with them.”
His high school pets were albino pythons, one white-colored, the other peach, so he knows they weren’t responsible for the proliferation of the exotic pet-turned invasive species now eating up native wildlife and endangering the Everglades ecosystem.
But the record-breaking python his team from the Florida Southwest Conservancy in Naples found this past December could have been one of the first.
“This could be one of the founding snakes from back then that was intentionally released or an escaped pet, who knows,” Bartoszek told reporters at a news conference Wednesday after National Geographic documented the discovery.
The team, made up of Bartoszek, his “righthand man” and biologist Ian Easterling and intern Kyle Findley stood around a table resembling a kitchen island with the snake’s body laid out on top of it.
They previously caught a 180-pound python, which they say is a mixed blessing: the scale of the snake represents the scale of the threat the species poses to the ecosystem.
Pythons grow in size based on how much they eat. The heft of the record-breaking snake suggests that it consumed many endangered mammals over its 15-20 year lifespan, likely dating back to when Burmese pythons, brought overseas as pets, established themselves in the wild in Florida.
Future genetic testing might allow researchers to ascertain how many generations of Burmese pythons have lived in Florida. At the moment, however, trappers and researchers are operating in the dark.
The python team has developed a successful tracking method, however, which allows them to find pythons off grid. They surgically insert transmitters into the male pythons, called “scouts,” and then locate them using radio telemetry. During breeding season, they follow the scouts to pregnant female pythons, which they trap and kill before they lay eggs.
In December, the team followed one of their scouts, a 12-foot male named Dionysus, off grid into the Everglades. They heard a rustle, and then they saw it. Immediately, they grabbed hold of the body, trying to restrain the head, as it balled up its tail like a fist, swinging at Findley, who dodged it, and hitting Easterling in the nose. They wrestled it into a bag, and lugged it back to their truck to take back to the lab, where it would be euthanized.
“We’ve done this so many times before, to be honest with you,” Easterling said after a reporter
asked about the adrenaline rush.
“This guy doesn’t get terribly excited,” Bartoszek added.
At the lab, they performed the necropsy. They found hoof cores in the python’s digestive tract, surmising that it had last eaten an adult white-tailed deer, probably about 70 pounds.
Right now, the team is in the period of what Bartoszek calls “reloading” as they wait for breeding season to start again. He spends his days in a kayak, fishing for snook and working on a project
tracking python hatchlings like the ones he brought to school.
In previous waves of the project, the team discovered that other snake species, like cottonmouths, prey on the hatchlings, which suggests that the ecosystem might be finding small ways to restore the balance.
In the winter, they’ll return to the hunt, and maybe even break some more records.
“There’s always a bigger snake,” Bartoszek said. “We just haven’t found it yet.”