Giant snakes eating people

Rivas, J. A. 2013. Natural history of the green anaconda: Two decades disentangling the secrets of the world’s largest snake. Oxford University Press.

In the meantime, check out this video of a large female anaconda puking up a cow!

If anacondas are the heaviest snakes, what are the longest? Reticulated pythons from Southeast Asia take that trophy, uncontested. The longest recorded “retic” is about 33 feet—yes, that’s five or six people laid end to end. Burmese pythons and African rock pythons can exceed lengths of 20 feet and are also quite formidable predators. These python species along with a few others star in the smorgasbord of online images of snakes eating large prey items.

A python has eaten a sheep.

A non-native Burmese python in the Florida Everglades ate an American alligator. The likely story is that the meal was too large and killed the snake, then scavengers noshed open the snake's belly.

A python kills a cow.

An olive python fixes to eat a wallaby.

But, do pythons eat humans? Let’s start with rock pythons, which—despite their penchant for eating lots of birds and non-human mammals—definitely have been known to occasionally include a human in the picnic basket.

Wikipedia cites a number of fatal attacks, in which a rock python killed a person but didn’t end up eating them. In at least two cases, the pre-teen prey was too large to get down the hatch; in another case a farmer was dragged up a tree by a python and rescued when he managed to call for help on his cell phone. In a few cases, however, the python managed to gulp down the prize: a 10 year-old was swallowed in 2002 in South Africa, and in the 1970’s a Portugese soldier was found inside the stomach of a snake.

A rock python has eaten a very large meal (not a human, however) and become stuck in a fence.

A close-up of the fenced snake, just for the awesomeness of it.

I asked Dr. Graham Alexander of The University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa to tell me about any close encounters he’s had with rock pythons during about eight years of studying them in the wild. Dr. Alexander said that the largest thing he ever witnessed a python eat was an impala, but that spending time in the wild with these huge snakes could be unnerving: