Credit: Screen grab via Everglades National Park/Twitter

Credit: Screen grab via Everglades National Park/Twitter

If you haven’t heard, invasive Burmese pythons have pretty much decimated the fragile ecosystem in Florida’s Everglades National Park. Which is why it’s great news to see a gator finally chewing one of these chuds like a Lean Beef Pup-Peroni.

Everglades National Park tweeted a brief video Sunday evening showing a very full and very content American alligator with a half-chewed snake hanging out of its mouth. 

“This invasive Burmese python was no match for our mighty, native American alligator!,” said the tweet. “With all the news of pythons overwhelming the Everglades ecosystem, it gives us hope to see our native animals fighting back.” 

Currently, officials with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission believe that 30,000 to even 300,000 of these snakes are in Florida, a state that already has more invasive species than anywhere else in the country. 

So when one of the local boys gets a win, it’s worth celebrating. 

Since both of these reptiles can be enormous, clearly it’s all about size and match-ups. Burmese pythons can grow up to 20-feet long, and the largest American alligator ever caught in Florida was nearly 15-feet long. 

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But the battle among these two apex predators has been going on ever since these snakes were introduced sometime in the late 1970s. Gators do occasionally eat Burmese pythons, but sometimes it’s the other way around. In 2005, an Everglades National Park employee shared a now viral photo of a python that literally burst open trying to swallow a gator that was too big to digest. And, in 2017 a video surfaced showing a 15-foot Burmese python strangling and killing a gator. 

While the two species compete for resources, it’s clear that the Burmese pythons are winning this fight. The snakes have absolutely devastated Southern Florida’s populations of bobcats, opossums, raccoons, foxes, cottontail rabbits and pretty much anything furry they can fit in their mouth. One study from the University of Florida stated that the snakes have depleted the number of mammals in the Everglades to the point mosquitos are now forced to feed off diseased rats. 

Last year, the state of Florida made considerable ground to push back against this problem. Gov. Ron DeSantis revived the popular python eradication program, and state and civilian hunters combined captured and killed approximately 3,600 Burmese pythons. Last month, 80 Burmese pythons were captured during the inaugural Python Bowl.

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This article appears in Jan 30 – Feb 6, 2020.

Colin Wolf has been working with weekly newspapers since 2007 and has been the Digital Editor for Creative Loafing Tampa since 2019. He is also the Director of Digital Content Strategy for CL's parent...