A Florida weather forecaster shared a video of a giant python slithering across a highway and got mixed reactions.
“Massive Florida Snake!” WINK Meteorologist Matt Devitt wrote on Facebook. “Check out the size of this he’s over 15 feet python across the road in Everglades National Park these days. NO!”
Soundless footage captured by Kim Clark shows the snake almost traversing the width of the road before taking refuge in the wetlands.
Unfortunately, Florida is home to thousands of invasive pythons, but it’s rare to come across a snake this big in the daytime.
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Devitt’s post received nearly 3,000 comments.
– “It is really sad that people have released these snakes that have grown too big to be pets. They are not native to North America and should never have been brought here in the first place. And they’re killing Florida’s deer, leopards…killing whatever they can and threatening those populations.”
– “We are overwhelmed by them in the Everglades. I think you need a license to catch them. They eat animals in their natural habitat and even alligators.”
“If I had seen it, I would have run over it to death. I hate snakes, even though I know in my head that they have a real purpose.”
But the most popular comment was, “The worst snake I’ve ever dealt with was a human.”
Many were sympathetic, with responses of the type “no more words of truth spoken” or “that’s right”.
Pythons literally eat native wildlife, and the state of Florida has launched several programs aimed at killing the reptiles and slowing their spread in and out of the Everglades ecosystem.
Last June, biologists captured what they said was the heaviest python they had encountered. A pregnant snake with 122 eggs weighed 215 pounds and measured 18 feet.
For her final meal, she ate what appeared to be a whole white-tailed deer.
