Even in our dog-eat-dog world, unusually large feasts might pique our interest.
A female Burmese python, about 16 feet (5 meters) long, recently swallowed a 76-pound (35-kilogram) female deer near Florida’s Everglades National Park.
The hunter and the prey both died as a result of the ordeal—the snake was shot in the head with a shotgun, as is customary, according to CNN—but the graphic photographs that followed told the story.
Burmese pythons are rarely seen eating, but when they do, they consume a lot.
In fact, I recently published an essay about how their hearts and other organs grow to help them digest their big feasts from the previous week. (They have fatty acids in their blood, to give you a simple explanation.)
The reptiles kill by choking their food. They’ll ambush a prospective meal, grab it with their backward-curving jaws, and wrap themselves around it, suffocating it to death.
The snakes then open their hinged jaws wide to completely swallow their meal.
