A New Predator Is Swallowing Pythons in Florida — The Footage Is Horrifying

[00:00:00]If you told me 10 years ago we'd be tracking one of the largest snakes on the planet, I would have not believed you for a minute, but here we are today having tracked over 80 adult pythons.

[00:00:09]>> Something in the Florida swamps is swallowing Burmese pythons whole, the most feared invasive predator in America. And the footage researchers finally captured is genuinely hard to watch. For years these snakes ate everything, deer, alligators, entire species, gone. Nothing could touch them.

[00:00:27]Then the radio transmitters surgically implanted in tagged pythons began going silent one after another.

[00:00:33]>> Today we were taking out a transmitter from one of the snakes that we've been following at Franklin Parker Preserve, a large female. And we were putting a new transmitter in.

[00:00:41]>> The signal still beeping from inside the belly of something nobody could name. No blood, no carcass, just a predator hunting a swamp full of scientists [music] who never saw it coming. And when the cameras finally caught it, the room went silent.

[00:00:56]The disappearing signals.

[00:00:59]In 2021, Bartoszek and his team at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida were running what looked on paper like the most boring science there is. Surgical transmitters in juvenile Burmese pythons, radio [music] signals tracked through the wetlands day after day, building a quiet picture of where these animals go and how they survive. Then the [music] signals started dying. Not the transmitters, those kept pulsing, clockwork, clean, and steady. It was the pythons attached to them that were vanishing.

[00:01:28]>> So, the first step is using anesthesia to put the snake to sleep. This takes about half an hour.

[00:01:34]Once she's out, an incision is made to access and remove the old transmitter.

[00:01:39]>> Python 19 was first. Three weeks of perfect data and then total stillness.

[00:01:45]Not the slow stillness of a cold snake.

[00:01:47]The team waited out through cypress roots and chest high saw grass to the coordinates, and every one of them stopped moving. No carcass, no blood, no drag marks, no shed skin, nothing disturbed at all. Just that faint electronic pulse, steady and rhythmic, beeping up at them from inside something else's body. Something had swallowed their python whole, transmitter and all, and it was still out there. Then, October, same year, it happened again.

[00:02:14]Two more signals flatlined. Two more pythons gone. And then, the x-rays came back. A python spine, curled and intact, inside an unknown stomach.

[00:02:25]One recovered animal had been over 50 lb and nearly 13 ft long. Its neck crushed.

[00:02:30]Its body stuffed under brush. Something had killed a 13-ft apex predator and eaten it whole. Bartoszek, who has spent 20 years in this work, called it the most surreal thing he had ever seen in the field. Three pythons, three transmitters, all recovered from inside something hunting in a swamp crawling with researchers and trail cameras, and not one person had laid eyes on it. They ran every diagnostic. The gear was flawless, which left one explanation.

[00:02:59]Whatever this was, it was real. Big enough to swallow a 13-ft snake, and good enough to do it under the noses of an experienced field crew without ever being seen.

[00:03:10]The invasion that won.

[00:03:13]>> This time of year the pythons are deep in there. This morning, it's hot. We may get lucky.

[00:03:18]But where they are is going to be in their little nested areas.

[00:03:23]>> To understand why this was impossible, you have to understand what these pythons had already done. Burmese pythons don't belong here. They come from the other side of the planet, Southeast [music] Asia, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, out of food webs that spent millions of years building predators and diseases to keep them in check. None of that came with them. In the 1980s and '90s, the exotic pet trade shipped thousands of cheap striking baby snakes into Florida. And then those babies grew to 15, 18, 20 ft.

[00:03:55]And people did what people do. They drove out to a canal and let them go.

[00:03:59]Then Hurricane Andrew tore through South Florida in 1992, shredded the breeding warehouses, and dumped hundreds more straight into the wild. They arrived with no natural enemies. Nothing here had evolved to fear them. So, they ate. And here's where I need you to actually picture it, not just hear numbers. Start with the raccoons. In the worst-hit stretches of the Everglades, raccoon numbers fell by 99.3%.

[00:04:24]Stop and sit with that number. That's not a decline. That's an erasure.

[00:04:28]Opossums, down 98.9%. [music] Bobcats, down 87.5%.

[00:04:35]Marsh rabbits and cotton tails, just gone from places they'd lived for thousands of years. Now, follow it up the chain. Adult white-tailed deer, swallowed whole. Alligators, animals that outlived the dinosaurs, turning up inside pythons' stomachs. And the birds.

[00:04:52]Researchers pulled the remains of 58 different bird species out of these snakes. 58. This didn't take a century.

[00:04:59]It took a couple of decades. And if you're still with me this far in, watching the kind of story the headlines skip right past, take 1 second and subscribe. It's free, and it's the only way the channel keeps digging into things like this. Because what happens next is the part nobody had modeled, nobody predicted, and nobody wanted to believe. Dr. Frank Mazzotti, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Florida who has given more than 20 years to this fight, put the python population somewhere between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. Everything got thrown at this. Federal import bans, state bounty programs, [music] detection dogs, thermal drones, environmental DNA, removal contests pulling in hunters from across the country. Even the Army Corps of Engineers. None of it moved the needle.

[00:05:48]And one by one, the the people who knew this ecosystem best started saying the same quiet thing. The pythons had won.

[00:05:56]Mazzotti put it about as plainly as it can be put, standing in a gravel lot outside Naples after 3 weeks in the swamp, sunburned and worn down. The ecosystem is being eaten alive, and we don't have a predator that can stop it.

[00:06:09]Nobody argued. The numbers didn't leave room to.

[00:06:14]Every answer wrong.

[00:06:17]Then the transmitters started going dark on Bartoszek's monitors, and the question stopped being whether the Everglades could be saved. It became something much stranger. What eats the thing that eats everything? Every answer they reached fell apart. A big alligator was the obvious guess, except alligators crush, they death roll, they leave wreckage, shattered bone, torn tissue, half-eaten remains. These pythons left none of that. A Florida panther bites through skull or spine and leaves puncture wounds and claw marks. There were none. No tracks. A black bear?

[00:06:48]Bears are strong, but nothing about a bear swallows a 13-ft snake in one piece. Nothing does that. They went down the entire food chain, and nothing fit.

[00:06:58]Whatever was doing this worked by a method their models couldn't produce.

[00:07:01]So, they did the only thing left. They bolted trail cameras to trees at every spot a signal had gone dark and waited.

[00:07:09]Weeks of nothing. And then one morning, a researcher opened a clip, and the whole review room went silent.

[00:07:16]Caught on camera.

[00:07:18]What's on that footage is small. No monster, no alligator, no panther, nothing on anyone's list. Just a thick dark coil lying dead still in the leaf litter at the water's edge. Matched so perfectly to the rotting vegetation, you could stare at the frame for a full minute and never find it. A juvenile python moves through, unhurried, and then the leaf litter explodes. The strike is too fast for the eye. One frame the snake is hidden, the next it's jaws are already locked onto the python's tail. There is no chase, no struggle the python can win. The attacker simply begins to walk its mouth down the body, jaw unhinging, stretching grotesquely wide, taking the python an inch by inch while it is still alive and twisting. You watch a snake nearly as long as the thing eating it disappear, tail first, down a throat that should not be able to open that far. And it doesn't stop until there's nothing left but a bulge sliding away into the dark.

[00:08:13]The predator was a Florida cottonmouth, a venomous pit viper that has lived in these exact wetlands for thousands of years. [music] An animal every single person on that team had stepped over on the trail a hundred times without a second thought.

[00:08:27]It had been here the whole time, doing this the whole time, and nobody had thought to look down. The x-ray confirmed it, cold. The cottonmouth in that documented [music] case measured between 34 and 42 inches. The python unfolded inside it was nearly as long. A snake eating prey almost its own size.

[00:08:45]Bartoszek stared at that image for a long time. He didn't call it a victory >> [music] >> because what it meant was that for years, while millions of dollars and every agency in the state failed to lay a glove on this invasion, a native snake nobody was watching had quietly been doing the one thing everyone swore was impossible. And if it could do that, the sickening question was how many other things out there were doing it, too.

[00:09:08]The perfect killer.

[00:09:11]In hindsight, it shouldn't have shocked anyone. The Florida cottonmouth, Agkistrodon conanti, is one of the most underrated predators on the continent.

[00:09:19]Adults run 30 to 48 inches, the rare one past 6 ft, all heavy muscle, built for exactly this drowned blackwater country.

[00:09:28]This was always their territory. The pythons just moved into it. That famous open-mouth display, the white cotton lining everyone pictures, is only the warning. The real weapon you can't see.

[00:09:39]Between the eyes and nostrils sit pit organs that read infrared, >> [music] >> raw body heat, with brutal precision.

[00:09:46]Darkness doesn't matter. Camouflage doesn't matter. A python, even a cold one, runs a hair warmer than the water around it, and that's all a cottonmouth needs. There is nowhere to hide from it in its own swamp. Then, the venom.

[00:10:01]Hemotoxic, engineered over millions of years to take apart blood and tissue from the inside. For something the size of a young python, one bite is the whole story. And here's what reframes the entire thing. This is not new behavior.

[00:10:14]Bartoszek's team confirmed cottonmouths already hunt 27 different snake species as a matter of routine. They're ophiophagus, born snake eaters. The Burmese python didn't put them on a new diet, it just got added to an old one.

[00:10:28]Strike, release, wait. A juvenile python at 18 in hasn't grown into its crushing strength yet. And once the venom is in, the outcome is decided. Three confirmed kills in one study area in a matter of months. That's a pattern, a native predator learning that baby pythons are easy and cashing in. But one snake in the leaf litter doesn't bend a population curve. And that's exactly what made Bartoszek's next discovery so hard to sit with. The cottonmouth, it turned out, wasn't working alone.

[00:10:59]The coalition.

[00:11:01]The transmitters had been telling a second story the whole time. And once the team went looking, it poured [music] out. Five of the 19 monitored pythons had been killed by American alligators.

[00:11:11]One of them, just 9 ft long. The gators hadn't surrendered the Everglades.

[00:11:15][music] They'd been fighting back the whole time, kill after kill, and nobody had been recording [music] it. Then, June 2021, a trail camera caught something with no precedent in the scientific record anywhere. A bobcat, a native cat whose own population this invasion had gutted by 87%. Walked up on a python nest and attacked it. Not scavenging, not looking into abandoned eggs. It went straight at the guarding female, slashing with both front paws, driving a giant snake backward, then settled in and raided the clutch one egg at a time. The first photographic evidence in history of a native mammal hunting a Burmese python nest. The bobcats had figured the threat out before the scientists [music] did and it kept going. Owls and hawks were filmed lifting juvenile pythons out of the open at dawn and dusk. Before they could grow into [music] the things that swallow deer, black bears took them. Panthers took them. Across Picayune Strand and Big Cypress, a whole coalition [music] was quietly assembling. Vipers in the leaf litter, raptors overhead, bobcats at the nest, gators in the water, bears in the brush. Nobody organized it. Every one of them was just doing what a few million years of evolution built it to do, drive out the thing that doesn't belong. But here's the truth and I won't dress it up.

[00:12:29]>> [music] >> It is not enough. Not yet. One female python lays 12 to 36 [music] eggs in a clutch, sometimes more, and coils around them, shivering her own body to keep them warm. [music] They mature fast.

[00:12:42]They live for decades. The math is merciless and it does not favor the home team. Human hunters have pulled more than 5,000 pythons out of the wild since the program began. The 2024 python challenge took nearly 200 in a single weekend. Sounds like a lot until you remember Zadi's verdict, barely scratching the surface. These snakes are masters of vanishing and most of this country can't even be walked. So every strike counts. Every cottonmouth in the leaves, every bobcat at a nest, every [music] gator in the water is buying the Everglades time. Time for these behaviors to spread, to pass [music] down, for the swamp to remember how to defend itself. And that's the part that should keep you up at night in the best [music] way. Nobody authorized any of this. The cottonmouths didn't wait for a permit. The bobcats didn't read a recovery plan. While the agencies wrote grants, >> [music] >> the swamp had already started fighting back. The cameras prove it's happening.

[00:13:37]What they can't tell us yet is whether it's happening fast enough, [music] whether one snake learning to eat a baby python becomes a thousand, whether all of it together ever outruns the reproductive engine of a Burmese python.

[00:13:49]That's the question pulling Bartoszek back into the water. The study is still running. The cameras are still rolling.

[00:13:55]The Conservancy is expanding the network, watching for the signal that the gap is finally closing. And somewhere in the blackwater of Picayune Strand tonight, between the cypress roots, a cottonmouth is digesting [music] a python whole. Its transmitter still beeping in the dark. Less than a mile away, a hundred eggs are about to hatch. So, tell me in the comments, is the swamp fighting back fast enough to win this, or [music] are we just watching it lose more slowly? And if you want to be here when the next clip comes back from those cameras, because this thing is far from over, subscribe right now. This war is just getting started.