Greedy Burmese python pukes up a whole deer in Florida: scientists

His snake eyes were bigger than his stomach.

Florida might have a new ally in the ongoing fight against the invasive Burmese python scourge — chilly weather.

Researchers who track the elusive and reviled reptiles were thrilled to witness one of the greedy beasts regurgitating an entire deer earlier this year — after the mercury plunged below the comfortable threshold for the cold-blooded constrictors.

The observation, made in late November in Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve, was detailed in a gag-inducing study in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

“Pythons are constantly doing things I never imagined, but this is such a beautiful moment where science and basic principles line up with field observations,” Mark Sandfoss, senior author of the study and a biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), told Live Science.

To the scientists’ knowledge, this marked the “first observation of a free-ranging Burmese python vomiting a deer within the invasive range without direct disturbance from humans,” they wrote.

The team reportedly happened upon the buck upchucking incident while researching the eating habits of the Asian invaders, which are a relatively understudied species — despite making the Sunshine State their home since the 1970s.

Since then, the population has soared out of control as the plus-sized reptiles — which can reportedly grow to over 20 feet long — have eaten and/or outcompeted local wildlife.

The crew specifically set out to study the Burmese python’s effect on native fauna such as whitetail deer.

As they pointed out, the resident deer population has been on the decline, raising concerns given that these grazers comprise the diets of local predators, such as the critically-endangered Florida panther.

“Deer in Big Cypress have been declining for several years, and we believe pythons to be a factor in that,” said lead author Travis Mangione, a biologist at the National Park Service (NPS).

To shed light on their interactions with deer and how long they took to digest them, the scientists spent over a year keeping tabs on the digestion of several large female pythons — the kind most likely to consume the ungulates.

One of the monitored serpents had a giant deer gut that did not recede over the next few days. The scientists returned to see the snake following one cold night when temps dipped to 48.9 degrees Fahrenheit, whereupon they found the snake swimming in a swamp without a distended midsection.

Lying nearby was the minimally digested remains of a whitetail that it had regurgitated.

As the snakes are cold blooded, all of their functions, including digestion, slow to a crawl until the weather warms up again — similar to how Florida’s invasive iguanas freeze and topple from trees during cold snaps. Should the mercury dip too low, the python’s meal can start decomposing in its stomach faster than the snake can digest it, causing microbes to amass.

The snake then vomits up the meal to avoid getting infected by said bacteria. Scientists deduced that this could be a positive sign when it comes to beating back these cold-blooded killers.

Scientists suspected that the snake missed one of the few meals it eats a year, meaning it might not have the requisite energy to make more babies, which could help restore the number of deer.

However, as the python survived its temp-induced purge, the critter could potentially eat another deer to make up for the missed meal, further taking a bite out of the vulnerable population.

Nonetheless, the development also indicates that weather limit the number of regions these scaly interlopers are able to invade.

“Pythons have complicated biology, and we’ve never really dealt with an animal like this at this scale — this large, invasive ectotherm, terrestrial,” Sandfoss said.

In the interim, conservations are pulling out all the stops when comes to combating this biblical seeming plague of serpents, whose numbers have exploded over the past half-century.

Measures include state incentive programs that reward residents for capturing and killing as many pythons as possible. Over the summer, a Florida snake slayer dispatched was awarded $1,000 after dispatching a whopping 87 invasive pythons in just one month.

Most recently, a water management district in Florida’s Everglades deployed robot rabbits (is it robo hop?) to help monitor and eventually eliminate the scourge.

The fur-minators are designed to imitate rabbits’ movements and even their heat signature and scent, which pythons hone in on when hunting flesh-and-blood bunnies.

Upon spotting a snake, the decoy’s artificial intelligence-powered camera alerts officials with the South Florida Water Management District, which dispatches someone to eradicate the threat.

Despite the prevalent and cutting-edge measures, experts fear that the python plague is here to stay.

In a research paper released in 2023, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said Burmese pythons in southern Florida represent “one of the most intractable” management issues in the world when it comes to invasive species.