Skip to footer

19-foot python killed in Florida

19-foot python killed: The huge 19-foot Burmese python is the biggest ever captured in Florida. The giant python wrapped itself around a man's leg before he killed it with a knife.

|
(AP Photo/University of Florida)
Unidentified University of Florida staff lying next to a dead Burmese python on the campus in Gainesville, Fla. The python, the longest ever caught in the state, measured 18 feet, 8 inches and weighed 128 pounds.
  • By Staff Associated Press

| Miami

Wildlife officials say a Burmese python nearly 19 feet (5.8 meters) long has been captured in Florida.

It's a new record for the longest Burmese python caught in the wild in Florida. The previous record was a 17-foot-7-inch (5.4 meter) python caught in August in Everglades National Park.

According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the 18-foot-8-inch (5.7 meter) snake was caught May 11 alongside a road in rural Miami-Dade County.

Wildlife officials said Monday that a Miami man spotted about 3 feet (one meter) of the snake sticking out of the roadside brush. He grabbed it and started dragging it into the open. When the snake began to wrap itself around his leg, he called to his friends for help and then used a knife to kill it.

The python weighed 128 pounds (58 kilograms).

Earlier this year, Florida held a Burmese python hunt. The hunt for Burmese pythons in the Everglades yielded 68 of the invasive snakes, the longest measuring more than 14 feet long, Florida wildlife officials said, according to a report in The Christian Science Monitor.

That might not seem like a success, considering roughly 1,600 people signed up for the state-sponsored Python Challenge that ended Feb. 17, but Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officials said the hunt may have prevented thousands more pythons from being born in the Everglades.

Female pythons can lay as many as 100 eggs at a time.

Researchers say pythons are eating their way through the Everglades, decimating populations of native mammals. The snakes can grow more than 20 feet in length, and they have no predators, other than the humans desperately trying to control their population.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to 19-foot python killed in Florida
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0521/19-foot-python-killed-in-Florida
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe