Just a few days ago, a one-meter-eight-meter-long python climbed onto the windowsill of a 10th-floor residence in Sanya, Hainan, and the resident was helpless and afraid to approach, so he could only ask for help from the firefighter.
Also this month, the British "Daily Mail" reported that in Florida, scientists found a complete crocodile in the stomach of a 5.5-meter-long Burmese python.
The crocodile is still intact when dissected
Crocodiles are top predators in nature, and pythons can swallow 1.5-meter-long crocodiles whole, do these pythons really have no natural enemies?
The legend of the mysterious Monty Python
The species history of the python can be traced back to 65 million years before the extinction of dinosaurs, and its morphology has not changed much for a long time, and it is a living fossil of animals with great research value.
Because of their extremely long history, there are legends related to pythons all over the world, the most famous of which are various giant snakes.
In 2018, local Malaysian news reported the appearance of a giant snake in the Bale River in Borneo, Malaysia, which it said was captured by a scientific expedition team while aerial photographing the local flood situation. According to the proportions in the picture, this giant snake is almost more than 30 meters long.
The once-sensational Malaysian giant snake incident
Python is a cold-blooded animal that hibernates as soon as the temperature is low and only lives in the tropics. Because of this habit, in addition to the Southeast Asian rainforest, the Amazon forest of South America is also the hardest hit area of Monty Python legend.
The terrifying python in the classic movie "The Scourge of the Wild Python" is based on the Amazon Forest Cockroach (rán). The giant snake in another fantasy movie "Fantasy Forest" is based on the Asian rock python.
These legendary movies are twenty or thirty meters long giant pythons, and humans without weapons are simply an appetizer in front of them, which makes people shudder to think about.
And the giant snake in myths and legends is even more ridiculously large.
The mainland's "Classic of Mountains and Seas" once recorded that in ancient times, a giant snake was entrenched in the area of Dongting Lake, devouring living animals passing by. Once swallowed an elephant in one gulp, and it took three years to spit out the bones.
People called this giant snake "Ba Snake", and later because it devoured too many humans, the Yellow Emperor sent Houyi to solve it, and killed the giant snake in the west of Dongting Lake, and the snake's bones fell to the ground and turned into Baling.
This is where the allusion to the "snake swallowing the elephant" comes from
In Norse mythology, the evil god Loki and the giantess Angelboda gave birth to three children, the giant wolf Fenrir, the great serpent Jermongard, and the god of death Hela. The god king Odin had a premonition that Jermongard would be a threat to him, so he threw the young serpent into the deep sea that surrounded the earth.
When Jermongard grew up, its entire body was large enough to encircle the entire world, so it was called the "earthly python".
If there really is such a huge predator in reality, it is definitely the existence at the top of the food chain. But nature has the law of life cycle, and no creature can be invincible in the world. So, what will be the python's natural enemy?
Loki's three children
A real Monty Python
Not to mention myths and legends and special effects movies, there were many python legends in our country in the last century. For example, digging a tunnel to dig a giant snake thicker than a person, digging and blowing up the cave of the giant snake... And so on and so forth.
Is the python really that big in reality?
First of all, we have to distinguish that pythons are only one of the snakes, in the reptiles-snakes under the three suborders, belonging to the protosnake suborder, that is, the evolution of more primitive large and medium-sized snakes, on both sides of the butt and in the body there are residual hind limb traces in the process of evolution, most of them are non-poisonous snakes.
48 million-year-old python fossils, and small hind limbs can be seen
Among the existing snakes, the largest is a member of the python family, and the Amazon forest cockroach is the boss of it, also known as the green leech, green anaconda, and forest cockroach. The largest Amazon on record weighs 227 kilograms, is 8.43 meters long, and has a circumference of 1.11 meters at its thickest point.
However, this is only a special case, and generally speaking, Amazonian forest grasshoppers rarely exceed six meters in length. On average, the world's longest snake is the Southeast Asian reticulated python, the longest reticulated python recorded in 1912 was 10 meters, but the body weight is much lighter than the Amazon senpai.
Other well-known pythons include the Burmese python, which lives in Southeast Asia like the reticulated python, the African rock python, the largest snake in Africa, the largest amethyst python in Australia, and the Indian python in South Asia.
Skeletal specimens of pythons
These giant snakes are also known as the six existing giant snakes, and the largest records of body length are more than 5 meters on average, and there have been records of these giant pythons swallowing humans more than once, and they can definitely be included in the predator team at the top of the food chain.
However, compared with their ancestors, these giant snakes are still not enough to see.
In 2009, a U.S. expedition team found 28 fossilized bones of prehistoric pythons in open-pit coal pits in Colombia. After research and restoration, this python has a body length of between 12-14 meters and a weight of about 1.3 tons, and is named the titan python.
Titan pythons lived about 55 million years ago, when the earth's carbon dioxide content was much higher than now, and the overall temperature was about 5-8 degrees higher than now.
Comparison of the size of the spine of the titan python and the common snake
Although in the family of these giant snakes, there are also "little guys" such as ball pythons and red-tailed snakes, but they are only the smallest in the family.
The average body length of the ball python is about one meter, and the red-tailed cockroach is 1.8-3 meters long, which is the smallest python and cockroach, but according to the real contact experience, a snake with a body length of about two meters may strangle an adult to the point of suffocation, not to mention those seven or eight meters long giant beasts.
Can a giant python really fight invincible hands all over the world?
Snakes have lived on Earth for much longer than humans, and in the process of ancient apes evolving into humans, fear of top predators such as giant pythons has become a survival instinct in our genes.
After all, humans with bare hands cannot resist a giant python, and an adventurous American scientist has experienced it firsthand.
Paul Rossorie himself
Paul Rossori, a scientist who has conducted research in the Amazon for many years, in order to call on more people to pay attention to the protection of the Amazon ecology, put on a special armor and want to experience what it is like to be swallowed by a giant python.
His special armor has multiple layers of protection, including high-strength carbon fiber armor, a cooling vest to maintain body temperature in the snake, and a dagger to protect himself.
The team coated him with pig's blood and attracted an Amazon senpai more than 6 meters long. However, the experiment was not completely successful, and after less than two minutes of being entangled in the giant snake, Paul had to call the team to rescue himself, and finally went to the hospital to check multiple fractures all over his body.
Paul in full armor
Such a comprehensive equipment is almost useless under the death entanglement of the Sen Qiao. In nature, giant pythons can often be seen hunting crocodiles, bison and other large animals alone. Basically, as long as it can be swallowed, any animal can become food for a giant python.
These giant pythons, which are more than five or six meters long and easily weigh more than one hundred kilograms, can indeed be said to have no natural enemies in nature, but no one is born so powerful.
As the saying goes, "a big snake is a python, a big python is a cockroach", the difference between pythons and cockroaches is not much, and the biggest difference is in the way of breeding. Pythons, like ordinary snakes, are oviparous, and female pythons are responsible for hatching. Oysters, on the other hand, are ovoviviparous animals, and the snake eggs hatch in the female body, and finally give birth directly to small snakes.
Cockroaches directly give birth to small snakes, while pythons only give birth to snake eggs
Compared with other large animals in nature, the larger the size, the longer the lifespan, the longer the pregnancy, and the fewer offspring born per litter. For example, elephants and giraffes have a gestation period of about one and a half years, and one litter will basically only give birth to one offspring.
But pythons and cockroaches, as the boss of snakes, the number of each litter is far more than common sense, when there are less than a dozen litters, at most can even lay a hundred eggs at a time, and the incubation period is only a few months.
According to the natural laws of animals, the lower the survival rate of pups, the greater the number of births per litter. For example, mice and rabbits at the lowest end of the food chain have a pregnancy period of less than one month, and each litter can give birth to a dozen.
Python and cockroaches typically have a lifespan of 20-35 years, with the longest recorded in captivity currently being 43 years. Long lifespan means slow growth, and snakes, unlike other large predators, raise their cubs to maturity by their parents and fend for themselves after birth.
Juvenile pythons grow from a body size of only a few tens of centimeters at birth to a dominant body type of more than five meters, and it takes at least about six or seven years, or when there is enough food. If you eat less, you grow more slowly.
During their growth, there are many predators that can prey on them. According to observations, Burmese pythons mature sexually at around 3 years of age, while the survival rate of young snakes by 3 years old is as low as 1%.
Nature is indeed fair, even the daunting python cannot resist the natural enemy of survival rate.