A man in Gold Coast captured the sight of a python devouring a whole marsupial in his backyard.
Greg Hosking, from Currumbin, in Gold Coast City, Queensland, Australia, filmed the python’s meal and noted that it took nearly 45 minutes for the snake to consume the marsupial.
“It was fascinating to witness this spectacle,” Hosking told ABC.
The python tightly coiled, dragging the marsupial up a tree.
The man informed the news agency that the creature, nicknamed “Monty,” had been spotted around the house before, but it hadn’t been seen for weeks. This time, the noisy birds in the yard caught his attention.
That was when he noticed the python in the treetop with its jaws wrapped around something. The homeowner mentioned that the creature was hanging approximately 5 meters off the ground.
Hosking revealed: “We were almost able to touch it; we kept our distance a bit.”
Mark “The Snake Hunter” Pelley told Yahoo7 that such sights are not uncommon.
He stated: “They can open their jaws very wide to capture prey larger than the width of their bodies. Pythons have the ability to swallow their prey whole.”
Carpet pythons (Morelia spilota) are found throughout Australia, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. They are non-venomous and primarily feed on small animals including frogs, lizards, birds, and mammals. An adult typically measures between 2 to 4 meters in length.
Carpet pythons are highly adaptable and have learned to coexist with humans. They appear in nearly every environment and are no longer unfamiliar to Australians. This is not the first time that a carpet python has been filmed hanging upside down to consume a marsupial in a residential area.
Pythons kill their prey by coiling their bodies around the animal and constricting it until it suffocates. They spend most of their time in trees and are mainly nocturnal.
