Burmese pythons in Florida’s Big Cypress National Reserve vomited an entire whitetail deer after temperatures in South Florida fell below 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) in their later years last year.
Pison is known to vomit food in a cold laboratory setting, but scientists have never caught an elusive snake doing it in the wild. The unusual observations made in late November 2024 are explained in a study published in the Journal Ecology and Evolution in July.
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The Burmese Pison (Python bivittatus) has been an invasive species of Florida since the late 1970s. Despite their existence over the last decades, they have been largely studied, with gaps in their knowledge of snake biology and interactions with native species such as deer.
Deer populations are declining in reserves. This is because it forms an important part of the diet of local predators, such as the Florida Panthers (Puma Concorrol Korii). To learn more about how often snakes eat deer and how quickly they digest, parent scientists spent a year tracking the digestion of several large female pythons.
One snake under observation had a large chunk in his stomach, indicating that he had eaten something deer-sized. However, for the next few days, the lump did not appear to be small.
After a cold night, when temperatures dropped to 48.9 f (9.4 c) in the reserve, scientists revisited the snake. They noticed it was without lumps and swam through shallow waters of willow marsh near the minimally digested, white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) that it had vomited.
Related: Scientists Discover Burmese Pythons Helping to Digest the Whole Skeletons Have Cells Unseen
“They discovered she was very empty, and they could smell the deer that wasn’t too far away, and they could put the two together,” Sandfoss said.
Snakes find it difficult to function in the cold because they are cold blooded or ectothermic. Their biological processes, including digestion, slow down until the temperature warms.
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If the temperature is too cold outdoors, the snake’s diet will begin to break down the stomach faster than the snake digests, causing bacteria to accumulate. The snake’s response is to vomit and eliminate bacteria. This could be an energy-intensive activity for an already hungry snake, but the snake of research survived it.
Burmese pythons are an invasive species of Florida, so snake survival has complicated implications, Sandfos said. You missed one of the large meals that only take a few times a year, so you might not have the energy to replicate, which will help you control the Python population. Alternatively, the snake could kill another deer and constitute lost energy, putting deer population native predators at even greater risk.
“Big Cypress deer has been declining for several years, and I believe pythons are a factor,” Prime Minister Travis Mangione, a biologist at the National Park Service (NPS), told Live Science. “This Python survived the vomiting event and will continue to eat native wildlife.”
Despite scientists working to understand how vomiting events in Pison, Burma, affect local ecosystems, observations in the wild hold valuable clues as to how much this invasive species spreads within the United States. Temperature is an important limiting factor in the snake range, and the coldest temperatures they can survive may be the coldest they can digest, Sandfos said.
The new research fits a large, yet unreleased research project analyzing the year-round of Python feeding data. Scientists working on this project hope to shed light on the basic biological processes of digestion in Burmese pythons, which has not been studied yet.
“Pythons has complex biology and we’ve never actually dealt with animals like this on this scale. “We’re trying to understand all of this.”
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