A professional python hunter who doubles as a professional alligator wrestler, according to his Instagram bio, helped catch “the longest live captured reticulated python ever caught in Puerto Rico.”
Working with Proyectos Retic, a group of python hunters in Puerto Rico who collect data and specimens about the reticulated python, Snakeaholic aka Kevin Pavlidis helped snag a reticulated python that measured 18′ 4″ long.
This gigantic snake was held up by eight people standing shoulder-to-shoulder to show just how big of a snake they’re dealing with. They tracked it down after it was “spotted strangling a pet cat behind a house.”
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There was no mention of whether the pet cat survived the ordeal or not. These hunters had a snake to catch. But as you can clearly see, that thing can easily take down more than a pet cat.
The reticulated python is an invasive species in Puerto Rico, much like the Burmese pythons are, in Snakeaholic’s home state of Florida.
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“It took all my tracking skills and 20 minutes of searching to find this snake down in the jungle,” Snakeaholic wrote about tracking down the snake after it was chased down a mountain away from the cat it was strangling.
“Removing this invasive apex predator is one more step towards restoring the delicate balance of the ecosystem out here in Puerto Rico and I am proud to be a part of this incredible conservation work!”
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Running around snatching pythons out of the jungle isn’t my idea of fun, but someone has to do it. A giant species of snake like this can take over an ecosystem, as Snakeaholic points out.
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“As incredible as these snakes are, they are an unbelievably large threat to the delicate ecosystem of Puerto Rico,” he added in another post about this monstrous snake.
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“It’s not the snake’s fault, this is yet another human error of introducing a non-native animal and @proyectoreticpr and I are doing our best to fix the problem other people created.”