"I like animals that punch above their weight class."
It was a chilly December day when Ian Bartoszek and a team of other biologists hiked into the wilderness outside Naples to track pythons. They were homing in on Loki, a 13-foot, 52-pound male. But something didn’t feel right.
Normally, if things go well, they find Loki shacked up with a big fertile female during breeding season. The goal is to remove and euthanize as many of the invasive snakes as possible — taking out a female full of 70 or so egg follicles is like removing 71 snakes from the ecosystem.
As they got closer, they prepared to wrangle multiple big snakes, but when they finally spotted him, he was alone, motionless, and his neck and head were buried under pine needles.
They soon realized he was dead.
Read more at the Orlando Sentinel