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The viral meme showing an African rock python and #berniesmittens is *hilarious* but also got me thinking about human-eating snakes again.
CW: death by snake #thread 1/
CW: death by snake #thread 1/
BTW, the image is actually of a python that ate a porcupine, and both perished (the snake might have regurgitated and died because it was being harassed by people). 2/ https://www.businessinsider.com/python-death-by-porcupine-2015-7
Anyway, back in 2012, I wrote a blog post on records of snakes that eat people. There wasn't much. 3/ http://snakeymama.blogspot.com/2012/11/man-eating-snakes.html
The main known records concerned the Agta people of the Philippines, who hunted pythons for meat and were also... hunted by the pythons for their meat. See https://www.pnas.org/content/108/52/E1470 4/
Since I wrote that blog, things have changed. And I don't only mean accidents where captive pythons kill people, which happen way too often, like the brothers killed (but not eaten) in Canada in 2013. 5/ https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/06/world/americas/canada-snake-deaths/index.html
No, I mean that people have actually been killed and eaten by pythons. The first I know about happened in 2017, when Akbar Salubiro went missing in Sulawesi and was later found in a reticulated python's stomach. 6/ https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/insane-snake-attacks/28/
Then in 2018, also in Sulawesi, a woman named Wa Tiba met the same fate, also found in a reticulated python belly. 7/ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39427462
Of course, now that multiple species of large pythons inhabit south Florida, people there are terrified they will meet the same fate. So far, biologists say that predatory strikes on people by pythons in Florida are rare. 8/ https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/wsb.413
Bear in mind that pythons have decimated mammal populations in the Everglades, eating the usual suspects like rabbits, but also deer and even Florida panthers! 9/ https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/03/pythons-wipe-out-rabbits-and-probably-much-more-everglades
What other encounters have I missed? Are the numbers of snake-eating-human events (still rare!) increasing due to continued movement of humans into wild places, or do we just hear more about these events now because of wider internet access? 10/10
