After a year-long fast, this gigantic snake is ready to feast—and we get to watch.
The reticulated python holds the title of longest snake in the world, growing up to 23 feet long. All that snake needs to be fed. Discovery UK videographers caught one horking a whole deer for its midnight snack, and it’s like a horror film courtesy of Mama Nature.
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In this video, the fun starts at the 4:20 mark (#blazeit), where we meet our big fella on a remote Indonesian island. It’s kind of hard to see everything that’s going on, as it’s shot at night—there’s a flash of scales, some doomed deer grazing—adding to the suspense of what you know is coming.
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The massive snake takes down a 66 pound deer and spends the next several hours swallowing it whole. But the most gruesome part isn’t even the kill: To get it down without suffocating, the python shoves its own windpipe out of its mouth like a feast-snorkel. Its heart and liver grow by 40 percent, to dissolve the deer in a week.
Just to add another layer of WTF, the documentary narrator throws in one more fun fact before leaving me to my nightmares: Pythons are very good swimmers, traveling miles at a time for their next kill. I, for one, am grateful that these things haven’t had legs in 100 million years.