This Burmese python is truly hissstoric.
The 17-foot-long, cold-blooded colossus was the largest ever to be removed from Big Cypress National Preserve in the Florida Everglades — weighing in at 140 pounds.
The female snake, which also contained 73 developing eggs, was caught using an innovative approach to tackling the invasive species, which poses a major threat to native wildlife in the Sunshine State.
“Using male pythons with radio transmitters allows the team to track the male to locate breeding females,” the preserve wrote on its Facebook page.
“The team not only removes the invasive snakes, but collects data for research, develop new removal tools, and learn how the pythons are using the Preserve,” it said.
“The team tracked one of the sentinel males with the transmitter and found this massive female nearby.”
The preserve posted a photograph of four researchers holding up the giant reptile in the 729,000-acre (1,139-square-mile) swampland expanse west of Miami.
Most of the pythons that have been found in the Everglades are between 6 and 10 feet long — with the largest one measured at over 18 feet long and weighing more than 100 pounds, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
State wildlife officials estimate there are as many as 100,000 pythons — which are native to Southeast Asia — living in the Florida swamps outside Miami.
The snakes began turning up in the Everglades in the 1980s, most likely abandoned by pet owners when the reptiles got too large to handle. Some pythons also may have escaped from a breeding site destroyed during Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
To control their population, the state even holds competitions encouraging people to remove as many of them as possible, according to CNN.
About 1,600 people registered for the 2013 inaugural Python Challenge, which was organized by the conservation commission. The searchers found only 68 snakes.
Two years ago, 25 hunters were paid to euthanize pythons under a $175,000 pilot program by the South Florida Water Management District.
