Asia is a great place to find big snakes. The world’s largest and heaviest don’t live here; that honour belongs to the green anacondas (Eunectes murinus) of South America and the Caribbean island of Trinidad, which have been reported to measure over 10 metres and weigh in excess of 200 kilograms. But there’s a heavyweight snake that’s native to Southern and Southeast Asia that is not only one of the planet’s biggest snakes, but also considered one of the most beautiful – the Burmese python (Python bivittatus).
Once considered a subspecies of the Indian python (Python molurus) but now recognised as a distinct species, the Burmese python occurs in eastern India, southeastern Bangladesh, western Bhutan, southeastern Nepal, and southern China (including Hong Kong), as well as Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and northern continental Malaysia. It has also been found in parts of Indonesia, particularly Java, Sulawesi, Bali, and Sumbawa.
These mostly nocturnal rainforest dwellers are highly water-dependent snakes and can remain submerged for up to half an hour. As juveniles, they live on land or on trees, but they eventually grow so large that they need to stay on the ground, hiding in the underbrush. The snake spends most of its time staying still and waiting for prey to approach, using its sharp rearward-pointing teeth to seize prey and then coiling its body around the animal to kill it through constriction. Its prey – primarily small mammals and birds, but also amphibians and reptiles – is swallowed whole. Elastic ligaments in the jaws allow pythons to swallow animals up to five times as wide as their head!
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