See The Gigantic Snake Discovered In A Sailboat Shower
No one knows how this massive snake found its way into a sailboat shower!
This article is more than 2 years old
The old joke that people in Florida are a different breed really rings true when it comes to the police officer who recently grabbed a seven-foot snake by the neck all in the name of duty. According to a post that’s going viral on the Marco Island Police Department’s Facebook page — Marco Island is a community in the Florida Keys — an officer by the name of Prigge responded to a family that discovered a massive python snake on their boat. The officer apparently just walked up to it and grabbed it by the neck. Photos of the incident show a remarkably calm Officer Prigge holding the animal in his right arm as it coils around his impressively large bicep.
The Miami Herald reports that the boat traveled to the island from nearby Indian Key. Moments after docking, Rose Marina General Manager Dan High recalls the “female occupant” going to the lower deck only to find herself face-to-face with the nightmare snake as it stowed away in their shower. The post on the department’s Facebook page notes that police were able to capture the snake (shockingly easy it seems) and hand it over to local wildlife handler Bobby Monroe. No word yet on whether or not the snake will be charged for trespassing, but it’s unlikely.
Honestly, the shower is a surprisingly good hiding place for a seemingly unignorable seven-foot-long snake. Although the “female occupant” of the boat probably doesn’t feel this way, she got kind of lucky that the snake wasn’t bigger. According to the Everglades Cooperative Invasive Species Management Area, Burmese Pythons like the one Officer Prigge apparently picked up like a bit of litter on the street, are usually seven feet long at the very least. Fully grown they’re known to get up to 20-feet long.
Unfortunately, these snakes are wreaking havoc on the local ecosystem since they’re not really supposed to be there. Most of them made their way to the everglades thanks to people taking them in as pets and then either losing or releasing them into the wild. As a result, they’re not only expanding at a rapid rate, but they’re competing for food with other, natural predators — the end result being a massive decrease in the mammal population of the Everglades, which are falling prey to the reptiles.
As a result of that overcrowding, there’s a much more chilling explanation for how the snake made its way to Marco Island. While stowing away on the boat it was discovered on is the most likely path, The U.S. Geological Survey notes that, while there is no evidence that a Burmese Python is capable of making the roughly 20-mile swim to the Florida Keys from the mainland, it’s not impossible. Then again, it’s also possible that some dummy tried to keep a Burmese Python as a pet on the island only to release or misplace it, thus bringing a big problem to Marco Island. Regardless of how the snake made its way into the boat’s shower, the message is clear for residents of Florida — as much as you like snakes, introducing a foreign species into an unfamiliar habitat can really screw up some nice boat owner’s shower. So don’t do it!
