A search for a missing woman in the Jambi province of Indonesia ended this week when remains were discovered in the stomach of a python.
According to CNN Indonesia, the 54-year-old woman went to work at a rubber plantation in the town of Elephant Falls on the island of Sumatra Sunday. She did not return home that evening, and her husband began looking for her, said the local police chief.
The woman’s husband found her sandals, a knife, a headscarf, and a jacket near the rubber plantation and sought help. By Monday morning, a large python was found. It was suspected of eating the victim. USA Today identified it as a 22-ft. long snake.
Per the translated article, community members caught the snake and brought it to the yard of the victim’s family. There, its stomach contents were opened and they determined that it had eaten her.
Pythons are not venomous snakes. According to the University of Cincinnati, pythons are constrictors, which can “bite their prey and quickly wrap their powerful coils around it, fatally cutting off the animal’s vital blood flow, before consuming it whole at their leisure.”
Snakes have lower jawbones that are not connected, allowing them to open their jaws wide to swallow prey. University of Cincinnati College of Arts and Sciences professor Bruce Jayne said some pythons have extra stretchy skin between their jaws to allow for even larger prey to be consumed.
According to United States Geological Survey, “all known constrictor-snake fatalities in the United States are from captive snakes,” and these deaths are “split between deaths of snake owners who were purposefully interacting with their pet and deaths of small children or infants in homes where a snake was kept captive as a pet.”
Generally, the risk of human fatalities from non-venomous snakes is low, with around one or two such deaths reported annually, said the USGS. However, multiple python deaths have been reported in Indonesia. In 2018, the BBC said two python deaths had been reported there within a year.
Down the Audacy app and follow 97.1 FM Talk.
Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | TikTok
Related
Related
