In Collier County, researchers have been keeping track of Burmese pythons under an ongoing study over their cryptic habits. During a time period of just three months, they have bagged over 2,000 pounds of snakes.

They have bagged many snakes with a monster among them that is 16 feet long and has a weight of 140 pounds, which as per researchers has set a new state record for the biggest male caught.

For the project, Conservancy of Southwest Florida biologist Ian Bartoszek collaborated with Denison University biologist Paul Andreadis, the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and the United States Geological Survey. The biologist Bartoszek called it kind of jaw-dropping discovery.

During the past three years, the researchers have been outfitting male ‘snitch snakes’ with radio trackers to get information about the python habits and, mainly to catch them.

In South Florida, pythons probably set free by pet owners or sneaked out from breeding facilities have highly increase in number. In fact, the toll has become so high that they have now become among the top predators in the area, bringing changes in the ecological landscape.

You can’t easily catch well-camouflaged reptiles in the wild until they are slithering out in the open. You can nearly anytime find them on leaves or roads in Southeast Florida, running across Everglades marshes.

Researchers have, however, now discovered their hiding place in Southwest Florida: gopher tortoise and armadillo burrows. They have, in fact, given confirmation to something they have had noted down earlier. They said that the pythons in Florida don’t mate in pairs.

In 2015, the researchers tracked a male to a gopher tortoise burrow. Once the team pulled out the snake to update its tracker, they discovered something strange. In that burrow, there were seven more snakes, including six males and one female. The snaked were squeezed within for what’s known as a ‘mating ball’.