“There is a python with a platypus in its mouth,” Elliot Bowerman’s friend called out as the two walked through a forest in Queensland, Australia.
Sure enough, in the nearby creek, a two-meter-long carpet python had its jaws clamped down on a platypus’s foot. The pair watched for a few minutes, took some photos of the rare encounter, and then continued walking.
“We didn’t want to disturb the snake,” they told The Guardian.
The male platypus was already dead when they spotted the snake clinging onto it. Bowerman, an ecologist, suspects the kill was quite recent as the platypus did not smell, and rigor mortis had not set in.
“I imagine he put up quite a fight with those venomous spurs,” Bowerman said.
Photo: Elliot Bowerman
Tamielle Brunt, a platypus expert with Queensland’s PlatypusWatch project, has called the images “incredible.” Although snakes are considered a potential predator for the egg-laying mammal, a python attack on this unique Australian creature has never been seen before.
“Most commonly, [the platypus’s] native predators would be sea eagles and hawks,” Brunt told Yahoo! News. “They could easily drop down and take one from the water… Then obviously there’s invasive predators like cats and foxes.”
Snakes are more dangerous to platypus eggs.
Bowerman seems to have a knack for witnessing bizarre animal interactions. Hiking last year in New South Wales, he heard a rustling in the bushes. It was an antechinus (a carnivorous marsupial mouse) eating a dead antechinus. It was the first time that cannibalism had been witnessed in this species.
