It was a chilly December day when Ian Bartoszek and a team of other biologists hiked into the wilderness outside Naples to track pythons. They were homing in on Loki, a 13-foot, 52-pound male. But something didn’t feel right.
Normally, if things go well, they find Loki shacked up with a big fertile female during breeding season. The goal is to remove and euthanize as many of the invasive snakes as possible — taking out a female full of 70 or so egg follicles is like removing 71 snakes from the ecosystem.
As they got closer, they prepared to wrangle multiple big snakes, but when they finally spotted him, he was alone, motionless, and his neck and head were buried under pine needles.
They soon realized he was dead.
“It was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, stop. Don’t step on anything. Let’s look around,’” Bartoszek said. “We went into ‘CSI Crime Scene’ mode.”
“First off, it was a little emotional, because he was dead,” Bartoszek said. “This was one of my favorite scout snakes.”
Bartoszek and the team of biologists at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida have been tracking 40 or so male scout snakes since 2013. This breeding season they removed 130 adult snakes totaling 6,500 pounds. Nearly all of that success hinges on radio-tracking male scout snakes who lead them to big females in areas where a human would never spot them.
The Conservancy had been tracking Loki for six years, and he’d led them to some very rotund females. “He was a good scout,” Bartoszek said. “He was a good player. You never like to lose an MVP.”
When they brushed away the pine needles, Loki’s head and neck were gnawed off. There were no discernible tracks, and he was half-buried, something biologists call a cache.
“Caching is fairly specific to cats, and it looked like a cat cache. We were excited to find out if it was a panther or a bobcat,” Bartoszek said.
Previously, biologists have found several cached pythons in nearby Big Cypress National Preserve, but they had no proof of what kind of wild cat had killed them — the area is home to both bobcats and much larger, and endangered Florida panthers.
Bartoszek needed help to figure out what had happened. He called in former coworker and wild cat expert Dave Shindle, who now works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as the coordinator for Florida panther recovery.
Shindle came to the cache site with a video trail cam, knowing that since the kill was fresh, the cat would likely be back. When he saw the snake’s carcass, he felt strongly that the killer was a cat — the gnawed neck was textbook feline caching behavior.
Pythons the size of Loki routinely eat bobcats (Bartoszek often finds bobcat remains in snakes’ digestive tracts during necropsies), and the Conservancy has documented a 15-foot snake swallowing a 77-pound deer, an animal three times the size of a bobcat.
Additionally, studies of bobcats on tree islands in the Everglades suggest that the more pythons there are in an area, the fewer bobcats use it, either because snakes eat them, or because there’s less prey for the cats due to competition from pythons.
It’s safe to say that pythons kill prey larger than themselves, but so do bobcats: They have been filmed tackling deer, especially young ones.
As Shindle set up the camera, the biologists started making bets on whether a bobcat or panther killed Loki. Bartoszek was betting a panther had done it. “It’s such a big python, I couldn’t really see a bobcat killing a 50-pound snake.” But panthers are exceedingly rare. They would soon find out who the killer was.
A predator, revealed
Shindle retrieved the camera the next day, and immediately spotted the killer on the video.
The grainy footage shows an approximately 25-pound bobcat gingerly walking across a log to return to its python stash. The cat seems nervous, cautious, constantly sniffing to pick up on the scent of the humans who’d been there the day before.
Bartoszek was impressed. “I like animals that punch above their weight class,” he said.
“That’s the last we saw of the bobcat. We just left the carcass there. Who knows if he came back.”
There’s no way to know with 100% certainty how Loki died. Maybe he drew his last breath before the cat found him. But bobcats are not known as scavengers. And Bartoszek had tracked and seen Loki a few days prior, and he was in top condition. “He was a prime specimen,” said Bartoszek. The conclusion: In all likelihood, a 25-pound bobcat killed a 13-foot, 52-pound python.
Leveraging the cold
A key factor in the snake’s demise, aside from the cat’s courage, may have been the cold weather.
Cold snaps, such as the one that occurred a few days before they found the snake, slow cold-blooded pythons down. They’re less able to flee, less able to defend themselves, they’re “off their game,” as Bartoszek put it. “I think he just got cold-stunned, and the cat was opportunistic and took him down,” Bartoszek said.
“This is a good sign for the Everglades that our native wildlife are fighting back,” he said. In fact bobcats may see pythons as a valuable food source if the conditions align. Successful predators put patterns together on how their prey behaves. It could be that this bobcat, and maybe others, have deduced that cold weather gives them an advantage over an otherwise deadly snake.
Bartoszek and his team have started to anticipate losing a scout snake each year during cold spells, maybe to a bobcat, maybe a panther, maybe a bear.
Earlier this year they were tracking an 11-foot, 35-pound snake named Pacino in the Picayune Strand State Forest after another cold snap. “We were out in the forest going, I wonder which of our animals could have got predated?” Sure enough, they found Pacino not only dead but almost entirely eaten.
The scene was messy — grass and ferns trampled. And there wasn’t much left of Pacino. “It was almost like a grenade went off and there was pretty much just the skull (of the snake),” said Bartoszek. Also, the site smelled like a bear.
“He looked like he was killed by a bear, but I can’t tell you 100% if he was. I don’t think he was killed by the cold, because we really didn’t get frost. I think it was a similar situation. He was exposed, and you could tell a bear got this python.”
Bartoszek sees a potential pattern emerging. “Animals are likely stunned, if you will, for lack of a better word, and a predator takes advantage. In fact, the native mammals might actively look for those vulnerabilities during a cold snap.”
Invasive Burmese pythons ended up in Florida wilderness via the exotic pet trade of the 1970s and ’80s. Escaped or released pets thrived and reproduced, first at the southern tip of the Everglades, but now as far north as Lake Okeechobee and the suburbs of Fort Myers. In some areas where the snakes are more established, mammal sightings are down 80% to 99%.
Bartoszek suspects that Florida panthers occasionally prey upon pythons, but there’s no proof yet. And there are only 200 or so Florida panthers in the wild. The fact that bobcats are widespread — the National Park Service said they have a “healthy population” in South Florida — and potentially learning to prey upon even large pythons is a good sign, Bartoszek said.
In warm weather, some bobcats have found other ways to put Burmese pythons on the menu.
Wildlife biologists in Florida documented a bobcat raiding a python nest back in 2021.
The cat returned several times when the massive 115-pound female mother snake was gone, snacking on eggs and caching the nest. When mamma came back, the cat actually faced off with her and took a swipe, but kept her distance as the snake coiled to strike.
The Conservancy loses approximately 10% of their 40 or so scout snakes each season, some to alligator predation, or sometimes the team will find the radio tracker with no snake. “We’ll never know what took them down,” said Bartoszek.
With the documentation of this bobcat cache, it looks like the tables can turn, at least once in a while. “As we have more (radio-tagged Burmese pythons) out there and we follow them longer-term, we see more of Florida native wildlife fighting back,” he said.
“Yeah, we were a little bummed that we lost a valuable scout. But we were also saying, ‘All right, score one for the home team.’”
Bill Kearney covers the environment, the outdoors and tropical weather. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Instagram @billkearney or on X @billkearney6.
