54-year-old girl devoured by snake in Indonesia

An Indonesian woman goes missing and is discovered days later inside a reticulated python. The attack is not an isolated case, but deadly attacks on humans are rare.

Only larger specimens of the reticulated python can devour humans.

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Sandals, headscarf, her jacket and her knife – that’s all the man found from his missing wife in the Indonesian province of Jambi on Sunday evening after the 54-year-old had not returned from her work on a rubber plantation. A day later he returned to the plantation with a search party. They did not find his wife on site, but in a clearing in the forest they discovered a snake, sluggish, with a conspicuously curved body.

The horrible foreboding soon became reality: the dissection of the snake revealed the woman’s still intact corpse, as shown by film footage circulating on the Internet. The local police chief confirmed the find to local media.

The dissected snake is said to be a reticulated python, one of the largest snake species in the world. It is one of four species of snakes that are physically capable of ingesting human-sized prey. He can dislocate his flexible lower jaw from the upper jaw if necessary.

Several media reported on the current incident. It is said that further attacks are feared in the region, as a snake of the same species, more than eight meters long, was recently sighted.

Reticulated pythons eat a lot, but rarely

Adult humans are not actually ideal prey for reticulated pythons—human shoulders are too broad. Only large pythons can devour whole people, and then only smaller and lifeless ones. The snakes usually strangle their victims before eating them.

Digesting such a large prey is hard work, the metabolic performance is comparable to that of a racehorse at full gallop – unlike the horse, the snake does not just maintain this state of emergency for several minutes, but for days, which probably puts it out of action for a long time . The reticulated pythons rarely go hunting. They eat according to the principle “better right than often”. They look for larger victims, but can also survive for more than a year without food.

It is therefore all the more rare for pythons to attack humans, but it happens again and again, especially in South Asia. Two other deadly attacks on humans have been reported in Indonesia in recent years. The cases are similar: the people worked in remote fields and never returned home.


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