An unprecedented video shows a lynx cat storming the nest without the protection of an invader Burmese Python by the eggs and a confrontation that followed when the 14-foot snake returned to its nest in the Florida Everglades.
Images from the Big Cypress National Reserve mark the “first documentation of any Florida animal taking advantage of python eggs” and the first evidence of any Everglades animal fighting a Burmese python, according to a report from the Geological Survey of the United States.
The video from the trail camera, captured by USGS cameras from June to August 2021, shows a curious lynx cat chasing the python’s nest of eggs. The native animal can be seen on June 1 approaching the nest unguarded and eating the eggs, then returning the next day, digging into the nest and biting more eggs.
When the lynx cat returned later that day, the python was back with its eggs and the lynx cat can be seen on the sidelines. But on June 4, the lynx cat returns and the trail camera captures the animal by sliding the nesting python.
CBS Miami reports that over the course of a few days, the male lynx can be seen “consuming, trampling, caching and uncovering eggs while the python disappears, but also facing the much larger snake and exchanging blows at least sometimes “. “according to the USGS.
Researchers said the photos suggest that the approximately 85-pound python at one point hit the lynx, which weighed about 20 pounds. They said the later images show the “python back on its coils, facing the lynx cat, which can then be seen sliding towards the python from the left side of the frame and then moving to the right while the python visually follows the lynx cat “.
Days later, when the biologists arrived, they moved the python and found that the nest had been destroyed, counting 42 “unviable or destroyed” eggs.
Over the next few weeks, the camera captured a lynx “investigating the site and scouring the destroyed eggs and eggshells,” the investigators said.
The research was published last month in the journal Ecology and Evolution.
United States Geological Survey
Captive Burmese pythons released by the destruction of Hurricane Andrew in 1992 have flourished in the South Florida ecosystem, decimating local species in the process.
Today the Everglades are packed with giant snakes and it has had devastating consequences. A 2012 U.S. Geological Survey study found this later Andrew exacerbated the invasion of Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades, raccoon and sea urchin populations fell by about 99 percent and some species of rabbits and foxes effectively disappeared.
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