Going Places
📽 by @slavkolai
An olive python having a wallaby for dinner. Northern Territory, Australia.
You might be thinking, no way that thing is eating something that big, and you would be wrong. An olive python can absolutely eat a wallaby - and they do it regularly.
Olive pythons (Liasis olivaceus) are one of Australia’s biggest snakes. Adults commonly reach 4 - 5 metres (13 - 16 ft) and can weigh 15 - 20 kg or more. That’s more than enough muscle and stretch to handle a small-to-medium wallaby.
They kill the same way all pythons do: coil around the prey, constrict until it stops breathing, then swallow it whole - head-first, usually. Their jaws unhinge completely, the skin stretches like rubber, and the whole body becomes one long expandable tube. A wallaby that looks impossible to fit actually disappears inside over a couple of hours.
The bulge will be ridiculous for a few days, the snake will look like it swallowed your barbeque and it’ll hide somewhere quiet for weeks while it digests - but it happens all the time. That’s why they’re one of Australia’s biggest snakes: they we born to straight up disappear decent-sized mammals
