Record 19 foot python captured in SW Florida by first time hunters
FORT MYERS - A group of friends in southwest Florida broke a record by capturing the longest python in the state.
Even more astonishing, some of the guys had never gone python hunting before.
Ana Waleri, whose son Jake was among the group, said he sent her a text of their record capture.
"You wake up to a text, that's a picture of them, you know, with the friends draped with the snake across their shoulders. And you think 'Well, that's great.' And then later the next morning, I got a video of Jake having to literally throw himself at the python and capture it by himself and that's when my heart stopped," she said.
"We were getting ourselves into a fight that was a little bit trickier than we first anticipated," said Jake Waleri.
The python they caught was 19 feet long and thought to be around 20 years old. It tipped the scales at 125 pounds.
"This one just blew me away when I came up to it and saw what he had caught," said fellow python hunter Stephen Gauta.
It wasn't easy. Jake Waleri said he had to change up his technique.
"I originally walked up to it, thinking I could just come behind it and grab its head like a normal grab. But then the snake went absolutely crazy. It was trying to wrap me up, trying to strangle me. My friends, luckily, were able to pull it off and, you know, we were able to capture this thing safely," he said.
His friends had never been python hunting before.
"I think they got the true Florida experience," said Jake Waleri.
The snake was measured by the Southwest Florida Conservancy which confirmed it was the longest ever captured in the state. Now the conservancy wants to run some tests and find out more about her.
"They're thinking that maybe because of how large this snake is and how old it is, it could be in the first or second generation of pythons that moved into Big Cypress," said Gauta.
After the conservancy is finished with it, Waleri and Gauta plan to donate the body so others can learn from it.