what is being dubbed by various media as the world's largest eastern brown snake has been captured and is now at the Australian Reptile Park (there is a video on the link). Gigantor: Is this Australia's largest brown snake?
A very impressive snake but I would suggest that it would be well over 3 years old. We had a similar Eastern Brown Snake living wild here at the zoo for a number of years. He did an excellent rat eradication job around aviaries where it was risky to bait. He always stayed in off exhibit areas and most of our visitors would never have known that he was there. It was not uncommon to hear the scream of a rat as he claimed another victim. One day I saw him basking in the sun with 3 big bulges in his body. Unfortunately, for him, he was too good at his job and ate himself out of house and home. He started frequenting other, more public, areas of the zoo which did not impress the visitors much. One day he casually slid across a path, between the wheels of a young Mum's pram. I attribute his very calm nature to the fact that he was an old snake with lots of life experience which did not include harassment. Younger snakes tend to be much more reactive - an instinctive survival mechanism in their early days. This snake's luck ran out when he started sunbaking at the entrance door to the zoo. During the relocation process I weighed him and measured him. He tipped the scales at 2.2 kilograms and measured 2.1 metres - the largest Eastern Brown that I can recall seeing.
Thats a whopper Steve. We have big resident Browns in some locations around the farm, but not that big. These big ones never seem to be aggressive. The mid sized ones make me more jumpy.
