A father and son assist in the catch of Florida’s second-heaviest Burmese python.

When a father and son went through Big Cypress Preserve on their way to grab shrimp tacos on Friday night, they had no idea that they would end up helping to defeat the second-heaviest Burmese python in Florida.

It took five men to haul in the 198-pound snake, which was so large that Mike Elfenbein initially mistook it for an alligator, according to a recent article by Gina Tomlinson of NBC2.

Elfenbein and his son Cole leaped from their truck to assist three other men in containing the enormous python.

Elfenbein remarked, “Her head was so big, like gripping a football. It was pretty insane; there were five of us lying in the road on top of the snake, and she lifted us off the ground and kept going.”

Elfenbein claimed to have called Amy Siewe, a Collier County-based professional python hunter, after struggling the snake for 45 minutes. After putting the enormous beast to sleep and transferring it to the conservancy, scientists discovered that the python was 17 feet and 2 inches in length.

“Deer hooves were discovered when they peered inside the stomach,” Siewe stated. “It ate deer, and she had eaten deer for a very long time.”

As Elfenbein put it, the five boys became fast friends after the crazy encounter. The two of them reside in Englewood, and his kid is just seventeen. The remaining three males are from Tampa, and they traveled to this region in order to go python hunting. Elfenbein claimed that although he and his son had previously caught ten-foot pythons, nothing came close to the enormous reptile.

“She had strength! That was something I had never experienced before,”  Elfenbein stated.

Elfenbein declared, “All the wildlife is going away from this place. Pythons are a part of it, but it’s a part of that  we can control. That, in my opinion, made missing the shrimp tacos worth it.”

Elfenbein is employed as a conservationist for the Cypress Chapter of the Izaak Walton League, a nonprofit organization.

A 215-pound python was found in West Florida just a year ago.

The article originally appeared on NBC2.

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