Australian Reptile Park giant Eastern Brown Snake

[Chlidonias]

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?

21 January 2015

The snake, dubbed 'Gigantor', is 50 centimetres longer than an average Eastern brown snake and is almost three times heavier coming in at two kilograms.

He has been helping the Reptile Park's life saving anti-venom program with great success so far, providing 30 milligrams of venom per milking as opposed to the average amount of 11 to 12 milligrams.

Around 3000 people are bitten by snakes in Australia each year and the most common bites are from brown (76 per cent), tiger (18 per cent) and black (6 per cent) snakes.

Eastern brown snakes are the second deadliest in the country after the Inland Taipan and are quite common in Sydney and the Central Coast

Curator at the Australia Reptile Park Liz Gabriel said Gigantor was definitely one of the biggest snakes she had seen and estimated he was over three years of age when he was found in a Brisbane backyard.

"He's just huge to tell you the truth," Ms Gabriel said. "We measured him and milked him to see what the venom output yield was from him and it was astounding.

"Even though he's a big snake and representative of the dangerous snakes that people see out and about, he's also a snake that will save lives in the coming years. The anti-venom here saves about 300 lives a year."

The venom is extracted from three-millimetre fangs which contain potent neurotoxins that cause paralysis and incoagulable blood. From there, the venom is given to a company which produces snake anti-venom.

Ms Gabriel said Gigantor was fairly relaxed when he was milked on Wednesday morning.

"Eastern brown snakes are quite a nervous species as a whole and he certainly portrayed that defensive nature," she said.

"For a big animal of his size and one that has come out of the wild, he wasn't too bad."

 

[Steve Robinson]

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.

 

[Monty]

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.