A violent battle to the death between two giant snakes.

Captured in a dramatic photo shared on Feb. 1 to Imgur, a grim scene hints at a violent battle to the death between two giant snakes, identified in the caption as a reticulated python (Python reticulatus) and a king cobra (Ophiophagus hannah), both native to Southeast Asia and among the biggest snake in the world.
Both are formidable serpents. The reticulated python is the longest and heaviest snake on Earth, reaching 23 feet (7 meters) in length and weighing as much as 165 lbs.



 (75 kilograms), and wielding considerable constricting power. Meanwhile, the king cobra can measure about 18 feet (5.5 m) long and weigh up to 20 lbs. (9 kg), and has a bite that packs enough neurotoxins to fell an Asian elephant. But when these two individuals squared off, neither survived the encounter.
The photo, which was uncredited, appears to have been taken in a shallow ditch in an area where people live, judging from the empty plastic water bottles and other assorted trash scattered nearby. The location is almost certainly in tropical Asia, as that would be the only place where the two snake species would be living in close proximity in the wild, Frank Burbrink, an associate curator in the Department of Herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
At first glance, it's hard to tell from the image where one snake's body ends and where the other's begins. A closer look helps to separate them — the cobra's jaws are locked onto the neck of the python, while the pythons diamond-patterned body is tightly coiled in snug loops around the cobra's neck and upper body. The cobra's lower body extends away from the muscular knot that binds the two snakes.
"And they're both big ones," Burbrink pointed out. Though there's little in the image to help determine their scale, juvenile cobras have distinctive markings that are absent in this one, indicating that it's an adult.
"You can see little white lines on the Cobra in the picture, on the part that's trailing out on the path," he said. Those white marks are remnants of the ring pattern found in juveniles, which is much brighter when they're young, Burbrink explained.
Pythons' deadly squeezing also obstructs the flow of blood in their prey's body, which can kill much more quickly than suffocation.
In the image, blood is visible on the cobra's maw, perhaps from the python's wound or from an injury to the cobra's mouth that happened during the tussle, Burbrink said. How long the struggle may have lasted would have depended on the amount and potency of the venom delivered by the cobra, which is impossible to guess from a photo, he said.