College of the Atlantic biology professor Dr. Stephen Ressel.College of the Atlantic biology professor Dr. Stephen Ressel.The length of time it takes to watch an episode of Games of Thrones is about all it takes for a reticulated python to kill and swallow a human being.

Death comes quickly, notes Cornell Professor Dr. Harry W. Greene. The reticulated python, the longest living species of snake in the world, are constrictors, meaning they coil around their prey and squeeze them until they’re dead in just a couple minutes. The swallowing takes most of the time.

Reticulated pythons bite first. Then, Greene said, “literally within a few seconds,” it would wrap its powerful coils around a person’s body, cutting off blood circulation to the brain, blocking off airways and preventing the chest from expanding. From one or all of those reasons, he said, a person would quickly die.

“Big pythons are incredibly powerful animals with huge muscles to both move and eat and constrict,” said Stephen Ressel, a professor at the College of Atlantic. “They certainly can pack a huge force as they’re constricting.”

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