NEAR NAPLES, Fla. (WSVN)– Some college kids made quite the catch in the Everglades. They teamed up and went searching for snakes, but they never thought they’d bag such a massive find.

Three college students captured a 17-foot Burmese python in the Big Cypress National Preserve, a remote area of Collier County, near Naples last week.

“When we spotted it, we all jumped out of the car screaming. Steve jumped on the head of the snake. Jake grabbed the tail, the belly,” Josh Laquis said.

Laquis was one of those brave students.

“Anything that kind of scares me excites me,” said Laquis.

He was looking for some fellow snake hunters when he connected with Jake Waleri and Stephen Gauta on social media.

He said, the night they decided to head into the Everglades, they drove to an area where another hunter had tried but failed to catch an unusually large python.

“For the entire night, all we talked about is what are the odds that we see the snake that the guy saw in the same spot. We didn’t think it was possible because the Everglades is a massive place,” Laquis said.

But the men said, all of a sudden, the massive snake appeared.

“It was just perfectly spread out in the middle of the road. It was just crossing from one side of the road to the other,” Gauta said.

So the trio jumped into action.

“With a snake this big, we were lucky there was three of us because if it was just one person trying to fight it, it would have probably gotten away,” Gauta said.

They successfully subdued the snake and say it weighed 110 pounds.

While it’s not the biggest Burmese python caught in the Everglades, the students said the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is looking to see if it might be the biggest to be caught by amateurs.

Florida is currently in the middle of the Python Challenge, which is a 10-day, statewide effort to eradicate the invasive snake from the Everglades.

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