Moment California snake catches huge fish, before devouring it whole

A group of campers in the Sierra Nevada mountains witnessed what was identified as an aquatic garter snake wrestling with a brown trout fish before somehow managing to swallow the hefty catch whole.

Wild footage captured a few days ago by Instagram user Madelin Woods stumbled upon the bizarre encounter while camping with friends, when they spotted the snake dragging the still-flopping trout out of the water, already clamped between its jaws.

“Too wild not to post,” she wrote, alongside the shocking images, which have racked up more than 34,000 likes.

The photos show the dark-colored serpent stretched across a rocky shoreline, with its jaws seemingly impossibly widened around the trout, whose body appears dramatically thicker than the snake’s head.

But getting the supersized meal down was apparently no easy feat.

“Over the course of an hour, we watched as he struggled with half the fish in his mouth, retreating and repositioning a couple times,” Woods wrote.

The group eventually left the determined diner alone and headed off to lunch themselves. When they returned, “he had the whole fish in his body and slithered away.”

Even a woman who ran the campground was stunned by the spectacle, telling the campers “she had never seen anything like this, or even a fish this big in that area.”

Garter snakes are skilled swimmers and active hunters, and can pursue prey underwater, according to the University of Nevada, Reno. Their diets can include rodents, birds, amphibians, invertebrates and fish. 

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