OMG LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THIS FREAKING SNAKE! (UPDATED)

As you may have heard, the Mississippi River is more swollen than it’s been in decades and, in an effort to prevent the flooding of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, the Army Corps of Engineers has opened a couple of floodgates diverting a lot of the Mississippi’s excess water into rural Louisiana. And since rural South Louisiana is quite swampy and thus, shall we say, fertile ground for wild critters, local officials have been warning residents to be hyper-aware of their surroundings, as the aforementioned wild critters — snakes, alligators, deer, etc. — suddenly faced with the flooding of their habitats as well, would likely seek higher and drier ground in order to survive. And now it appears as though we’ve had the first sighting of something crawling out of the swamp that is positively freakish.

The pic above was submitted by a reader to Baton Rouge’s WAFB.com with the following rather bland description: “Driving along the highway near the Morganza spillway and this was spotted.” “This?” “THIS?!?!” That’s all this person could muster was “this?” Were I the one to submit it, the photo’s description would have been something more like this: “HOLY CRAP LOOK AT THIS POSITIVELY PREHISTORIC-LOOKING SNAKE/SERPENT THING!!! IT’S THE GOSH DARN LOCH NESS MONSTER, THAT’S WHAT IT IS!!!”

I should note that I grew up in rural swampy Louisiana, but it’s been a while since I ventured back out there. Obviously. Still, in all the time I spent running around the backwoods as a Cajun youth, I don’t ever recall seeing anything remotely resembling this. It looks like a damn anaconda and, last I checked, those aren’t that common round these parts, so honestly I have no idea what the heck it is.

UPDATE: Someone wrote in alerting me to the fact that the photo of this “thing” was posted to Reddit a few days ago, with the poster claiming that it was found in Australia, meaning that whoever posted it to WAFB.com last night is a dastardly trickster (Damn you to hell, Internet!). So y’all can breathe easy now, I guess. Though as my friend Holly noted on Twitter, “WELL IT CAN OBVIOUSLY SWIM, SO I WOULDN’T GET TOO COMFY!”

(via)