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It was 2.30 am when Lea-Ann Mears suddenly woke to the feeling of a 4-metre-long scrub python sinking its teeth into her posterior.

Mears knew the python was near her home 鈥� in fact, reptile biologist Daniel Natusch had called the previous day to warn her to lock doors and close windows. Natusch, based at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, had been tracking the snake 鈥� which had been implanted with a radiotelemetry device 鈥� for the previous five weeks as part of a study to understand more about the python鈥檚 use of land.

鈥淭hey could very easily kill and eat the children,鈥� says Natusch. 鈥淪o I said, 鈥楲ook, it鈥檚 never going to happen, but lock the kids鈥� doors and windows at night.鈥欌�� Mears had a toddler and a 3-year-old in the house.

Mears did lock her children鈥檚 bedroom, but she didn鈥檛 take Natusch鈥檚 warning too seriously. In fact, because the weather in northern Queensland is uncomfortably warm even at night, she left the front door of her home open to let in a draught before retiring for the night.

Unfortunately for her, the move didn鈥檛 facilitate a comfortable slumber. After the snake attacked, she managed to turn on the light. 鈥淭he snake was still latched onto my butt,鈥� she says. 鈥淚 had to reach down and put my hand in its mouth and yank its teeth through the flesh to get it off.鈥�

Blood was everywhere, from her hand in the snake鈥檚 mouth as well as from her bottom. But with a good grip on the reptile, she ran to her kitchen, dumping the python inside and locking the door. Natusch arrived quickly and watched the house while Mears went to the hospital to deal with what turned out to be minor injuries. Natusch then took the snake 100 metres up the road and let it free the next morning.

In a paper published recently, Natusch and his colleagues note that the incident is curious because it brings up a larger question of why a 5-kilogram snake would even attempt to eat a 64-kilogram woman it could never hope to swallow.

He tracked down a few more examples of this happening through news clippings. His own research revealed scrub pythons trying to ingest prey with a body mass up to nine times larger than their own. In three of those incidents, the effort ended up killing the snake, though it wasn鈥檛 always clear exactly why death occurred.

Natusch suspects that the pythons target such large prey partly due to the harsh nature of their environment. Scrub pythons can endure months or even years without a meal, but that doesn鈥檛 mean they always survive. At night in the dark, this particular snake may have just seen an exposed leg and underestimated the size of its prey 鈥� 鈥淏iting off more than you can chew鈥�, as the paper is titled.

Or it may just be a question of desperation. The same snake came back 10 months later in January 2015 and tried to eat one of Mears鈥檚 dogs 鈥� a 25-kilogram Catahoula leopard dog. It was in the process of strangling the dog when Mears freed her pet.

鈥淢y theory is it鈥檚 a bloody tough life out there in the bush,鈥� says Natusch. 鈥淭hese snakes need to take chances.鈥�