Bobcat fights a Python, steals its eggs. (Not my headline.)

(ATTN: Just like 99.99% of video headlines on the internet, you don’t actually see the bobcat fight the python … you see several close interactions and quite a few photos. There are several photos of the bobcat and a opossum scavenging the nest for eggs when the python has left. What pisses me off about this article is that the researchers set up cameras on the nest of a invasive python, knowing those eggs were eventually gonna hatch and that would be another batch of pythons loose in Florida. Why didn’t they collect and destroy them?)
Anyway …
This camera was deployed June 2021.
Researchers who documented this encounter in the Big Cypress National Preserve say it’s the first time they’ve seen a native predator tangling with a python in the wild.
Burmese pythons are at the very top of Florida’s “Most Unwanted” list. There are now 500 or so invasive species living in the Sunshine State, but none of these are as harmful as pythons. One the biggest problem with pythons, from a wildlife management standpoint, is that they have no natural predators. Wildlife biologists have never actually documented a native predator taking on a Burmese python in the wild. Until now.
In a study that was published in Ecology and Evolution last month, researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey captured photographs and videos of a bobcat tangling with a 120-pound female python that was defending her nest. The footage from Big Cypress shows that after the initial face-off between the bobcat and the snake, the cat returned to the nest to feast on its eggs.
Excerpt:
“The male bobcat was first caught on camera at the unguarded python nest on June 1, the same day the camera was deployed. Over the next couple days, the cat was photographed “repeatedly approaching the unguarded nest and consuming, trampling, caching, and uncovering the eggs.” And on June 4, the interspecies standoff finally turned into a brawl. The photo sequence shows the python striking at the bobcat before the cat takes a swipe at the snake.
Researchers went out to the site later that day and took note of the damaged nest.* Weeks later, on June 15, they returned to find the python brooding the nest, and they documented 42 destroyed eggs along with 22 damaged but “potentially viable” eggs, which they took to the lab for further testing.** They left the camera in place, however, and were able to capture more photos of the cat, which returned over the next several weeks to scavenge and destroy the eggs that were left behind.***
This was an important and encouraging discovery for the research team. Mainly because it shows that after all the damage that pythons have done (and continue to do) in America’s last remaining subtropical wilderness, its native inhabitants are learning to fight back.”****

They had at least 3 opportunities to get rid of at least 1 batch of eggs and a breeding female …
*Why didn’t they destroy the eggs?
**Why didn’t they destroy the python and the eggs?
***Why were any eggs left behind? Why weren’t they all destroyed?
****If they had taken a perfect opportunity they would have removed at least one real threat to “America’s last remaining subtropical wilderness,”

https://www.outdoorlife.com/conservation/bobcat-fights-python-everglades/