Womas have an orange head with a gray, olive, golden-brown, or light tan body with darker bands across their skin. Their belly is cream to yellow in color.

Womas lack the heat-sensitive pits that other pythons have to locate prey.

Womas are noctural (active at night) and spend the daytime sheltered in hollow logs, abandoned burrows, or thick vegetation. They use their flat head like shovels to enlarge their burrows.

Womas lure in their prey by wiggling the end of their tail to entice the prey to go after it. They kill their prey by constriction. They may also seek small prey in burrows. When they do that, a burrow is usually too small for a woma to be able to coil around its prey; the woma kills the prey by crushing it against the burrow wall. Adult womas bear scars from the resistance of their prey in burrows because the prey is not killed as quickly as by constriction with coils.