Python wars: the snake epidemic eating away at Florida

[nitpicker]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/22/florida-python-action-team-snake-epidemic

Python wars: the snake epidemic eating away at Florida

Lance Richardson

Thu 22 Aug 2019 06.00 BST

(snip)
Burmese pythons have no natural predators here. They do, however, have an uncanny ability to swallow things significantly larger than their own heads. Able to grow to more than 20ft in length, these stealthy invaders ambush their prey, squeeze until the prey stops breathing and then split their jaw apart to take the prey whole. They can inflict a nasty wound on humans – when Van Gorder was bitten, it took five months for one of the broken teeth to work its way out – but the chances of anything more serious happening are slim (though not impossible). Masters of camouflage, they can slide by an eagle-eyed biologist in just a few inches of water, and they can cover huge distances. One was recently discovered coiled up on a floating crab pot more than 15 miles out to sea.

It’s estimated that there are tens of thousands of pythons now living in the Florida wild. A 2012 study in the Everglades suggested that a disturbing number of mammals have been swallowed by the invasive species: a spike in python sightings since 2000 coincided with a more than 90% reduction in raccoons, opossums and rabbits.

But it’s not just the smaller, soft animals who have been attacked. In December 2016, a YouTube video showed a Burmese python in Big Cypress National Preserve, next to the Everglades, strangling an alligator. This viral video led the executive director of the South Florida Water Management District, who was horrified by what he saw, to create the district’s own Python Elimination Program, in 2017. “He said he wanted to put 25 outdoorsmen with guns out in the field,” recalls Mike Kirkland, an invasive animal biologist who was charged with assembling the original team.

Damage done by the pythons to south Florida ecosystems has become so acute in recent years that the quest to stop has turned into a collective crusade. Wildlife biologists, government agencies, zoos and universities are deploying a full arsenal of responses, from telemetry tracking to early research into pheromone manipulation.

In addition, the FWC and the South Florida Water Management District each created independent python removal squads in 2017 of hardy, civic-minded individuals who are skilled at capturing the nonnative constrictors. These individuals must be over 18, and they must pass a stringent vetting process. Once licensed as professionals, they are charged with removing pythons from a patchwork quilt of district, state and federal lands that also, in the case of the Python Action Team, includes Everglades national park, which is off-limits to non-Patric hunters. The issue is also on the minds of ordinary citizens who haven’t been officially tasked with stalking the species. When I mentioned the pythons in passing to a well-known Florida author, he emailed back a photo of himself holding up one he’d recently shot. “Them damn pythons,” he wrote.
(snip)

There are many unknowns when it comes to Burmese pythons in south Florida. The earliest recorded sighting was on the edge of Everglades national park in 1979, but nobody knows for sure how one became many. A popular (but possibly apocryphal) theory is that hundreds of them escaped from a breeding facility flattened in 1992’s Hurricane Andrew. Another theory, more widely accepted, is that the blame rests largely with irresponsible pet owners.

According to federal importation data, more than 99,000 Burmese pythons, which are native to south-east Asia, were brought into the US between 1999 and 2006 alone. Due to Florida’s amenable climate, obliging private ownership laws, and lax biosecurity, some of those became pets. Four different biologists I spoke with say that owners may have set their pythons free either in or around the Everglades when their endearing 12in hatchlings grew to several feet long and became unmanageable. A list of reptile and amphibian imports into Florida since 1863 shows that “pet trade” is responsible for more than 85% of introductions into the Florida environment, most of them occurring during the past six decades. Recognizing the link, the FWC made it illegal to have Burmese pythons as pets in Florida in 2010.

Much of what is known about the python invasion is due to efforts by the Conservancy of Southwest Florida and its collaborators – what Ian Bartoszek, the conservancy’s research manager, calls “six years of hard work of staying on the tail of these animals”.
(snip)

In April 2015, Bartoszek and other conservancy biologists, along with land managers from Collier-Seminole state park, came across a female with an unusually distended middle. After moving the python, it started to regurgitate a white-tailed deer. The deer – a fawn – turned out to be 111% of the python’s own body weight, and it would have been even more had part of it not been already digested.

If left unchecked, the impact of such gorging will be silence. Native mammals are already being overwhelmed, either eaten or (like the Florida panther, which hunts deer) outcompeted for food. Pythons have been found to feed on at least 43 species of bird, too, including the magnificent frigatebird, which is an alarming achievement. (“It soars!” Bartoszek says.) What will remain – what already remains, in some areas – is a landscape empty of virtually every animal except fish, rats, a few amphibians and more snakes.
(snip)

[hlthe2b]

1. Does anyone remember Congress trying to outlaw import and sale of some of these species?

About a decade ago. Republicans coerced by the pet industry lobby (of course) blocked it.

[Ilsa]

2. This is an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen.

It's every bit as important as releasing toxic chemicals into a river, or other environmental disaster.

[bronxiteforever]

3. +1

[Duppers]

4. Just put a price on their heads

Offer a decent amt of an reward per python and let the regular hunters do their thing. There'd be thousands of bubbas out in the Glades, saving other wildlife.