South Florida's killer pythons capture U.S. attention

[babylonsister]

South Florida's killer pythons capture U.S. attention

Sen. Bill Nelson told a congressional panel that the Burmese python, a killer pet thriving in the Everglades, tops a long list of invasive species spreading across the country.


BY CURTIS MORGAN
[e-mail]


From Chinese mitten crabs in Chesapeake Bay to the Coqui tree frog in Hawaii, exotic creatures have overrun America from sea to shining sea.

But no state faces a bigger, scarier threat than Florida -- a point made abundantly clear during a Senate hearing Wednesday on the nation's losing battle to slow the spread of invasive species.

Florida Sen. Bill Nelson delivered a vivid show-and-tell to lawmakers, unrolling the skin of a Burmese python killed in Everglades National Park, all 17 feet of it. Then he explained in graphic detail how a pet python half that size strangled a toddler in her crib last week in a town northwest of Orlando.

''It's just a matter of time before one of these snakes gets to a visitor in the Florida Everglades,'' Nelson told a Senate panel examining an invasive surge that poses increasingly expensive threats to native wildlife, crops, livestock and people.

Gregory Ruiz, a senior scientist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, estimated that exotics already have cost the United States $100 billion a year. He called current efforts to control and eradicate exotic creatures ''a patchwork'' in need of a major overhaul. It was a view echoed repeatedly during the two-hour hearing in Washington, D.C.

more...

http://www.miamiherald.com/457/story/1133628.html

[AnneD]

1. Illegal immigration....

it's not just for humans anymore.

[Botany]

2. Al Gore was on invasive species 20 years ago.

Snakes might be easier to control w/ the use of pheromones to "bring 'em in."

The control of invasive species is key to ecological restoration.

[hootinholler]

3. K&R

[pscot]

4. Muslim terraists with pythons

Call homeland security.

[doodadem]

5. I have a hard time believing

that sneak attacks from killer pythons are a threat to national security.

[one_true_leroy]

6. No, but the very endangered Everglade Panthers are at their mercy.

Besides head-to-head competition for resources (the panthers, alligators, and now pythons are the apex predators of the region), the pythons are a serious threat to any cubs, and there are tens of thousands of the pythons and only dozens of cubs. Besides that, they threaten any nesting and feeding birds, some of which arrive at the Everglades either just before or after their (depending on season and route) trip over the Gulf. If they can't eat in peace due to predators, they will perish over the ocean.

[queenjane]

7. Can we feed the idiots who released them TO the pythons?? (nfm)

[misanthrope]

8. Non-captive pythons in Florida should be eradicated on sight...

...and an effort should be made to rid the area of them.