Preventing the spread of these animals is an enormously challenging undertaking. I have no idea how it can be done. These animals are excellent swimmers and travel extensively through marsh, swamps and river valleys.
They also travel by land and are great climbers with prehensile tails. Reducing the population of pythons decreases the competition for remaining food resources.
As a result, the pythons that do remain become healthier, stronger and more fertile. And in the end, the population continues to grow at high rates. Yep, decreasing the population in the short-term will actually cause it to spike in the long-term.
More questions remain: Is Florida going to dam every lake and stream to prevent their movement? How do you possibly prevent the spread of these animals along the coast? The brutal reality is that preventing the spread of these animals appears impossible. Deciding to address this problem through this approach is tacit resignation.
Resignation that these pythons will inevitably decimate all of the native wildlife in the Everglades and every new ecosystem they encounter. Those rural communities where the pythons spread will face an alarming public health debacle. I wish I were writing a script for a movie, but unfortunately this blog represents reality.
Florida authorities are operating under the assumption that the problem is so bad that it is fundamentally unsolvable. The only solution here is containing the population and preventing their spread. I would challenge that assumption. As per the above arguments, containing the snake population is an extraordinarily difficult undertaking.
It might be impossible. To my knowledge, Florida has not created any effective model, or even offered a hypothetical scenario, in which the movement of these animals can be effectively controlled. Even deeper, containment is fundamentally flawed since a slight decrease in the population will only cause it to spike in the long-term.
The only way to truly solve the problem is to remove every last python from this ecosystem. Due to the obvious security risks and financial costs of transporting thousands of large carnivorous snakes halfway across the planet, removal naturally means killing every last snake.
It's worth quickly noting the snakes themselves did nothing wrong here; when they are hungry, they eat. This problem is entirely human-generated. No reliable alternatives exist besides removal. And the urgency here just grows over time. As the snakes spread along the southeastern coast, I suspect this problem will expand beyond Florida in no time. Florida authorities should get creative in thinking through possible solutions. Think outside the box.
If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can use technology towards achieving meaningful gains at wiping out breeding reptiles. Put together a team of top snake biologists, ecological scientists and extermination experts. Entertain ways to attract the animals through crafting the right smell. Discover their favorite foods and recreate this scent on a large scale.
Attract males through recreating the scent of a breeding female. See if a similar tactic might work for what drives female attraction. Experiment with ways of making the animals infertile.
A reasonable counterargument might be as follows: if you don't believe the snakes could be contained, how could they possibly all be killed. And I would fully acknowledge that both goals would be extraordinarily hard to accomplish. But, at the same time, I think gearing energy, money and resources towards removal, as opposed to containment, makes infinitely more sense.
As per the above arguments, containment is both fundamentally flawed and impossible to achieve. But a goal of removal relies on different tactics with an alternate set of questions: How do we attract the animals to specific locations where they are then swiftly killed? How do we attract females? How can we make the animals infertile?
Do females tend to congregate or breed in specific locations? Energy, resources and money geared towards these questions will be the most effective approach at restoring what remains of the Everglades. But on behalf of all the people who will inevitably be living near these animals and all of the native species devastated, we should at least try. They deserve a shot. Tens of thousands of invasive Burmese pythons are estimated to be present in the Everglades. Apply Filter.
Where are Burmese pythons or other large constrictors distributed in Florida? The Burmese python is now distributed across more than a thousand square miles of southern Florida, including all of Everglades National Park and areas to the north including Big Cypress National Preserve and Collier-Seminole State Forest. A number of Burmese pythons have been found in the Florida Keys, but there is not yet confirmation of a How many Burmese pythons inhabit southern Florida?
What should I do if I see a python in the wild? If you see a python in the wild — or suspect that a snake is a python or an invasive snake — you should take the same precautions for these constrictor snakes as one would take for alligators: avoid interacting with or getting close to them. If you are in Everglades National Park, you can report a python sighting to a park ranger. You can also How have invasive pythons impacted Florida ecosystems?
Non-native Burmese pythons have established a breeding population in South Florida and are one of the most concerning invasive species in Everglades National Park. Pythons compete with native wildlife for food, which includes mammals, birds, and other reptiles.
Severe mammal declines in Everglades National Park have been linked to Burmese pythons Are large constrictor snakes such as Burmese pythons able to kill people? What is the risk?
Would this be in the wild, or in backyards? Human fatalities from non-venomous snakes are very rare, probably averaging one or two per year worldwide. All known constrictor-snake fatalities in the United States are from captive snakes; these are split between deaths of snake owners who were purposefully interacting with their pet and deaths of small children or infants in homes where a It was during that storm that a python breeding facility was destroyed, releasing countless snakes into the nearby swamps.
Today, authorities have no idea how many pythons occupy the area, in large part because they Everglades—in their vast inaccessibility—are so hard to conduct surveys in. And the mottled brown snakes blend well into the scrubby environment. While only in South Florida for an ecological blink of the eye, the Burmese python has already devastated the mammal population of the Everglades, severely threatening its biodiversity. Another study, which fitted rabbits with radio transmitters and released them into the Everglades, found that 77 percent of those who died within the year met their fate at the deathly squeeze of the invasive serpent.
There was nothing to keep them from doing very well. In , the state made python pet ownership illegal. For orientation, they first showed me satellite images of the region on a computer screen: urban and suburban development here, corporate vegetable farms there, and wild Everglades country extending southward and eastward almost everywhere else, all of it cupped by the dark blue semicircle of the ocean. The team tracks 23 of these pythons, each signaling at its own radio frequency.
Dots on the satellite map indicated where each snake had been heard from last. Burmese pythons breed between December and March, with February the height of the season. Removing the females with their eggs—sometimes as many as 60 or even plus eggs per female—is the population-controlling goal. The nonsentinel males are culled, too or kept and made into sentinels. We parked on a gravel road and plunged into unstable grassy tufts and chest-high forests of saw palmetto whose big, open-handed leaves sounded like cardboard scraping as we pushed through.
Bartoszek held up a radio antenna shaped like a horizontal football goal post and listened for beeps. Each sentinel snake has been given a name.
Then he heard other beeps. The beeps led us into sinkhole country, where we waded up to our pants pockets in swamp water, pulling our booted feet out of gripping muck. Abundant common reeds, which narrow to an eye-poking point at their tip, are similarly unhelpful. The vines dangled and ripped at us. Bartoszek chopped at them with his machete. The beeps coming from Kirkland got so loud that we had to be right on top of him, Bartoszek said.
He went ahead by inches, bent over and scanning the swampy, brushy ground. Another few steps and we would have brushed right under him. I moved closer to the snake. In the confusion of leaves and branches, sunlight and shadow, I could hardly make him out. Slowly I approached his head. He did not spook but stayed still. A tiny motion: The tongue flicked out. When the tongue is withdrawn, it touches a sensory node on the roof of the mouth that analyzes the information.
Its prominent nostrils resemble retractable headlights; heat-sensing receptors below them enable it to key in on the body temperatures of its mostly warmblooded prey. The small, beadlike eyes were watching, steadily. No female could be found, nor could Malcolm, the other sentinel nearby. The team agreed that both he and the female had probably gone underwater.
So, leaving Kirkland in the tree, we bushwhacked back out. The half-mile we covered, round-trip, took about an hour and a half.
It felt strange to be back so suddenly in Naples traffic on vast expanses of pavement filled with cars. We battled into the bush to find some of them. Quatro had buried himself in a mass of para grass right next to a housing development and a golf course. The para grass was so thick you could stand on it as if on a mattress.
Following the beeps, the scientists parted dense greenery, layer after layer, until they saw the shiny, patterned hide of the huge animal coiled below. Ian Easterling spotted him, having been fooled by this snake before. Suddenly a hair-raising rattling came from an Eastern diamondback rattlesnake on the ground a few feet away. Katie King, whose specialty is rattlesnakes, reacted ecstatically.
She had sheltered in a nearby gopher tortoise burrow. Bartoszek put a flexible tube with a camera at its end down the burrow to see if any other snakes were with her. The large, coiled-up snake was alone and stared into the lens, irate. It included a foot-long female and six males. The snakes cross boundary lines, so Bartoszek and company do, too. Tracking Stan Lee, a sentinel who had recently wandered into a farm, Bartoszek got a cheerful wave-through from a farm supervisor. The snake had last been spotted on the other side of a field of farm equipment.
In all likelihood, he had found his way through that field during the last 24 hours, winding among harvesters, gang plows and fertilizer sprayers. Not so with sentinel snakes, who are left to identify more targets.
The other pythons out there never seem to suspect. Then the snakes go into a freezer for future study. Later they are incinerated so that nothing ingests the euthanizing chemicals.
One morning Bartoszek invited me to a necropsy of a python the team had captured three weeks before. The snake, a foot, pound female, was in the final thawing stage, piled in coils in and around a metal sink.
And we caught all of them within 55 square miles around Naples. The Everglades ecosystem is about 5, square miles.
Easterling and King stretched the python belly-up on the long, marble-topped dissection table. If nothing were done about these pythons, they could eventually convert our entire wildlife biomass into one giant snake.
He showed me the tongue, a tiny strand of tissue that hardly looked substantial enough to possess such sensitivity.
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