Burmese Pythons Wreak Havoc In Everglades

Animal Detectives Probe Exotic Snakes' Harmful Effect On Native Species

(AP) 
A decade ago, Snow and Oberhofer spent their days reintroducing rare, native birds to the pinelands and monitoring "indicator" species, such as wading birds, alligators, bald eagles, panthers. Then, in the late '90s, pythons began turning up.

Pet owners were releasing their giant, unwanted snakes in and around the park. But convincing the public that pythons are a danger to this otherworldly mosaic of marshes, sloughs, marl prairies and shadowy hammocks was, and still is, a tough sell.

Perhaps that is because of the Everglades' primeval nature. Truly — where else in North America can the visitor find crocodiles, manatees and rainbow-colored tree snails, roseate spoonbills and ghost orchids, towering royal palms and gumbo limbos? Here, biblical clouds of mosquitoes can turn a white off-road vehicle black within seconds. Water lilies can perfume the air for miles.

At night, the beam of a lamp through a marsh often catches the eerie, ruby shine of a lurking alligator's eyes.

Yet, as vast and threatening as these wetlands may appear, they have been so drained and abused by humans in the last century that a population of pythons, if left unchallenged, could take down this fragile web of life within a generation.

"It's a now-or-never thing," Oberhofer says. "We still have a chance, with the python's numbers being so limited, to do something. But if we let this go, we don't know how far the pythons will migrate, how much they will reproduce."

One thing is certain, Snow says. "They'll eat just about everything that's warm-blooded."

Three years ago, a party of bird-watchers walking along the eastern Everglades' Anhinga Trail stumbled upon a death match of super predators — python versus alligator. The gator, it appeared, had the upper hand: Its jaws, capable of a bite pressure of more than 3,000 pounds per square inch, were clenched on the snake, and for hours the gator carried its prey about, waiting for the python to go limp.

But it didn't; after nearly 30 hours the python wriggled free of the alligator's jaws and swam off into the high grass. "We looked for buzzards feeding on a snake carcass," Snow recalls, "but we never found any."

That a python could survive a gator attack was a red flag, and it was soon followed by others.

In February 2004, tourists at the Pa-hay-okee Overlook watched, stunned, as a python wrapped itself around an alligator, which countered by rolling over and grabbing the snake in its mouth and swimming off. And then, last fall, the carcasses of a 13-foot python and a 6-foot gator that had squared off were found later floating in a marsh, the gator's tail and hind legs protruding from the split-open gut of the python.

"Sometimes," says Snow, "pythons swallow things they shouldn't."

The Burmese python, one of the six biggest snakes, does not possess fangs and is not venomous. Rather, it is a sit-and-wait ambush hunter of the first order. Typically, it bites prey with six rows of needle-sharp, back-curving teeth, which dig deeper when its target tries to pull away. It then coils itself around its victim, squeezes the life out of it, and swallows it whole. Its stomach acids quickly dissolve even bone, Snow says.

In the wild, pythons often reach 20 feet in length, weigh more than 200 pounds, and grow strong enough to overpower a grown man. Hinged jaws, in fact, enable the snake to open its mouth wide enough to accommodate humans.

"Once they reach 8 to 9 feet in size," Snow says, "you don't want to be alone with a python."

Native to Southeast Asia, the Burmese python — Python molurus bivittatus — has come to the Everglades by way of the burgeoning, global trade in exotic pets, creatures of many kinds shipped to America legally and distributed through pet shops and flea markets. Today, Americans may own 22 of the 24 python species that exist.

Since 2000, slightly more than 1 million pythons have been imported by the United States for commercial sale; nearly half are shipped to Miami, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service says.

Python hatchlings, which can cost as little as $20 at a flea market, tickle armchair herpetologists. "They're so darling when they're tiny," Oberhofer says. "Later, the big attraction at home is being able to watch your python kill something — like a rat — and gobble it whole in its tank."

Soon, however, the python gets bigger than the kids. (Pythons, fed a steady diet of mice, squirrels and rabbits, grow 6 to 8 feet, or bigger, within a year.) When this happens, owners try to sell or give away their pets but cannot find them new homes. Unwilling to euthanize their beloveds, many release pythons into the wild, unaware of the ecological havoc they may bring.

many years ago I had a Black Pacu which is a member of the piranha family and are vegetarian, he grew to big to keep in a 20 gallon tank and tried to give him away, at the time there were stores that sold this type of fish and did not want it, so I took it down to one of our local lakes, and setup a large screened in fence and there he grew to over 30 inches, one afternoon while feeding him he got over the fence, I never saw again until a child caught him on his line, he was over 40 inches, I sure I hope he did not eat him

[alphaa10-2009]

This is an outstanding example of how humans destroy an ecosystem by thoughtless release of pets and other "toys" they find suddenly inconvenient. Since evolutionary adaptation for survival seems glacial in pace, nature and natural balances can be disrupted severely with such rapid human interventions.

The pity is the most glacial change of all is a sense of growing responsibility for what happens in our own environmental backyards.