Burmese Pythons Wreak Havoc In Everglades

Animal Detectives Probe Exotic Snakes' Harmful Effect On Native Species

(AP) 
Which brings to Oberhofer's mind a story about Guam, where she once worked with other biologists.

"Two exotic species were introduced there," she says, "the brown-tree snake and a little lizard that the snake liked to eat. Well, the lizards multiplied like crazy, which meant that the brown-tree snake had so much to eat it proliferated" — and consumed many other species.

Today, Guam's forests have gone silent, she says. "The brown-tree snakes ate the native birds and bats to extinction. Those birds are found only in zoos now."

One recent afternoon, Snow took a visitor into a field of chest-high cane grass to check on his latest invention: a 2-by-4-foot, steel-mesh trap fashioned especially for pythons. The trap had wide, PVC tubes on both ends (entrances for the big snake) and a cage within the cage holding a rat — python bait.

But there was no python.

"It hasn't worked very well. We haven't caught any pythons with it yet — just small, native snakes." Snow adjusts his cap, frowns, then gazes across the field, still but for a lazy breeze rustling the high grass. The stillness doesn't fool Snow.

"I've walked right by pythons and not even known they were right next to me," he says. "Most times, you can't see the enemy until you stumble across it."

Crunching his way back to the off-roader, eyes darting this way and that, he described tactics to control pythons. One idea, recommended by snake management experts, has produced results: implanting captured pythons with radio transmitters and releasing them into the wild to track their movements, habitat use and breeding patterns — and to betray the locations of other pythons.

"It's all based on the Judas concept," Snow said, noting that four "tagged" pythons had led to the capture of 12 others through October and that three more pythons with transmitters have since been released.

Snow suspects that female pythons lay down trails of chemical scent "cues" for suitors. If scientists could develop synthetic cues, he says, the chemicals might be used to draw pythons into one of his traps.

By Snow's count, 154 pythons have been removed in and around the Everglades through the first 11 months of this year, up markedly from the 95 caught in all of 2005, 70 in 2004, and 23 in 2003.

Does it mean pythons are multiplying at a faster rate? Or is it that the python detectives are just more effective at nabbing them?

Snow won't say — and he'd rather not hazard a guess at how many pythons are living, or breeding, in the Everglades.

Most of the caught pythons are euthanized because of the threat they pose to at-risk native species such as the mangrove fox squirrel, the wood stork and the endangered Key Largo wood rat. Pythons may also be competing for space with the threatened Eastern indigo snake.

And so, the python detectives muck about limy marshes and brackish ponds by day and cruise the main park road after sundown.

On a recent nocturnal patrol, Snow is crawling along Route 9336 near Nine Mile Pond, the off-roader's headlights catching the occasional heron or white ibis, when, suddenly, he hits the brakes, grabs his 4-foot "snake tongs" and hops out into a gathering of flies.

On the blacktop, in a cone of light thrown by Snow's headlamp, lies a rattlesnake, a four-footer. It doesn't budge.

"Ah," Snow grunts, lifting the rattler with the tongs and slinging it off into the bush. "Road kill."

Vehicles strike pythons sometimes, too, but bodies are rarely found. Do they survive? Do they go so deep undercover that scavengers don't find them? "Just another thing we don't know about the enemy," Snow says.

He trains his gaze to the west, looking for something other than the spiked grass silhouetted against a moonlit sky. Pythons need not be seen to make this landscape creepy.

The creepiness comes with knowing they are out there, somewhere.

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.