Fish and Wildlife Service requested help in keeping more pythons, which are powerful swimmers, from reaching and colonizing Key Largo. Concerted efforts led by Drs. Reed and Rodda, Dr. Both areas are on the undeveloped north end of the island.
The goal of this effort is to intercept and eradicate snakes as they arrive on Key Largo, as well as to prevent colonization of the Lower Keys. Each trap is checked daily. In September , a Burmese python was captured in one of the traps, and several pythons have been found on the developed part of the island. The traps will continue to be used in conjunction with a mainland trap trial described below. Meanwhile, vigorous education and outreach efforts see below are being employed throughout Key Largo to build public awareness and capitalize on opportunities to report and remove observed snakes.
Areas of the continental United States with climate matching that of the pythons' native range in Asia. FORT scientists also are conducting trap trials on the mainland of Florida. Sixty traps have been set in areas known to support high densities of Burmese pythons, primarily on land owned by the South Florida Water Management District.
Investigators are testing whether the traps work, which entrance designs are superior, and which sites are best for trapping. As a team, the research partners are also conducting ecological studies on pythons to better understand their biological requirements and behaviors in their new environment.
Fort Collins-based USGS scientists are advising on experimental design and helping agencies with how to use the research results to inform management decisions. Through cross-agency cooperation and working with private businesses and organizations, FORT scientists and their partners are helping to train people who cover a lot of ground during the course of their workday.
Delivery company drivers, meter readers, firefighters and law enforcement officers, and other government and private personnel are learning how to recognize and report these snakes to appropriate agencies. Rozar and others and consults on rapid-response efforts. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission sponsors free " Amnesty Days " at zoos around the state for people to turn in unwanted nonnative pets, such as snakes that have grown too large to care for, rather than releasing them into the wild.
Training continues on a regular basis, and several television science programs have filmed the USGS invasive snake work. Florida is not the only site in the continental United States threatened by invasive snakes. As a generalist predator, water snakes, like the constrictors, represent a potential threat to small prey species of conservation concern, and may compete with native endangered species such as the giant gartersnake Thamnophis gigas. They pose no known risk to humans, although they bite readily when handled.
FORT scientists are helping Federal and State partners to assess the scale of this problem and attempt control efforts, including a trial eradication program in southern California led by Dr. USGS research on snake ecology, control, and containment underway in Guam, Florida, and California will increase the likelihood of developing effective, targeted strategies—including prevention and control tools, rapid-response teams, and ecological forecasting—for land and resource managers as well as policymakers as they work to conserve U.
Krysko, K. Enge, L. Oberhofer, A. Warren-Bradley, and L. Introduced populations of Boa constrictor Boidae and Python molurus bivitattus Pythonidae in southern Florida. Pages — in R. Henderson and R. 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. State and federal agencies are also upping the ante by hosting occasional competitive "python challenges," complete with cash prizes. Feeney says the elimination program has removed almost 4, pythons from the wild, likely a small fraction of the estimated number of pythons still lurking the Everglades.
But he has some cause for optimism since half those snakes have been females—which are capable of laying eggs per year. The agency is also exploring more aggressive tactics, from canine detection to genetic warfare, which involves editing the genomes of snakes that are then released into the wild.
About three-quarters of the way toward the tail, on either side of the cloaca the single opening for the intestinal, urinary and genital tracts , pythons have small vestigial appendages called spurs. The spurs of males are longer than those of females and provide a quick means of identifying the sex.
Easterling made a rectangular cut in the muscle and removed a small section to send for analysis of its mercury content. Like other apex predators, pythons accumulate toxins in their tissues from what they eat, and a sample can suggest the level of mercury contamination in the environment. He also swabbed the skin to take samples that would be sent to a lab working on experiments with pheromones as lures for monitoring and trapping pythons. Then he removed the eggs, which were about the size of chicken eggs, and leathery.
There were 43 of them. Most important, Easterling checked the contents of the digestive tract; he found nothing. Pythons can go for up to a year without eating. Bartoszek brought out a plastic container of hoof cores from white-tailed deer he had found in pythons.
Now that the snakes have devastated the population of smaller mammals, they appear to be moving to larger ones. On his computer he called up pictures he had taken last year of a python in the process of swallowing a fawn. We believe this is the largest prey-to-Burmese python ratio ever recorded.
On an extra-large computer screen overlooking the lab, Bartoszek showed me data points by the hundreds: the current locations of all the sentinel snakes, the sex-seeking routes they had taken during the past weeks, the places where the team had recently captured females, the captures by month during the previous year, the first capture the team ever made, the farthest distance a sentinel is known to have traveled—and more. I left Naples and drove eastward across the Everglades.
Traffic thronged on Highway 41, the Tamiami Trail. In the rest of South Florida, the money for python removal is public or tribal , the number of staff is greater and the emphasis is more on the human factor. Since March , its contract hunters have removed more than 2, pythons, or more than two and a half miles and 12 tons of snake. Kirkland, the person, is another dark-haired, compact, intense combat officer in the python wars. He has one degree in biology and another in environmental policy.
The skin of a foot, 3-inch python that he caught himself extends across his office wall. Back in and again in , the state ran a program called the Python Challenge, which channeled an expressed public wish to help catch pythons. The challenge dispatched hunters into the Everglades by the hundreds—1, in , 1, in —over a period of several weeks to see what they could do, but the results were disappointing. After that, the district announced it was taking applications to fill 25 full-time paid positions for python hunters.
It received 1, applications in four days. Applicants had to show a proven record of success. We give our hunters master keys to the levee gates.
There are hundreds of miles of levee roads they can drive. Snakes like to come up on the levees and bask. The hunters cruise slowly and look for them out the windows, and get cricks in their necks from it. Of course, sometimes most of their pay goes for gas money. The hunters kill the snakes with shotguns or pistols, or with bolt guns, devices used in slaughterhouses. Often they keep the skins, which can be sold; the rest they leave for scavengers.
Working with other agencies and organizations, the district intends to use every method of catching pythons, including heat-sensor drones, pheromone traps, sentinel snakes and snake-hunting dogs. For now, the district will rely on human eyes and hands. The casino and its attached hotel sit in the marsh at the western edge of greater Miami, where development ends. Beyond the casino to the northwest is nothing but Everglades. Her long, wavy blond hair went almost to her waist.
She drove west on Highway 41, turned off it, went around some hydraulic infrastructure by a canal and opened a levee gate. Donna has caught more than pythons. Before we started she showed me what to look for.
Taking off her python-skin belt, she laid it outstretched in some grass. We drove and we drove—17 miles on one levee, 15 miles on another. To the east, the skyline of Miami sparkled dimly. To the west stretched the total black darkness of the marsh.
For a while the lights of planes landing at Miami International passed regularly overhead. Once, when Deanna was flying home from Seattle, her plane crossed the Everglades during daylight and she looked down and saw her mother in the truck driving along a levee.
She and I both held pistol-grip flashlights to point out any snakelike things we saw. I kept calling out to Donna, at the wheel, to stop, because I thought I saw something, but I was always wrong. Soon I got used to the way the shadows of weeds sidled by us as the truck rolled on, and to the dark water suddenly glittering among the grasses, and to the occasional pythonish scraps of PVC pipe.
Burrowing owls flared up from the levee sides and flew off, calling. Alligator eyes in the black canals reflected our light back to us like the lantern eyes of demons. The night got later, and later still. As she talked, sort of out of the side of her mouth, she kept watching and never broke concentration. The next day it rained, and the thermometer dropped into the low 60s.
First I talked to Melissa Miller, a quiet, gentle-mannered woman who is the interagency python management coordinator for Florida Fish and Wildlife. Miller keeps track of the python researchers and hunters that various agencies send into the Everglades and how much hunters get paid for hunting where. According to her data, it takes a hunter an average of 19 hours to find a python. She also is gentle, alert and soft-spoken, a manner maybe derived from watching animals in the wild.
She described the challenges of working in the Everglades. These are refuges where female pythons can hide their eggs and stay with them for two months until they hatch. The hammocks, of which there are thousands, can be miles from anywhere and are often accessible only by boat or helicopter. In short, policing the entire Everglades for pythons will never be possible.
On another floor I visited Frank Mazzotti, a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Florida. He supervises 15 researchers who study the spatial ecology of pythons and other reptiles—that is, where they live and where they go. For proof, check out the videos of pythons on YouTube, especially the ones of pythons fighting alligators. Most python coverage plays up their scary side. Still, the videos are pretty cool. Tegus are lizards that can go into alligator nests and bring out eggs that are bigger than their heads.
Just a few tegus can wipe out entire alligator colonies in no time. Fortunately, tegus can also be trapped, so maybe we can still contain them. But nobody wants to hear about that. It was the same with the pythons. People did not have the necessary motivation to do anything about them, either, until it was too late.
Under the current political dispensation more land has been opened to development, more environment-protecting regulations relaxed, more funds cut.
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