Pythons Conquer Everglades
The Animal Uprising™, with the assistance of human Quislings, is well on its way to conquering the Florida Everglades. Using a a horde of python shock troops, they are rapidly taking over the joint and are even at war with the local alligators - there is no honor among the animals.
EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK, Fla. - "SNAKE!" Hearing this shout, Skip Snow slammed on the brakes. When the off-roader plowed to a halt, he and his partner, Lori Oberhofer, leaped out and took off running toward two snakes, actually — a pair of 10-foot Burmese pythons lying on a levee, sunning themselves.
After slipping, sliding and tumbling down a rocky embankment, Snow, a wildlife biologist, grabbed one of the creatures by the tail. The python, Oberhofer says, did not care much for that.
"It made a sound like Darth Vader breathing," she says, "and then its head swung around and I saw this white mouth flying through the air."
Snow saw the mouth, too — the jaws open 180 degrees, the gums an obscene white, the needle-sharp teeth bared in an almost devilish grin. He let out a shriek, then blinked, and when his eyes opened the python's head was hanging in mid-air, less than a foot from his own.
Oberhofer, with a Ninja-like thrust, had snared the python in mid-strike.
"I snagged it right behind its head, on its neck," the 43-year-old wildlife technician recalls. "It was pure reflex — a defensive move. I don't know if I could ever do it again."
The python hadn't succumbed yet, however. "They defecate on you, on purpose, hoping to make you reconsider what you're doing," Oberhofer says. "It's not pleasant."
In the end, the humans were victorious, if not sweet-smelling: Both snakes were bagged, trucked off to the Everglades Research Center, euthanized and necropsied — meaning their innards were dissected, then meticulously inspected, for the benefit of science.
So goes python control in the Everglades, a painstaking, around-the-clock slog against a voracious, foreign snake species that has established a stronghold in this watery wilderness and put native wildlife at risk.
Two stalwart defenders is all that stands between the world and a complete conquest. (/Humor mode). Getting serious below the fold.
Look folks, there is a real problem here with so-called exotic pets. This is just plain stupid, allowing these things into the country. What is happening in Florida and elsewhere is that these pets are being released into the wild when reality catches up with the pet lover. What in the heck is someone taking a python as a pet for unless they are capable of dealing with a full grown one? They get to be up to 26 feet long.
"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.
As I said this is stupid. We should require people to prove they are capable of keeping such pets, not just selling them to anybody with a few bucks at a flea market.
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Blue Crab Boulevard » The Conquest Of Florida — Saturday, 30 December , 2006 @ 2:35 pm
By Tom, Sunday, 17 December , 2006 @ 6:40 pm
Just another problem from invasive species. Way too many animals and plants have been introduced into this country and others to the demise of local flora & fauna.