In west Dade near the Everglades, something is proliferating faster than vacant, empty tract houses: snakes.
There are many snakes in the Everglades. Brown water snakes, cottonmouth, the indigo snake, and rat snakes to name a few.
Ask biologists what snake worries them most, it’s one that doesn’t belong there: the Burmese python.
Abandoned by pet owners, breeders and lazy pet show owners, these snakes multiply faster than rabbits. Python love the Everglades the way Miamians love Cuban espresso.
But the infestation of the Burmese python is not a secret like the length of Castro's beard.
These snakes commonly reach 18 feet and can reach over 20 feet. In other words, if a snake has made it through your hurricane shutters, you don’t need an interpretative guide to tell you what it is.
Don’t worry: except at Turkey Point Nuclear Reactor where python grow 40 feet long and two feet wide, these snakes tend to avoid people. Just kidding.
For the general public the python make dramatic displays, for instance, sound bites on network news, newswire photos or youtube, snake battling alligators in a slow fight to the death.
But just how many of them are in the Everglades, spreading toward tract housing, is a question scientists are trying to wrap their hands around.
You can’t comb for snakes in the Everglades the way you comb nits from a child’s lousey head.
On the other hand if you could, you’d do it the way it’s done in the Frog Pond, that scandal past abutting the national park.
You’d take a couple of big John Deere tractors and drag some wide tillers across land left fallow. Tractors move slow through the grass. Python move slower.
It is about 5,000 acres, the Frog Pond, named probably for the million frogs that once lived there.
For decades, after the frogs presumably were drained out or killed by pesticides, part of it was farmed for vegetables, the way adjacent farmland was until it was taken over gradually by tract housing.
In October 2005, 22 pythons were killed by tractors in the Frog Pond, across a stretch of fallow land grown tall with grass.
Recently, that land was plowed again. More than 40 pythons were killed, this time.
Park biologists located the dead pythons by the vultures. Well, maybe it’s an episode for Dexter.
The python can live up to 25 years and are able to survive long periods without eating. Python lay large clutches of eggs, sometimes over 100.
So back to the original question: how many python are in the Everglades?
Scientists believe there are from 10,000 to 100,000 of them in the Everglades right now.
Maybe the snakes are the outward manifestation of tract housing spreading through historic Everglades.
They wouldn’t be there, but for us.
7 comments:
I spend a lot of time in the Glades and had never run across a python.
Until the night we were looking for owls and there was one crossing the road.
14 feet long. It took my breath away. I am generally unafraid of wild creatures and like reptiles, but this 14 foot snake in an environment that it didn't belong,was another story entirely.
Oh the shoes, oh the handbags…they can’t be endangered if they are undocumented aliens can they? With pythons perhaps there’s the potential for matching luggage.
More worrisome is the fate of law abiding, fly eating, not bothering anybody snakes. They have a loss of habitat and sometimes take to the streets. They don’t know any better than possums and other unfortunate road kill. That was my observation when bicycling in South Miami. A, shall we say polite, garden variety, was unsuspectedly crossing the street, or rather slithering to the other side. (Oh that age old chicken question “Why?”) The oncoming SUV was oblivious. I flagged them unsuccessfully. All I could do was take the writhing remains into the shade and pour my water bottle over it.
S
This is a really big problem here in South Florida. Not only are pythons reaking havoc in the everglades but there are tons of other invasive species that are competing with native species. And usually the invasive ones win out. I mean have you seen the invasion of green iguanas around here. I think people need to better educated about the type of pets they are able to care for. If your intersted I came across this clip on uVu that talks more about the invasive species population in south florida. The link is http://uvu.channel2.org keyword 'python'
You left out the two worse snakes, developers and lobbyists.
what about politicos?
Oh wow, a good name for a development of tract homes: Python Place
Actually, the Fish and Wildlife Commission just passed a law that requires people to have an ID chip implanted in a number of different pythons before they're sold so the owners can be tracked down. Maybe people won't be so quick to release their "pet" once it gets too big if they can be tracked down and fined.
They should allow trappers to collect the snakes out of the Glades. Handbags and belts sound OK to me.)
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