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October 7, 2005

Gator Gluttony: A Python's Fatal Mistake

You buy a cute little baby Burmese python at the pet store for $20. It likes to weave itself through your fingers and watches TV from the comfort of its own personal ficus tree in the living room. It becomes a part of the family.

You feed it little mice from the safety of your bathtub, so it doesn't learn to hunt in its cage and bite you. Then you feed it bigger mice. After a while, you're feeding your snake dead rabbits.

It begins to occur to you that your python is going to live for up to 25 years, growing to 15-20 feet long and 100-200 pounds. By this point, your snake has it's own room.

At some point, you decide your pet is ruling your life. It's too expensive, and maybe it's scared you a bit with its aggressive feeding behavior. Perhaps you read a story about a python killing its owner, like Grant Williams or Rick Barber.

You decide it has to go, but where?

Few people are willing to take in such a large animal, especially a snake. The humane society won't take it, so you decide to let it loose in a nearby swamp. It's the only humane thing to do, right?

WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!

You have just aided and abetted the second most important force driving plant and animal endangerment and extinction in the world (the first being habitat loss). When an exotic species is introduced into a new environment, it's very unlikely to have native predators. Instead, its populations can grow, unchecked, while it devours the resources of the native species. For example, people keep dumping pet Burmese pythons into the Florida Everglades, and they're competing with the native gators for food and territory. Lately, visitors to the park have witnessed some very violent battles between the exotic snakes and the big scaly lizards.

The Burmese python is just one of thousands of non-native animal and plant species that have invaded the United States in the last decades. Florida teems with exotic creatures that have no business living there. Other regions have their own problems.

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Burmese pythons are popular—and legal—pet snakes. In the past five years, the U.S. has imported more than 144,000 Burmese pythons.

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Since the mid-1990s park rangers have captured or killed 68 Burmese pythons in Everglades National Park. The pythons are now most certainly breeding in the park.

More At: Huge, Freed Pet Pythons Invade Florida Everglades

Rangers know that the pythons are breeding in the wild, as they have found snakes with umbilical cord scars. Tracking down and eradicating the pet python population in the park (alliteration at its finest, eh?) is a huge problem, but Florida park officials are trying a couple of methods.

The state agency's law enforcement division recently authorized its officers to kill exotic reptiles, specifically pythons, found on lands under its management, said Kevin Enge, a scientist with the commission.

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In December scientists plan to capture and tag several pythons with radio-tracking devices to reveal their exact whereabouts inside the 1.5-million-acre (600,000-hectare) national park.

More at: Invasive Pythons Squeezing Florida Everglades

Introducing exotic species, especially formerly captive ones, can have other strange effects as well. Animals that have been hand-fed since birth (especially pre-killed stuff) may have odd feeding behaviors. Recently, a 13-foot Burmese python tried to eat a 6-foot long alligator. The gator was just too big, and the python's stomach just burst, making a very gruesome photography opportunity which has been featured on National Geographic's website:

Unfortunately for a 13-foot (4-meter) Burmese python in Florida's Everglades National Park, eating the enemy seems to have caused the voracious reptile to bust a gut—literally.

More at: Photo in the News: Python Bursts After Eating Gator

Posted by sorsha at October 7, 2005 4:16 PM