One morning Bartoszek invited me to a necropsy of a python the team had captured three weeks before. The snake, a foot, pound female, was in the final thawing stage, piled in coils in and around a metal sink. And we caught all of them within 55 square miles around Naples. The Everglades ecosystem is about 5, square miles. Easterling and King stretched the python belly-up on the long, marble-topped dissection table. If nothing were done about these pythons, they could eventually convert our entire wildlife biomass into one giant snake.
He showed me the tongue, a tiny strand of tissue that hardly looked substantial enough to possess such sensitivity.
The teeth were horror-movie sharp, and numerous, and they curved inward. Bartoszek and Easterling—and, in fact, most of the people I met who work with pythons in Florida—have been bitten, and the points of python teeth often remain in their fingers, palms or wrists. Luckily, pythons are not venomous. As Easterling continued cutting toward the tail and peeling back the hide, the exposed muscle gleamed like pale and massive filet mignon.
The fat tissue resembled marshmallows or balls of mozzarella in bags of clear membrane. This snake, like many pythons caught by the team, had fattened on potentially hundreds of animals until it was bulky in the middle.
The long, narrow lungs extended down both sides of the snake. 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.
How many Burmese pythons inhabit southern Florida? Tens of thousands of invasive Burmese pythons are estimated to be present in the Everglades. What should I do if I see a python in the wild? If you see a python in the wild — or suspect that a snake is a python or an invasive snake — you should take the same precautions for these constrictor snakes as one would take for alligators: avoid interacting with or getting close to them.
If you are in Everglades National Park, you can report a python sighting to a park ranger. You can also Are large constrictor snakes such as Burmese pythons able to kill people?
What is the risk? Would this be in the wild, or in backyards? Human fatalities from non-venomous snakes are very rare, probably averaging one or two per year worldwide. All known constrictor-snake fatalities in the United States are from captive snakes; these are split between deaths of snake owners who were purposefully interacting with their pet and deaths of small children or infants in homes where a Can invasive pythons be eradicated?
The odds of eradicating an introduced population of reptiles once it has spread across a large area are very low, pointing to the importance of prevention, early detection and rapid response.
And with the Burmese python now distributed across more than a thousand square miles of southern Florida, including all of Everglades National Park and areas Could invasive pythons move into cities? Boa constrictors and northern African pythons live in or adjacent to the Miami metropolitan area, and in their native ranges various python species and the boa constrictor are often found living in suburban and urban areas.
As with alligators, the risk of human attack in urban areas is very low but not absent. Are invasive snakes dangerous? Free-ranging snakes representing dozens of species from around the world are discovered in the United States in any given year, usually as a result of escapees or releases from the pet trade, but most of these don't appear to have established a reproductive population.
Any animal can be problematic when released in places where it is not native Filter Total Items: 3. Year Published: Invasive species research—Science for detection, containment, and control Invasive species research within the U. Attribution: Ecosystems. View Citation. Campbell, E. Geological Survey Fact Sheet —, 4 p. Year Published: Invasive Species Science Branch: research and management tools for controlling invasive species Invasive, nonnative species of plants, animals, and disease organisms adversely affect the ecosystems they enter.
Reed, Robert N. Filter Total Items: Date published: August 21, Date published: November 1, Date published: September 22, Burmese pythons have been found on Key Largo. Date published: April 28, Researchers are doing everything they can do try and track these snakes using spatial data Bonneau et al.
Additionally, National Park staff are combating the invasion through the use of dogs that can sniff out snakes Wadlow , snake traps USDA , employing snake hunters from local areas and world class snake hunters from India Flesher and even imposing a ban on the trade of Burmese Pythons.
A ban on Burmese Pythons was created in and prohibited the moving of any live Burmese Pythons, even in the form of eggs and sperm, across state and national boundaries Reptile Magazine. Work Cited. Ecological Impacts of the Burmese Python In recent years, many native species that call the Everglades home have begun to disappear due in part largely to the Burmese Python.
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