Burmese Pythons At Home In The Everglades - KRT

[hatrack]

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - (KRT) - "As Mike Mercier walked along a boardwalk at Everglades National Park, he heard a series of loud splashes. His wife shouted for him to look, and he saw a stunning sight: A huge snake wrapped around an adult alligator. The alligator rolled over and grabbed the snake in its mouth. As Mercier ran down the boardwalk to keep up, the alligator swam off with the snake in its jaws.

His photographs confirmed what he thought he saw: a Burmese python, a native of Southeast Asia and one of the largest snakes in the world. Since the mid-1990s, rangers and other employees have captured or killed 67 Burmese pythons at Everglades National Park, and sightings are becoming more frequent. Illegally released by pet owners who no longer wanted to take care of them, the snakes have begun to breed along the main park road, causing deep concern among biologists who want to protect the park's wildlife.

"They're eating native birds and mammals," said Skip Snow, a park biologist in charge of reducing the python population. "They're here because of the international pet trade." In the past five years, the United States has imported 144,563 Burmese pythons, with the largest number coming from Vietnam, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Humane Society of the United States and other animal welfare groups have called for restrictions on the trade in pythons and other reptiles, saying it endangers people and subjects animals to cruel confinement, thirst and starvation during transport. At a minimum, they say people should have to get a license to own such a dangerous animal.

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Pythons are capable of killing and eating every variety of bird and mammal in the park, with the exception of full-grown panthers, Snow said. In the digestive tracts of pythons killed at the park, biologists have found the remains of gray squirrels, cotton rats, black rats, opossum, pied-billed grebes and house wrens. And in an ominous development, pythons have been spotted with growing frequency at Paurotis Pond, site of a rookery of endangered wood storks in Everglades National Park. Aside from directly killing wildlife, pythons compete with them for prey and for space. By consuming small mammals, they're taking food from the mouths of native predators such as bobcats, hawks and other snakes. And by occupying the park's holes and burrows, they're taking valuable space away from native snakes such as the endangered Eastern indigo snake."

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http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/nation/8693396.htm

[blindpig]

1. just the tip of the iceberg

Nile moniters on the Gulf Coast, Common Caimans, half a dozen anoles, several geckos, marine toads, cuban treefrogs, and that's just some of the herps. Truely a mess, almost all due to the exotic animal trade and the sloppy way it is done in S Florida. The mass trade in wild caught exotics needs to end, most wild populations can't take it.
But screw the Humane Society, they would ban the keeping of all reptiles and amphibians!