SURPRISINGLY, FLORIDA COULD GET WORSE

With another Earth Day come and gone, I’m surprised that hunting pythons in the Everglades hasn’t taken some form of environmental priority.

Wait, what? Hunting?

Isn’t this supposed to be about Earth Day?

Well, yes! You see, Burmese pythons have completely taken over the Florida Everglades. Funny thing is, they aren’t supposed to be there at all. Their natural habitat lies in Southeast Asia.

“Burms” were brought to the U.S. from that region to be sold as exotic pets. However, overzealous pet owners weren’t prepared for how huge these snakes could get, and released these hungry pythons into the wild, fostering the start of their invasion in the marshlands of southern Florida.

What’s more, in 1992 a breeding facility in the Everglades was destroyed by the Category 5 Hurricane Andrew, releasing a large quantity of Burms. This cemented the species as a reproducing population in the unusually wild area.

For Burms, it’s a perfect setting. With their brown, patterned scales, they can hide anywhere in the swampy Everglades. They also have no known predators in the area, but tons of prey. Burms have been spotted eating everything from rabbits to alligators.

Due to this, many native species of rodent, foxes, and smaller prey animals have nearly disappeared from the Everglades. It’s not surprising; there are tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of snakes hunting them daily.

It’s not the snakes’ fault that they were brought here; so, does all of this really justify hunting these animals?

The kicker is, female Burmese can breed at as young as 18 months, and can live for 20 years. If that’s not bad enough, they can lay 20-100 eggs a year. That can be up to 1,850 babies per female. And as I have said before, there already are tens of thousands of them populating the area.

As much as I love Burms, as much as any other snake enthusiast, they have got to go. By eating all the smaller prey, they are changing the structure of the Everglades’ natural ecosystem, thus damaging the environment. They have been considered Florida’s greatest ecological threat.

There have been measures taken to reduce this threat. In 2017, the Python Elimination Program was introduced. It has utilized paid contests, the use of canine searches, and teams who are paid to hunt only pythons. So far, this program has removed over 3,000 of these snakes from the wild.

You may think that’s a big number, but remember, a female Burm can lay up to 1,850 eggs in her lifetime: Three thousand snakes is no more than the offspring of two female Burmese pythons.

What the takeaway from this is, we have to be mindful when releasing animals into the wild and understand that while it’s not the animals’ fault, they are still harming the ecosystem.

Burmese pythons, by far, aren’t the only invasive species in the U.S. Goldfish have become invasive in the Midwest, where, with natural selection occurring, much of the existing population is a brown, murky color, making them hard to hunt.

The feral swine is taking over the Midwest, as well, harming the environment and injuring people.

The Pacific Northwest now has the red-eared slider (turtles), crayfish, feral swine, mud snail, and zebra mussel to contend with; the list goes on, potentially exponentially.

This is our home – the U.S. – and in some way or another, we brought these species here to begin with. It’s our responsibility to do what we can to protect our ecosystem, even if the methods seem a bit harsh, like hunting.