GPS Tracking is Used to Find Invasive Burmese Pythons Taking Over the Everglades
24 Sep 2015Burmese pythons are big, scary, and hungry. They are eating their way through the Florida Everglades, wreaking havoc as they go.
The reptiles are huge and require a lot of food. They are wiping out the native population of small mammals including rodents, rabbits, raccoons, deer, possums, and mink. The Everglades decades ago was an environment where these types of animals thrived.
The Burmese pythons have no natural predators, which means there are no animals that regularly hunt them down and kill them. They are left to breed, eat, and take over the Everglades.
Scientists Using GPS
Though not predators, scientists are taking up cudgels against the snakes. Davidson College has started an experiment to track marsh rabbits, using GPS tracking devices on collars. They released the rabbits into the Everglades and monitored how well they did.
The rabbits lived and bred well at first, but within nine months fewer than 23% were still alive. Bob Reed, chief of the invasive branch of the U.S. Geological Society, said, “All of us were shocked by the results. Rabbit populations are supposed to be regulated by factors other than predation.”
Several snakes have been caught with the radio collars and the remains of the rabbits in their stomachs. The GPS device kept transmitting, even inside the python.
Harm to the Eco-System
Scientists aren’t sure what the long-term effects will be on the Everglades. But they do feel that it is too late to wipe the pythons out. The only way to handle it is containment, making an effort to prevent the snakes from spreading to the Florida Keys.
They feel they won’t be able to reintroduce the small mammals into the area, which is a 10,000 square kilometer freshwater wetland in Florida. The Everglades is considered an important ecosystem, which is suffering from the loss of the mammals and the overwhelming numbers of snakes.
Pet Pythons
The pythons were seen rarely in the area until the 1990s when the pet trade took off. At that point, there was a huge increase in the number of pythons imported from Southeast Asia for exotic pet enthusiasts. Over the last decade and a half, scientists estimate that there are over 10,000 of the snakes within the Everglades.
The snakes can’t be legally imported now, due to measures taken by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They can’t be imported into the United States and it is illegal to trade them across state lines.
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