How many pythons are there

They like to hang out around water and slither up trees. The longest such snake ever caught in Florida measured more than 18 feet, wildlife officials say. The U. The Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has said that while most of the snakes have lived around the Everglades, some are moving further north. People who spot invasive wildlife are urged to report their sightings to the state exotic species hotline at IveGot1 or at IveGot1.

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Connect with us. About us. Bartoszek put a flexible tube with a camera at its end down the burrow to see if any other snakes were with her. The large, coiled-up snake was alone and stared into the lens, irate. It included a foot-long female and six males. The snakes cross boundary lines, so Bartoszek and company do, too. Tracking Stan Lee, a sentinel who had recently wandered into a farm, Bartoszek got a cheerful wave-through from a farm supervisor.

The snake had last been spotted on the other side of a field of farm equipment. In all likelihood, he had found his way through that field during the last 24 hours, winding among harvesters, gang plows and fertilizer sprayers.

Not so with sentinel snakes, who are left to identify more targets. The other pythons out there never seem to suspect. Then the snakes go into a freezer for future study. Later they are incinerated so that nothing ingests the euthanizing chemicals.

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. After not wanting to deal with these challenges, many released them into the wild. The above numbers are based on sightings and killings of pythons. The bottom line is that from early to the present, the population of breeding pythons in the Everglades spiraled to well over 30, For starters, the Burmese python routinely lives 25 years or more.

Astonishingly, the record lifespan for a python in captivity is 47 years! Females typically lay one clutch of eggs per year, usually in the spring. Each clutch contains somewhere between 12 and 36 eggs. But much larger numbers have been recorded.

This August 15 report from the New York Times included finding a foot python with 87 eggs. Consider a brief thought experiment where we entertain the consequences of some conservative numbers. Assume a third are female for a total of 10, Assume half are large enough to be actively breeding in the wild. So we have 5, female pythons producing 12 eggs per year. The result is 60, new young per year. Assume half that number of young survives and we are left with 30, new pythons being added to the habitat per year.

In conclusion, by conservative estimates, without even considering compounding, Florida will be adding 30, new Pythons per year. Again, these are conservative numbers that ignore compound growth. Food sources will simply run out.

Native species will go extinct. I was thrilled to learn some apparent good news in this otherwise awful story. The consensus among herpetologists appears that the python cannot survive through a winter beyond south Florida. But that study appears to be an outlier. Consensus among snake biologists is that Burmese pythons are unable to withstand a winter beyond south Florida.

An experimental closure in South Carolina kept a number of pythons over winter. All of the animals died, as they could not properly acclimate to the change in climate. When it gets cold, these pythons simply die. The study did note, however, that the pythons could survive extended periods of temperatures lower than southern Florida.

Python's inability to survive winter, however, may very well be the only good news with regards to their ability to spread throughout the region. Research in an early issue of the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology report concluded that pythons are able to tolerate salt water and can therefore travel through marine and estuarine environments like bays or inlets. The open seas are also a possibility. Prior to the report, it was hoped that the pythons would die in saltwater and would therefore be primarily limited to the freshwater of the Everglades.

The snakes can therefore travel along the southeastern coastline and would only be limited by climate restrictions. Worse still, many climate biologists and snake herpetologists claim this climatic range is quite suitable habitat and very similar to that of Southeast Asia.

One animal in the Everglades appears able to pose a threat to an adult python. In a battle between the Burmese Python and an American Alligator, who wins? The answer: it depends.

Both animals have been found to prey on one another. A large alligator can kill and eat a medium-sized python. And the opposite holds true for a large python. Back to the alligator-python battle. How is it decided? The battle is often decided by two main factors: the respective size of each animal and the caliber of the first strike. The python, on the other hand, aims to wrap itself around the alligator, as it would any other prey.

After securing a full wrap, it suffocates the animal and then eats it whole. For a successful alligator hunt, size is key for the snake. The larger the python, the greater its chance of successfully wrapping itself around the alligator.

Pythons are not venomous and must wrap around their prey to secure a kill. Naturally, small and medium-sized alligators are more vulnerable.

Some sensational pictures have showed up online of battles between the python and the alligator: alligator eating python, python eating alligator.

Its body rejected the meal outright and the snake died a gruesome death. Size becomes a key-determining factor of survival between what will inevitably be the two significant remaining animals. Over time, as evolution runs its course, natural selection would favor increasingly large alligators and pythons.

Yes, what was previously a balanced and varied ecosystem of rabbits, foxes, bobcats, deer and opossums in the Everglades is now becoming a battle between larger-and-larger pythons and alligators. But this natural selection is unlikely to take shape. Burmese pythons and American alligators will not battle over the course of millions of years for the same reason this highly imbalanced ecosystem arose in the first place: human intervention.

The python problem will get so bad that humans will have to take comprehensive and aggressive action to curtail the population.

Families living in rural areas have reason to worry. As food sources run out, the snakes will grow increasingly desperate in search of a new meal.

If a snake is willing to attack a large alligator, household pets are unquestionably vulnerable to attack. Dogs and cats must be properly confined in rural areas to stay safe. The snakes do not typically pose a threat to adults and tend to be wary of approaching people.

Although, when food sources run out, the animals could become desperate and children might be vulnerable. In the summer of , a foot Burmese python inside a central Florida home escaped from its enclosure and killed a 2-year-old girl. The girl was strangled in her crib. The snake had not been fed for a month and was severely underweight.