ROCK PYTHON invades Florida

Re: ROCK PYTHON invades Florida

Postby martinshaun » Sat Feb 13, 2010 8:58 am

The government of the united states is trying to ban 9 python and boa species, the pictures and stories of large snakes cruising the everglades just evoke so much fear, Florida is in danger they say, they will come and eat your children !!!
So tell me ? what about the out of control population of feral pigs ? feral cats ? do you hear about them ? what about the breeding population of Rhesus monkeys ? do you hear about that ? I saw about 12 of then sitting on a fence at a resort north of Orlando, very common I was told, the media ignores that. Snakes sell news !!

True there are burmese breeding in the everglades, they are confined to one area and work is underway to eradicate them, but please ! The pigs and cats kill far more indiginous animals than burms and maybe even afrocs, the media just ignores that issue. There is a crazy world out there, this is just the start I think.

Martin.
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Re: ROCK PYTHON invades Florida

Postby Bushviper » Sat Feb 13, 2010 11:22 am

Martin there is some hidden agenda behind this because the research they have undertaken and reality do not seem to correspond. There are "hundreds of thousands" of Burmese pythons but people who are licensed to capture or kill them could only find a handful during the entire season. Are they possibly not that plentiful? The feral pigs will never be eradicated because it employs people who trap then all year round and make a living. Would you wipe out your "golden goose".

The hype about 20 foot 300 lb monsters that are going to eat children will always draw attention while the kitties are just so cute why worry about them.
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Re: ROCK PYTHON invades Florida

Postby hissing roach » Sat Feb 13, 2010 3:20 pm

On the bright side, maybe all these snakes will keep the Nutria invasion down. :)
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Re: ROCK PYTHON invades Florida

Postby hissing roach » Fri Feb 26, 2010 3:17 pm

Cold Snap Killed Many Pythons In Everglades
Pythons, Iguanas, Non-Native Fish Died In January Freeze Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel 2/11/09
By David Fleshler and Lisa J. Huriash, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Vultures circled over Everglades National Park's Anhinga Trail, where
thousands of dead non-native fish floated in the marshes.

About half the Burmese pythons found in the park in the past few
weeks were dead.

Dead iguanas have dropped from trees onto patios across South
Florida. And in western Miami-Dade County, three African rock pythons
- powerful constrictors that can kill people - have turned up dead.

Although South Florida's warm, moist climate has nurtured a vast
range of non-native plants and animals, a cold snap last month
reminded these unwanted guests they're not in Burma or Ecuador
anymore.

Temperatures that dropped into the 30s killed Burmese pythons,
iguanas and other marquee names in the state's invasive species zoo.

Although reports so far say the cold has not eliminated any of them,
it has sharply reduced their numbers, which some say may indicate
South Florida is not as welcoming to invaders as originally thought.

"Anecdotally, we might have lost maybe half of the pythons out there
to the cold," said Scott Hardin, the Florida Fish and Wildlife
Conservation Commission's exotic species coordinator. "Iguanas
definitely. From a collection of observations from people, more than
50 percent fatality on green iguanas. Green iguanas really got hit
hard. Lots of freshwater fish died; no way to estimate that."

The cold snap has played into a highly politicized debate over how to
prevent non-native species from colonizing the United States. Reptile
dealers and hobbyists strongly oppose a proposal by the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service to ban the import of and interstate trade in Burmese
pythons and several other large snakes. They say South Florida's cold
snap shows these species don't threaten to spread north, as some
claim, and a federal crackdown is unnecessary.

"Pythons are tropical animals," said Andrew Wyatt, president of the
United States Association of Reptile Keepers. "When temperatures fall
below a certain level, they are unable to survive. It reinforces the
idea that the pythons can't exist more than a short period of time
north of Lake Okeechobee. Even the pythons in the Everglades are
dying during the cold snap."

Wyatt said scientists are downplaying the effect of cold weather on
the pythons because that would undermine their ability to win grants
to study a problem that has received international publicity.

"It's all about money," he said. "It's very little to do with the
truth of fundamental problems on the ground."

But federal and state wildlife officials say the cold weather has not
solved the problem. Not only did pythons survive, but so did other
invasive species, even if the cold set them back a bit.

Along the park's Gulf Coast, where old-world climbing ferns lay dense
mats over native trees, the cold snap inflicted frost damage on these
invaders from Asia and Australia, said David Hallac, chief biologist
at Everglades National Park. But it didn't kill them, he said, and
they continue to spread.

And although they receive less publicity than pythons, non-native
fish have infested the Everglades. The cold weather apparently killed
them in the thousands, including the Mayan cichlid, walking catfish
and spotfin spiny eel, Hallac said. But at the bottom of canals and
other water bodies, pockets of warm water allowed some of these fish
to survive, he said, giving them a chance to repopulate the park once
the weather warms up.

No one knows how many Burmese pythons live in the Everglades, where
they were released as unwanted pets or where they found refuge after
hurricanes destroyed their breeding facilities. But what's certain is
there are a lot fewer today than there were a month ago.

Greg Graziani, a police officer who owns a reptile breeding facility,
is one of several licensed python hunters who stalk the snakes in the
Everglades. In four days of snake hunting, he found two dead snakes,
two live ones, and one snake on the verge of death.

"Vultures had pecked through 12 inches by 4 inches down the back of
this animal's body," he said. "I thought it was dead and we reached
down to pick it up and it was very much alive."

In cold weather, Graziani said, pythons go into a catatonic state,
and if they don't make it to a safe place to ride out the weather,
freeze to death. "We're finding the smaller pythons are handling it
better than the large ones - the smaller ones can get into different
cracks and crevices to maintain the temperatures they need."

Joe Wasilewski, of Homestead, a wildlife biologist who hunts pythons
in the Everglades, said that on a single day in late January he found
seven live snakes and seven dead ones.

"You don't see dead ones like that for no reason," he said. "And they
were laid out like they were caught by the onslaught of the cold, the
way the carcasses were lined up."
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Re: ROCK PYTHON invades Florida

Postby Groenslang » Sun Feb 28, 2010 6:51 pm

Very interesting, thanx for posting this! Seems that mother nature always has the final say!
The future depends on what we do in the present. - Mahatma Gandhi

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Re: ROCK PYTHON invades Florida

Postby snakeman70 » Thu Jul 01, 2010 8:28 am

10gbooj wrote:America and it's snake problems... Will it ever stop?
Lets just hope that some law gets implemented to stop incompetent keepers from owning "absolutely verocious animals"

Yes the laws have been passed. But for your information it effects EVERYONE....not just the idiots who buy a python and then turn it loose when it gets big. How stupid are they??? It's a damn python, it is supposed to get big. I have kept Burmese Pythons and Red Tail Boas for years and NEVER turned one loose. But people in Florida have done this and now the whole damn country has to pay for their stupidity. If I want to move across state lines I have to sell my Boa first. I cannot take her to a expo in a neighboring state because IDIOTS have to pass a law, because they are too stupid to pick up a snake book and learn how big the snakes get to begin with.I cannot take my snake across state lines for veterinary treatment because of laws. While I certainly agree that stupid people have caused this problem, passing more laws is not the solution. AMERICA ALREADY HAS TOO MANY DAMN LAWS
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Re: ROCK PYTHON invades Florida

Postby Drewbot » Thu Jul 01, 2010 5:36 pm

Many of the Burmese Pythons that escaped and established breeding populations, were freed during a massive hurricane that went through southern Florida. Not totally the fault of irresponsible pet owners.

http://www.reptileknowledge.com/articles/article22.php
To answer these questions, we must go back to the early 1990s. Hurricane Andrew devastated Florida in 1992, and it damaged quite a few zoos, pet stores, exotic animal warehouses, and wildlife refuges in the process. Many of the escaped animals -- ranging from monkeys to mountain lions -- were rounded up after the storm. Some, unfortunately, were put down. But many animals eluded capture. It has been documented that a large (but unknown) number of Burmese pythons were "liberated" by Hurricane Andrew, escaping into the Florida Everglades and other parts of the state.

It is also likely that irresponsible pet keepers contributed to this problem, though to what extent I cannot say. We have a snake-care Q&A service on this website, and through it I have spoken to hundreds of snake keepers over the years. On several occasions, I have spoken to Burmese pythons owners who were desperately trying to find new homes for their pet snakes, to no avail. Based on this experience, I believe it's possible that a few pet pythons have been released into the wild over the years, in Florida and elsewhere. And, as you will soon learn, it only takes a single breeding pair to start an "invasion."
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Re: ROCK PYTHON invades Florida

Postby StephanN » Mon Aug 30, 2010 10:31 pm

as a matter of fact that since hurricanes andrew and kathrina hit southern united states lots of exotics escaped in to the glades and similar swamps and reproduced .
there is quit a big burmese population known in the everglades also osme rock and osme rectic pythons aswell , rumors say there is even a smal boa constricotr colony somewhere in the glades

all this brought on the so called python ban wich is up for voting in congress now but probably wont pass , but if it wont pass wildlife,game and fish authoritys allrady said it iwll palce rectics , bumrese , rock pythons and all boa constrictor species on a list wich ban them from selling importing and exporting them over state lines
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