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Money making opportunity with Burmese pythons?
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Florida officials are considering paying people to kill snakes in one of our National parks. This is not quite as crazy an idea as it seems. The snakes are Burmese pythons, a highly invasive non-native species and the park is the Everglades, an area which humans are trying to make safe for the local wildlife.
The Burmese python is not a snake for inexperienced or wimpy pet owners. The creatures are beautiful and live for over twenty years, so if you do adopt one you'll have a chance to bond with your snake. The care requirements, while more involved than, say, a corn snake, are not complicated. On the other hand, the snakes are large, strong, and escape artists. Many pet owners do find that the adults are too much to handle. And where the climate is right, an escaped or abandoned Burmese python can cause massive environmental problems.
In the Everglades, Burmese pythons do quite well. At a rough estimate, 150,000 or the non-native invasive snakes now live in Florida's national park (www.tampabay.com/news/environment/wildlife/article1005180.ece). They not only compete with but actually devour the native species. While the most famous Burmese python made the news by failing to eat an alligator, but it did suceed in killing the native reptile. Other Burmese pythons have been found with the remains of bobcats and deer in their digestive tracts. Burmese pythons in the Everglades are one good reason why there's currently some support in Congress for outlawing the sale of most exotic animals.
However, there are problems to be worked out before Floridians can start supplementing their incomes by hunting snakes. At the moment, hunting is illegal throughout most of the Everglades. One suggestion was to start out with a pilot program in Big Cypress, where hunting is legal. And while Lousisianna had good results from a program to pay people for hunting the invasive nutria (a kind of rodent), nutria are easier to find and kill than Burmese pythons.
One major issue is how to prevent people from killing the wrong snake. The animal is not going to sit and pose for hunters and most of us are not as good as we should be at identifying our snake neighbors. It seems likely to me that this program, by opening a protected area to hunters, could do more harm than good. After all, the snakes are in trouble for being accomplished predators, but we humans are pretty good at that too. And we're sometimes less fussy than we should be about what we catch. Think of the two pregnant sharks caught in the area recently.
No one has yet mentioned the price per snake. What can the state actually afford right now? Will offering a bounty on snakes bring out inexperienced hunters who will need saving from themselves at a time when the state has less money for rescue efforts? Just yesterday in Tampa, a young man had to be hospitalized after an accidental meeting with a rattlesnake. We don't need inexperienced people out hunting snakes! Do we want or need a state agency to license Burmese python hunters?
Burmese pythons are elusive, so it might work better to put the money into trapping the snakes. One idea is to use traps baited with scent to capture snakes. Would it be possible to trap and sterilize snakes? This may sound like too much pity for these destructive animals, but it's also been found effective against fruit flies. Sometimes the seemingly soft-hearted method is what actually works.
Burmese pythons do not belong in the Everglades. It's not like the swans in the Chesapeake area, where the invasive species is one of many problems. The Everglades should be a protected area. However, I am fairly sure that releasing one invasive species to go hunt down the one already there is not the best idea.
For more info:
www.tampabay.com/news/environment/wildlife/article1005180.ece
www.miamiherald.com/news/florida/story/1070898.html
on Burmese pythons
nas.er.usgs.gov/queries/FactSheet.asp
www.repticzone.com/photogallery/BurmesePythons1.html
care sheets
www.repticzone.com/caresheets/1426.html
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