Hi Greg,

The reason is because the journal we want to submit this to will not accept anything that has already been reported by newspapers/tv/etc. You can imagine that as soon as we release the numbers there will be a media frenzy. In addition to that, other scientists could potentially steal our data if we make it public before it is published and they could publish it themselves. I had a conversation with Skip on Thursday of last week and he said he is mindful of what's going on with the legislation and that these data will be made public before all of that is over. But for now, I think everyone can rest somewhat comfortably knowing that a lot of pythons died. I can verify some of what is in the newspaper article that was posted elsewhere... that Joe Wasilewski, Kenney Krysko, and others went out and found 14 burms one weekend and half were alive and half were dead. Our paper will cover all pythons reported to us (telemetered and non-telemetered animals) in a timely manner after the cold fronts and will provide details on how and where each animal was found as well as their condition (alive/dead). If there were a conspiracy I wouldn't come on here and say A LOT OF PYTHONS DIED!!! There are many survivors though. I'm sorry for the delay but I can assure you that everyone working on the paper has made it their number 1 priority. We've worked days/nights/weekends to complete our respective parts and have been pulled away from their other duties (writing books, looking for dead crocs, etc) to get this out ASAP. There are currently 7 authors (subject to change) and so coordinating everything and sending it back and forth for review within our own group is an undertaking in and of itself. We want this to be released in a peer-reviewed fashion to avoid the criticism dealt to the USGS risk assessment when that came out. All I can say is that I hope people understand and that we're working on it as hard as we can (my part is currently done (unless something else comes up) or else I would not be playing on the forums (even on the weekend).

Mike

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