>>My definition of proof. First hand (confirmable) eye witness account with photos of eggs or netonates from someone who knows what their talking about.

We I think we already had this discussion in another thread, but just in case...

We're not talking about a reporter, or any random wildlife officer here. The person posting the story was a volunteer in the field and the people he qootes as saying they found a nest are the biologists hired specifically by the park service for the purpose of studying burmese pythons in the everglades. It's not like any average person with 5 minutes of instructions couldn't positively ID a 10 foot burmese in the park. Maybe some people might mistake a retic or a boa for a burm, but I hardly think that's a problem. Unless you seriously think it's an elaborate hoax by the National Park Service, I can't imagine why you have such a problem with this.

I've heard a lot of conjecture about how they got there and there's plenty of room for debate and study about that, but saying they're not there in numbers or that they couldn't breed successfully makes no sense to me.

Our refuge is a few miles outside the park, we stuck several burms we received into an outdoor enclose with no climate control and people walking by all day. They bred, we stuck the eggs in a box of (way too) wet mulch and threw them in the garage and forgot about them. About 95% hatched. I've been in areas on the edge of the park that were ABSOLUTELY PERFECT for incubating burm eggs. Hot, with thick ground cover and a mat of slightly moist soil almost like peat moss (maybe it is?). You think they would have trouble?

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