>>Why is it that all non-native species will have a huge negative impact on the Florida environment..?

They don't always, but it's often not known what will happen until after they are established. The risk is too great. Even if they don't do HUGE damage, as you say, in a world where biodiversity is being hit from all sides, even a little damage is enough, isn't it.

>>Sure there's degrees but not all are going to cause major change considering reptiles are seldom a pest species.

Okay. Nile Monitors and South Florida. Burmese Pythons and South Florida. Madagascan geckos and South Florida. Do you have any idea how long those other continents and their representative biota have been separated from ours? MILLIONS of years. There were Varanids and Pythonids on their respective continents long before there were even Australopithecines, much less Homo sapiens.

What happens when you have a cosmopolitan collection of animals in one cage? Essentially, a foreign disease party where pathogens can shimmy from species to species unmolested in a body with a naive immune system. Now run that same experiment in a locale with hundreds of its own native species and you have a recipe for mass macro-regional disaster.

This is why conservation biologists and SMART zoos are trying to get breeding facilities built in the native regions where the animals live, like the El Valle Amphibian Conservation and Rescue Center in Panama. It's much more effective and WAY less expensive to keep frogs in the country of their origin with trained people who live in that same region. And it's much more risky to ship them to a foreign country to a breeding center where there are usually species from all over the world.

Who would have thought that a tiny ant discovered by EO Wilson just a few decades ago in Mobile, Alabama would turn out to be the highly invasive Fire Ant that has covered most of the Southeast U.S. since then?

Who would have thought that you can walk through many parts of South Florida and only see thousands of Cuban Brown Anoles where there used to be carolinensis everywhere? And they were only introduced 60 years ago.

>>But the most important fact is never discussed, the fact that South Florida and Florida as a whole is not conducive to reptiles from equatorial tropical regions.

Apparently it is not only conducive but nigh on perfect, since Varanids, Burmese Pythons, Chameleons, Phelsuma, Iguanas, Tegus, and other established species are all considered equatorial and tropical.

DR
Suboc.com

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