7. INVASIVE SPECIES: Republicans rail against exotic snake restrictions (03/24/2010)

Email this StoryPrint this StoryPatrick Reis, E&E reporter

With an 18-foot skin laid out before them, Obama administration officials defended the need for more regulations on foreign pythons to skeptical House Republicans.



The Interior Department is proposing to classify nine large snake species as "injurious" under the Lacey Act, a designation that would prohibit their import and transportation across state lines.



The designation is intended to prevent future snake outbreaks like the one currently gripping the Florida Everglades, where escaped Burmese pythons have created a self-sustaining population numbering in the tens of thousands.



The pythons threaten Florida's ecosystem and could move north as climate change warms the southeastern United States, Bert Frost, the National Park Service's associate director of natural resources, stewardship and science, told members of the House Natural Resources Committee yesterday. The snakes are already swallowing up rare species such as the Key Largo wood rat, the blue heron and the wood stork.





An American alligator and a Burmese python locked in a struggle to prevail in Everglades National Park. This python appears to be losing, but snakes in similar situations have apparently escaped unharmed, and in other situations pythons have eaten alligators. Photo by Lori Oberhofer. Courtesy of the National Park Service.



"These invasive large constrictor snakes are highly adaptable to new environments and opportunistic in expanding their native range," Frost said while sitting behind a massive python skin brought to the hearing by an official from the South Florida Water Management District.



Republicans Rob Bishop of Utah and Henry Brown of South Carolina protested the proposed trade restrictions would curtail personal freedoms, devastate the pet industry and do nothing to combat the population of snakes already in the Everglades.



"How is putting thousands of Americans out of work and destroying thousands of small businesses going to eradicate Burmese pythons in South Florida?" Brown said.



The designation could even exacerbate the current infestation by pushing breeders whose snakes have lost their economic value to release them into the wild, said Shawn Heflick, a herpetologist from Florida.



To address the current infestation, the service is experimenting with snake traps, pet owner education programs and even thermal scans that would allow researchers to detect the cold-blooded creatures through differences in temperature with the ecosystem around them.



The administration is also exploring ways to prevent invasive populations from becoming established, Frost told the committee. Under the current system, regulation of invasive species is reactive, and even then, the process of restricting further imports can take years, he said. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working to develop a multi-stakeholder group to rapidly evaluate the risk of species before they are imported.



To deal with snakes in the Everglades, Bishop proposed opening the park to hunters. Hunting is allowed in the Big Cypress National Preserve to the park's north, but only agents under federal contract are allowed to take snakes in the park.



Frost said using agents in the Everglades National Park has led to the capture of more than 100 pythons, while private hunting programs have caught fewer than five. Frost said private hunters had caught fewer snakes because pythons are rarely their primary target.



Bishop countered that hunters are hampered by regulations prohibiting them from using guns and restrictions on the vehicles needed to take them deep into the wetlands where the pythons are found.



"We have a land-use policy, and we have a problem, and the two don't meet," Bishop said.
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