THE STAR (Toronto, Ontario) 03 January 07 Pythons take the park - Florida's Everglades Park is battling with pet pythons that have been released into its territory – and flourished (Todd Lewan)
Everglades National Park, Fla (AP): "SNAKE!"
Hearing this shout, Skip Snow slammed on the brakes. He and his partner Lori Oberhofer leapt out and took off running toward a pair of three-metre Burmese pythons.
Snow, a wildlife biologist, grabbed one of the creatures by the tail. "It made a sound like Darth Vader breathing," Oberhofer says. "Then its head swung around and I saw this white mouth flying through the air."
Snow saw the mouth, too – the jaws open 180 degrees, the gums an obscene white, the needle-sharp teeth bared in an almost devilish grin. He let out a shriek, then blinked, and when his eyes opened the python's head was hanging in mid-air, several centimetres from his own.
Oberhofer had snared the python in mid-strike.
"I snagged it right behind its head, on its neck," the 43-year-old wildlife technician recalls. "It was pure reflex – a defensive move. I don't know if I could ever do it again."
The python hadn't succumbed yet, however. "They defecate on you, on purpose, hoping to make you reconsider what you're doing," Oberhofer says. "It's not pleasant."
In the end, the humans were victorious: The snakes were bagged, trucked off to the Everglades Research Center, euthanized and necropsied – meaning their innards were dissected, then meticulously inspected, for the benefit of science.
So goes python control in the Everglades, a painstaking, around-the-clock slog against a voracious, foreign snake species putting native wildlife at risk.
Critters that pythons find most delectable – raccoons, possums, muskrats and native cotton rats – are already under attack, as are birds such as the house wren, pied-billed grebe, white ibis and limpkin.
Scientists also worry that these reptiles may soon start to feast on endangered native species.
"The Everglades doesn't work by itself any more," says Leon Howell, 58, who has been associated with the park for the last 21 years as a visitor, naturalist, fishing guide and park ranger. "This whole landscape has to be managed today: water, fire, exotics – you name it."
Without python detectives like Snow and Oberhofer, Howell figures there'd be pythons "all over the place."
A decade ago, Snow and Oberhofer spent their days reintroducing rare, native birds to the pinelands and monitoring "indicator" species, such as wading birds, alligators, bald eagles and panthers.
Then, in the late '90s, pythons began turning up. Pet owners were releasing unwanted snakes in and around the park.
But convincing the public that pythons are a danger to this otherworldly mosaic of marshes, sloughs, marl prairies and shadowy hammocks was, and still is, difficult.
Native to Southeast Asia, the Burmese python has come to the Everglades by way of the burgeoning global trade in exotic pets, shipped legally and distributed through pet shops and flea markets.
The Everglades isn't the only place with these problems. In November, a 1.5-metre Burmese python was found in the middle of a quiet Toronto street. And a venomous cobra has been missing inside a west-end rooming house since October, forcing an evacuation of residents.
It's just that Florida has been grappling with pet release more than most areas. Since 2000, slightly more than a million pythons have been imported by the U.S. for commercial sale. Nearly half are shipped to Miami, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service says.
Python hatchlings, which can cost as little as $20 U.S. at a flea market, are big sellers. "They're so darling when they're tiny," Oberhofer says. "Later, the big attraction at home is being able to watch your python kill something."
Soon, however, the python gets too big. Pythons, fed a steady diet of mice, squirrels and rabbits, grow 1.8 to 2.4 metres, or bigger, within a year. When this happens, owners often try to sell or give away their pets but cannot find them new homes.
Unwilling to euthanize their beloveds, many release pythons into the wild, unaware of the ecological havoc they bring.
As vast and threatening as these wetlands may appear, they have been so drained and abused by humans in the last century that a population of pythons, if left unchallenged, could take down this fragile web of life within a generation.
"It's a now-or-never thing," Oberhofer says. "We still have a chance, with the python's numbers being so limited, to do something. But if we let this go, we don't know how far the pythons will migrate."
One thing is certain, Snow says. "They'll eat just about everything that's warm-blooded."
Three years ago, a party of bird-watchers walking along the eastern Everglades' Anhinga Trail stumbled upon a death match of super predators – python versus alligator.
The gator, it appeared, had the upper hand: Its jaws were clenched on the snake, and for hours the gator carried its prey about, waiting for the python to go limp.
But it didn't. After nearly 30 hours the python wriggled free of the alligator's jaws and swam off into the high grass. "We looked for buzzards feeding on a snake carcass," Snow recalls, "but we never found any."
In February 2004, tourists at the Pa-hay-okee Overlook watched, stunned, as a python wrapped itself around an alligator, which countered by rolling over and grabbing the snake in its mouth and swimming off.
And then, last fall, the carcasses of a four-metre python and a two-metre gator that had squared off were found later floating in a marsh, the gator's tail and hind legs protruding from the split-open gut of the python. "Sometimes," says Snow, "pythons swallow things they shouldn't."
The Burmese python, one of the six biggest snakes, does not possess fangs and is not venomous. Rather, it is a sit-and-wait ambush hunter. Typically, it bites prey with six rows of needle-sharp, back-curving teeth, which dig deeper when its target pulls away. It then coils itself around its victim, squeezes the life out of it, and swallows it whole. Its hinged jaws enable the snake to open its mouth wide enough to accommodate humans.
In the wild, pythons often reach six metres in length and weigh more than 200 pounds.
One recent afternoon, Snow took a visitor into a field of chest-high cane grass to check on his latest invention: a steel-mesh trap fashioned especially for pythons. The trap has wide, PVC tubes on both ends (entrances for the big snake) and a cage within the cage holding a rat – python bait.
But there was no python. "It hasn't worked very well. We haven't caught any pythons with it yet – just small, native snakes."
Snow adjusts his cap, frowns, then gazes across the field, still but for a lazy breeze rustling the high grass. The stillness doesn't fool Snow. "I've walked right by pythons and not even known they were right next to me," he says. "Most times, you can't see the enemy until you stumble across it."
Snow suspects that female pythons lay down trails of chemical scent "cues" for suitors.
If scientists could develop synthetic cues, he says, the chemicals might be used to draw pythons into one of his traps. By Snow's count, 154 pythons were removed in and around the Everglades in the first 11 months of 2006, up markedly from the 95 caught in all of 2005, 70 in 2004, and 23 in 2003.
Does it mean pythons are multiplying at a faster rate? Or is it that the python detectives are just more effective?
Snow won't say – and he'd rather not hazard a guess at how many pythons are living, or breeding, in the Everglades. And then he trains his gaze to the west, looking for something other than the spiked grass.
Pythons take the park