OXFORD PRESS (Ohio) 15 September 05 Snakes are over-collected as pets, or attacked by non-native fire ants (Michael Browning)
West Palm Beach, Fla.( Cox News Service): It is as if the results of the sixth day of Creation, when God made "every thing that creepeth upon the earth," were being canceled out, erased around the edges. Hordes of new people are putting some of Florida's humblest residents to flight, wiping them out in hundreds of thousands, a new biological survey reports.
"Amphibians and Reptiles: Status and Conservation in Florida," a just-published scientific survey edited by Walter E. Meshaka, Jr. and Kimberly J. Babbitt, paints a gloomy picture of what is happening to the state's "herpetofauna," those cool-blooded wriggling things that flourished here thousands of years before we showed up.
Crushed beneath our car wheels, buried by our bulldozers, poisoned by our insecticides and fertilizers, chased from our new back yards and patios as obnoxious pests, eaten alive by exotic red ants, over-collected by egotistical pet owners, Florida's snakes, frogs, lizards and salamanders face a future that is getting grimmer and narrower year by year.
"Florida has a greater biodiversity of reptiles than any place on the North American continent, just a wonderful diversity of creatures," said Bruce Means, executive director of the Coastal Plains Institute and one of the contributors to the book.
"Unfortunately they are under assault from wildly burgeoning human masses. I've been doing this for 44 years, and I've seen species like the Southern Dusky Salamander just disappear. I am not optimistic about the future at all."
A collection of articles by scientists who are experts in their field, "Amphibians and Reptiles " speaks openly of "persecution" and "extirpation," of some reptiles, particularly box turtles, gopher tortoises and kingsnakes. Scientific abbreviations like "DOR" stand for "Dead On Road," and mean the myriad squashings of frogs, lizards, turtles and snakes beneath our chariot wheels.
Some roads, like U.S. 441 across Payne's Prairie in Alachua County, and the Tamiami Trail that runs across Florida from Miami to Tampa, are virtual abattoirs, greased with the gory little bodies of "anurans," as frogs and toads are called scientifically.
"On Aug. 5, 1991 I stopped counting after 10,000," biologist Jim Weimer said in a 1996 interview, describing a single night on U.S. 441 across Payne's Prairie. "This was just one night. On May 2, 1991, there were over 5,000 Southern Leopard frogs killed."
Florida is growing by leaps and bounds. The population is already above 15.3 million and expected to reach 25 million over the next quarter-century. Every hour, 28 new people come to live in Florida, averaged annually. Every hour. There are billions to be made here, in development.
"But at what price?" Meshaka and Babbitt ask in their introduction. "Drives to work are unbearable, and one must drive farther and farther to see nature. . . . As space runs out, agriculture is now giving way to human development, the borders of which stand cheek to jowl with every major wetland, upland, and estuarine system in the state."
The condition of Florida's herpetofauna has become "drastically unrecognizable" from what it was 50 years ago. In short, these little frogs, snakes, lizards, salamanders, turtles and tortoises are behaving like croaking, slithering, wriggling, plodding-footed, extremely stressed little canaries in a sunny coal mine.
Their deaths are hastening the day when Florida, the richest habitat in America for animals, birds and reptiles, will be little more than a sterile monoculture, a "habitat for humanity" alone.
The report teems with figures and charts. It is interesting to learn that, enormous as Palm Beach County is, it is not the most biodiverse county in Florida when it comes to herpetofauna. That honor goes to little Franklin County, south of Tallahassee in the Big Bend, with 99 native amphibian and reptile species. Nearby Liberty County is second, with 98, and Santa Rosa County has 97.
Palm Beach County, by contrast, has only 69, Martin 44 and St. Lucie 46 species. The least biodiverse place in Florida, when it comes to these creatures, is DeSoto County, just east of Charlotte County near Florida's lower west coast.
We have four native salamander species here, along with 14 native frogs and toads, eight native lizards, 14 kinds of native turtles, 28 native snakes and one "crocodilian," the Florida alligator. Palm Beach County is fairly snaky, still. Only 11 counties in the state have more species of snakes than we do.
If you want to grasp the dizzying reach of these creatures' antiquity, consider the lowly box turtle. It has been in Florida since the Pliocene era, which began five million years ago. There are at least three subspecies here, and one island, Egmont Key, off Tampa Bay, used to have so many of them it recalls the time when early 18th-century French explorers in the Gulf referred to all of America as "L'Ile aux Tortues," the Isle of Turtles.
Egmont Key became a National Wildlife Refuge in 1974 but it is being eroded and lacks the funds to afford more than a single caretaker. The box turtle is generally thought of as "common" in Florida but this report suggests it may not be nearly as common as supposed.
The fate of the gopher tortoise is even more dire. This slow-moving creature lives in burrows on sandy uplands, the very sort of land most prized by developers. Bulldozers often entomb the hapless tortoises alive. Thanks to their slow metabolism, they may linger for months underground before dying of thirst and hunger. As many as 68,000 gopher tortoises have been killed in Florida over the past 12 years, according to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission figures, in order to make room for roads, houses, malls and golf courses.
"Current gopher tortoise regulations and conservation measures appear to be inadequate to sustain the species in Florida through the next century," writes Ray E. Ashton Jr. in the new report.
The grimmest article of all in the new book is "The Decline and Extirpation of the Kingsnake in Florida," by Kenneth L. Krysko and Daniel J. Smith. The kingsnake is a magnificent creature, coming in several colors, harmless, beautiful and sweet-tempered and therefore much sought-after by collectors, who pay up to $300 for one.
Traffic and drainage along the infamous U.S. 441 across Payne's Prairie practically wiped out the snake in the 1960s. By 1977 not a single kingsnake could be found there. Franklin County used to abound with them. Collectors captured practically all the kingsnakes along the Tamiami Trail west of Miami by 1995. A survey in 2000 found a single specimen, mortally wounded on a highway.
At present the only large population of kingsnakes lies around and to the west of Lake Okeechobee. Non-native fire ants are busily killing off these refugees.
More Grim Statistics:
• More than 77,590 alligators have been killed as "nuisances" because they invaded Florida back yards since 1977; the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission now fields about 5,000 calls each year from alarmed homeowners. The state lets private trappers dispose of them, and their meat and hides were worth nearly $3 million in 1999.
• The pet industry is thriving at the expense of wildlife. One Florida collector caught 4,194 cricket frogs and sold them over a two-year period. Turtles are captured and sold at the rate of up to 5,663 a year. Rattlesnakes are sought-after for their skins, meat and gallbladders, which are used in Chinese traditional medicine. About 20,000 snakes of all species are removed from the wild annually to be sold as pets.
The legendary Ross Allen of Silver Springs was one of the biggest entrepreneurs. Jolly old Ross Allen was a hero to countless children and Boy Scouts in the 1950s and 1960s. They loved watching him handle snakes fearlessly, and were thrilled to hear how many times he had been bitten by rattlers and survived.
They didn't know Allen was in the snake trade up to his neck. Over a five-year period Allen bought and sold 6,858 rat snakes alone, the new report says. Allen regarded the woods of Central Florida as a kind of infinite piggybank of valuable snakes.
The figures in the new book are devastating. From 1990 to 1994 collectors captured and sold 5,683 salamanders, 88,096 frogs and toads, 17,627 turtles, 189,712 chameleons and 85,311 snakes of all species. Eighty percent of the lizards, 76 percent of the snakes, 50 percent of the turtles and 27 percent of the chameleons came from Lake Okeechobee south. This is just the legal, reported trade.
There are some bright spots in the report. Alligators are thriving, even getting larger. The average "nuisance" alligator hide now measures 7.3 feet in length. And there are 1.26 million acres of state-protected land in Florida, off-limits to development.
But, say Meshaka and Babbitt, it's time to look at the future with clear eyes. These little reptiles and amphibians can't speak, no matter what the Bible says about the "voice of the turtle" being heard in the land. But they are trying to tell us something, the scientists declare:
"Rather than just waving our arms to attempt to slow the rate of human growth and habitat alteration, we should anticipate the worst and develop plans that have the potential to maintain current levels of biodiversity."
Snakes are over-collected as pets, or attacked by non-native fire ants