The year-old, foot-long Asian pythons seem to be devouring everything that come their way in the dizzying array of native wildlife, west of the ever-expanding Miami metropolis.
Across the 1.5-million-acre ‘river of grass,’ the South Asian snakes topping 300 pounds can grow to 20 feet!
But, what are confusing are the pythons increasingly being found in Florida!
Ah! Simple! It is a popular $70 item at either reptile fairs or on the Web. True, buying them when aged only a year is fun, but in a few years when it reaches a room-spanning, cat-munching size, it prompts some owners to abandon them by the roadside.
Though it is not a problem, what is worrying the scientists and the conservationists is its impact on the near-tropical Florida park’s ecology, where it is unfolding alarmingly!
Narrating what the biologists have extracted from the stomachs of captured or dead Burmese pythons, Skip Snow, a U.S. biologist in Everglades National Park said,
We’ve found everything, from very small mammals – native cotton mice, native cotton rats, rabbits, squirrels, possums, raccoons, even a bobcat, most recently the hooves of a deer. Everything from a house wren up through wading birds and water birds, pipe-billed grebes, coots, egrets, limpkins, and at least one big alligator.
These Asian pythons perhaps are the most spectacular addition to what we called the Florida’s growing list of biological interlopers! It is posing threat to the region’s native life.
The still rapidly new terrain-colonizing pythons seem to be made really for invading.
What can stop this devastation are a stringent vigilance and an immediate crack down on the trade in such species.
And for this, the U.S. and state governments need to initiate swifter responses.
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