In the Florida Everglades, Burmese pythons have caused so much damage to the ecosystem that the state now pays people to hunt and kill them. Fox4 reported that a wildlife conservancy has a new strategy for combating this invasive species: implanting "spy pythons" with microchips and tracking their movements.
The hope is that the male spies will lead researchers to female pythons and their nests, allowing them to eliminate one or both.
"The females can lay hundreds of eggs at a time so if we can get the females either out of the population, or get their nests out of the population that immediately cuts back on hundreds of new pythons," said Dr. Kelsi Stovall, a veterinarian at the Glass Animal Hospital at the Naples Zoo, who is performing the surgeries, implanting the microchips in anesthetized male pythons.
While this may sound like a pretty outside-the-box strategy for dealing with an invasive species, extreme measures are needed to combat the Burmese pythons, which have no natural predators in the Everglades (apart from retired real estate agents).
The pythons began to appear in the Everglades sometime around the turn of the century, likely after being released by people who had purchased them via the exotic pet trade. Now, their population has ballooned to somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million, according to the Los Angeles Times, and they have decimated several native species, including rabbits and foxes, which they have virtually eliminated entirely.
One of the reasons that the pythons have been so difficult to deal with is their incredible resiliency. "These pythons can live for almost a month with no water. They can live off the water that sets on their scales in the morning. They can go for almost a year without eating," one reptile expert explained.
Other strategies for reducing the python population have included encouraging people to view them as a food source. Python meat apparently tastes very similar to chicken and is already a popular protein across Southeast Asia and China.
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