'Dumped' Pythons Put Squeeze on Everglades Wildlife [LiveScience
2012-01-30] [Photo] Big Burmese python. CREDIT: Mike Rochford
Sixteen-foot-long pythons aren't just frightening movie
concepts, they are a real-life threat in the Everglades where
they are annihilating the park's mammal populations to
unrecoverable numbers, researchers now say. The pythons entered
the park from households that kept the snakes as pets, and may
also have been set loose by hurricanes in the '90s, researchers
say. Rangers started noticing the python's presence in 2000,
when two snakes were removed from national lands. The number of
pythons has skyrocketed, with more than 300 pythons being
removed from the Everglades every year since 2007. Researchers
don't know their true numbers but estimate at least tens of
thousands of the giant snakes inhabit the National Everglades
Park. "They turn up all over the U.S., but now they are
established and reproducing and apparently doing very well in
South Florida," said study researcher Michael D