By Melissa Segrest Green Right Now They started out as pets,
perhaps living in little boys’ bedrooms, being shown off to
friends and wrapping around arms. But then the Burmese pythons
grew, and grew, and grew (about 7 feet in a year), and they
weren’t so cute or easy to deal with any more. Not quite. Those
pet pythons grew — up to 20 feet long and 250 pounds –and they
eat anything from deer to bobcats to wood storks to endangered
species. Less than a decade ago, there were only a few in the
Everglades. Today, more than 100,000 of them are slithering
around south Florida, crushing what was an already delicate
ecosystem. Even though the state is aggressively trying to find
them and restrict the sale of them as pets, the python hunters
will never catch up. And the giant reptiles are spreading, south
into the Florida Keys and north into Central Florida. One
estimate predicts they will eventually inhabit about one-third
of the United States. And that’s not taking global warming into
account. If there’s any wisp of