rather big chance to kill big snakes.
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/13491667.htm
Big chance to study big snakes
Prof, student part of effort to electronically track pythons in Florida
BRUCE HENDERSON
bhenderson@charlotteobserver.com
The top of the food chain is growing crowded in Florida's Everglades, where pet Burmese pythons set free by their owners have become alligator-wrestling predators.
"When they get to be 12 feet long or so, people get tired of buying another rabbit and just let them go," said Davidson College herpetologist Mike Dorcas.
Dorcas and one of his biology students, Shannon Pittman, were part of a team that captured some of the big constrictors this month -- then released them with electronic tracking devices.
Learning more about the snakes' habits will help biologists figure out how to wipe them out of the park, where they may threaten native wildlife.
The former pets adapt well to the warm, wet Everglades when released there. They reproduce fast, with a large female capable of laying 50 eggs at a time that hatch into 1 1/2-foot babies.
Python appetites match their size, which can reach 20 feet. A photo of a 13-foot Burmese python that burst after swallowing a 6-foot Everglades alligator made worldwide news in October. Another python ate a bobcat.
"The potential impact is really unknown, but certainly they have the capability of eating a wide variety of other animals" such as endangered wood storks, Dorcas said.
Biologists from the National Park Service, U.S. Geological Survey, the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory and Davidson captured four pythons in the Everglades early this month.
Finding big snakes in the park's long grass isn't as easy as it might seem, which leads to Dorcas.
His specialty is surgically implanting tiny radio transmitters that allow snakes to be tracked, usually to help their species survive. He's done that with Eastern diamondback rattlesnakes in South Carolina, rubber boas in the Pacific Northwest and rat snakes around Davidson.
In Florida, with Pittman's help, Dorcas anesthetized the captured snakes and, in the body cavity of each, implanted two transmitters and a device that logs their temperatures. They will be monitored for up to a year before being caught again and euthanized.
That, too, is no simple matter with pythons whose weapons are powerful jaws and crushing coils.
A 16-foot, 160-pound Burmese python was exhausted by the time Everglades team members wrestled it into submission. They put it in the trunk of Dorcas' rental car to rest, opening the door later to find the recovered reptile striking in 6-foot lunges.
"Somebody got it by the head and others got the rest of the body," Dorcas said. "The only thing you have going for you is that you hope you're a little bit smarter than the animal."
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