Posted on 01/24/2017 9:02:51 AM PST by tekrat
What Judas snakes, snake-sniffing dogs and even hunters from around the globe have struggled to accomplish may finally be pulled off by a pair of singing snake catchers from India: solving the riddle for finding Burmese pythons in Florida's Everglades.
In just two weeks this month, the two tribesmen from Southern India, working with theUniversity of Florida, caught 14 pythons. That included a monster 16-foot female holed up in the ruins of the old Nike missile base on Key Largo.
Irula trackers and biologists discovered this 16-foot female python, along with three other snakes, holed up in a 27-foot long, 18-inch wide shaft at the old Nike missile base in Key Largo last week.Courtesy of Joe Wasilewski
For perspective, consider last year’s second Python Challenge, an annual contest to draw attention to Florida’s python problem. The hunt attracted 1,000 hunters, most of them amateurs. Over a month, they managed to bag just 106 snakes. The year before, hunters snagged 68.
(Excerpt) Read more at miamiherald.com ...
For perspective,
Worth every nickel. Eradicate those monsters.
What ever works. Those snakes need to be eradicated.
I live in FL. And I am petrified of snakes. This scares the **** out of me.
I live in FL. And I am petrified of snakes. This scares the **** out of me.
The irula are an interesting tribe. They are an ancient remnant of the peoples who lived in Asia before the Dravidians like the Tamils or the Aryans came. They are relater to the Andamanesr and the Australoid peoples who live in Papua new Guinea, Melanesia and Australia
Comments at the article are a hoot !
Give a bunch of Florida boys $100 per snake and there won’t be any in a month.
Instead, we bring in foreign workers.
It says right in the article that 1000 Florida snake hunters caught 106 snakes in one month, while these two guys caught 14 in two weeks. It seems like they really are highly skilled workers.
There was a bounty.
Just hunting the snakes Americans won’t hunt!....................
The article does cover cost/snake. I’m thinking that if they would pony up a $100 bounty/snake (dead of course)there would be some local interest. I know me and my buddies would have been all over something like that back in the day.
Definitely. Not sure what they do with the snakes once they catch them. If they just killed them that would keep costs down.
These guys probably “injuned up” on, not just a few, 8 foot Eastern diamondbacks and some cotton mouths, etc.
Wonder if they took these bad boys outta the environment, too?
“most of them amateurs. “
There simply wasn’t much reward in it. There were also restrictions.
IIRC a congressman proposed using a similar method to get rid of the tree snakes infesting some Pacific islands. These snakes are much smaller and were easier to find, so it might have been a helpful idea. But I'm not sure that would work here because:
1. Who is going to send allow their kid to mess with a 16-foot constrictor snake that lives in a swamp?
2. Apparently these snakes are extremely hard to locate.
3. There already is a bounty on the snakes (less than $100) as well as a prize for catching the most snakes. These are attracting hunters but not anywhere near enough to solve the problem.
This seems like a losing battle.
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