Famed snake trackers from India latest weapon in Florida war on pythons

Miami Herald ^ | 1/26/2017 | JENNY STALETOVICH

[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.

[Rebelbase]

“They won’t be back, due to injuries from eroded karst landscape and other issues.”

I know exactly of which you speak. Like walking through a mine field in the dry season. Can’t imagine walking in it when it’s flooded.

[Daffynition]

Too chicken to cross the road

[Daffynition]

[Cronos]

Well, "Indians" are all of them

The original peoples in the subcontinent were these Australoid (or sometimes people say Negritos, though they aren't related to the Negroes) -- who despite superficially looking like the black Africans are as genetically separate from them as a the Irish are

Then came the Mon-Khmer peoples, now restricted to tribal peoples in northern India (Orissa-Bihar-Bengal), then the Dravidians (southern India and also the Brahui tribe in Pakistan -- I hold that the Dravidians are the descendents of the Harappan civilisation on the indus valley), then the Indo-European tribes in the north,

you also have the Tai-Kadai people in the north-east of India who came around the time of Christ, the Tibeto-Burmese who came to the same place a bit later

Also the mixing of the Tocharian, Kushans etc. in western India/Pakistan

[pnz1]

Can you just shoot those things?

[wideminded]

One ol’ fisherman I talked to said he lives in the Glades and all this snake shit is made up so the wildlife service and botanists can get government grants. Fake News? You decide.

Assuming Wikipedia is correct in saying that over 2000 pythons have been removed from the Everglades since 2005 (there is lots of evidence that a significant number have been found by people who are not botanists or in the wildlife service) and apparently pythons lay a large number of eggs and are very good at hiding and there are a lot of hiding places in a swamp, and because this seems like an ideal environment for the snakes to reproduce and there definitely are a lot of people who keep pythons as pets and some of them have to have been stupid enough to release their snakes into the Everglades, I decide that it is not fake news and it is probably very serious problem.

It does sound weird that a guy who lives there has never seen one, but it does not seem statistically impossible.