Posted on 02/19/2023 5:18:15 AM PST by where's_the_Outrage?
After nearly five months of waiting, an alarm activated on Michael Cove’s radio, a sign his study was working.
To hunt pythons, an invasive predator in the Florida Keys, Cove and fellow researchers have been strapping GPS collars to opossums and raccoons. When one was eaten by a python in September, researchers programmed the device to notify them from within the snake’s stomach....
According to a ScienceDaily study, the number of raccoons, opossums and bobcats in the Everglades all dropped by at least 87 percent between 1997 and 2012. The same study found that marsh and cottontail rabbits and foxes had disappeared from the area.....
Cove developed a new approach. He said he bought 30 GPS collars for about $1,000 apiece, then caught opossums and raccoons in the area and bolted a collar around their necks with a leather strap in late April. Cove said the collars don’t place animals in greater danger of being eaten.
Researchers programmed an alert to sound when the collars stop moving for more than four hours, Cove said. That could signal that a python consumed the collar-wearing mammal and was resting to digest....
Last week, however, the researchers confronted an obstacle. Their radios buzzed, and they tracked down the GPS collar. It was sitting among a python’s feces, researchers said, likely because the snake had swallowed and digested the collar.
Forty other animals were outfitted with collars, but researchers have encountered other roadblocks, Cove said. Six of the animals have disappeared, and a few others were struck by cars, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
There’s plenty of money in bounties. They aren’t easy to catch or shoot. Also they reproduce at a rate that would take an army to catch up with. Even then they’d just bounce back eventually anyway.
.....”Also they reproduce at a rate that would take an army to catch up with”.....
That is a huge problem.
why don’t you come down to florida and show them how to do it instead of preaching from a keyboard... 😁
Rabbits and foxes are pretty much gone. Small deer are big targets as well.
They have one. And it’s pretty good one too. But not nearly enouhg for what hunters have to go through to,get the snakes In such a hostile and difficult environment there
Troy Landry on the gator hunting show goes to Florida during the off season for gator trapping, and he works with a Floridan there and they get a bunch of snakes and make a pretty good wage. they capture the snakes a,I e thouhg for the show. But the bounty is dead or alive o. Snakes, and I think they pay just as much
Not pr3aching, just pointing out some facts. Health reasons prevent my going there and hunting the snakes, Otherwise I would love to be there doing it as it pays pretty good.
As a fairly easy exercise I would have you drive eastward on the Tamiami trail in Southern Florida. On the right most of the whole way is a canal and across it an impenetrable mass of vegetation. That is the visible python habitat. A man can’t walk through it much less see and kill the pythons.
There are bounty hunters that get paid for killing pythons. It’s easy money. They go out at night and find the snakes on paved roads, laying there soaking up the heat. Killing them is then simple.
They don’t waste time in the jungle vegetative jumble
Yup- I’ve seen folks talking about how snakes have just decimated certain areas of native species. Exotic fish are also quite a problem now too inmthe everglades.
Dang! That’s a big stinking snake. Troy Landry and company catch some big ones but that is hugh!
they’re trying all angles and options available to solve the problem without jeopardizing the safety of other hunters...
it’s a dangerous area to begin with...
5-foot alligator found inside Burmese python in Florida
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Gator got more than it could chew.....
Declare them a pest species, open up a year-’round season (Florida may have already done this; I wouldn’t know, myself) and place a bounty of oh... $200 per dead snake. Send that cajun dude from Louisiana to help out.
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