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 ...
Yep - watching the areas Troy Landry and crew gO into looks like really tough areas. Bruce on the show cracks me up- he looks,like the last person that would be tromping through such dense cover hour after hour, but I guess he manages pretty well and seems right at home there. It’s amazing to me how there are camps and “roads” of sorts way out in the middle of nowhere in the swamps. And also,how far away from the original places that were “studying invasive species” which got destroyed in the hurricanes and released a bunch of snake evidently. Not sure if they were the sole source of the prob,em, but certainly contributed to it.
I’d also love to be down there hunting iguanas too. That seems to be another problem Florida is having. Could keep pretty busy doing that for a long while it seems. Not sure if they have bounty on those or not though?
BTTT!!!
He does go there during off season when gator hunting closes. I think they get paid for the lb, which amounts to around $100-300 or so. Hey catch them live though. Seems like Too much Hassel, and danger. Bring em in dead for the bounty. The swamps are huge, and without an army of hunters, the problem likely won’t be solved by hunting alone. But at least it could be cut down some.
Now. If we coild just teach the skunk area there to prefer snakes over deer and such, the problem could be doen away with as there are so many skunk apes living there lol
This is the type nonsense Democrats produce.
$1K just for the collar plus multiple thousands more dollars in personnel, equipment, vehicle, etc costs to kill one python.
Anything but open the areas to year round python hunting because doing so would admit a benefit from private gun ownership.
not sure of a bounty but there was a chef in that area that wrote a cookbook containing different recipes for cooking iguanas...
I read somewhere recently that the females are the monster ones like the one pictured and the males are the smaller of the species.
Evidently from what I’ve read, the males in fairly large numbers will be attracted to a single female which is why sometimes they track the males hoping they lead them to a monster female like this one.
Would be nice if there was a breed of Dog that hunted snakes.
Sounds like detection is a problem.
What is the weapon of choice for python hunting? 12 gauge?
I’ve seen a few videos of hunters trying them for the first time- the consensus was generally not favorable it seemed (though some did like the taste ok). One guy even brought in a chef who knew how to cook it, but the fella still didn’t like it. Might be something you have to grow up eating to appreciate.
They do have dogs that track the snakes, and in one show, it showed the dog alerting the hunters to the presence of rattler snakes that were near invisible in the brush. So they can help keep the hunters safer too. The day they used the dogs, they did pretty well too, a.ertingmthe hunters to snakes that were down in holes that otherwise wouod have gone unnoticed.
One issue is the females, when carrying eggs, will go underground or hide......so when the hunts are going on it's mostly the males that are caught above ground. It's a hug undertaking getting to the female ones.....just in size alone as most are not caught so they grow to these huge monsters.
Just sayin'...
or desperate...
the first person to eat a blue crab had to be hungry ...
If they’re invasive, illegal and displace native wildlife, I’m pretty sure they qualify for amnesty under current Biden border rules. I’m not sure what Florida is allowed to do about them. Maybe send them to New York?
There's things other than snakes what eat possum:
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