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 ...
Or up north, the first to eat a lobster. In the north there is a tribe who’s name mean “ bark eaters” as during the winter the food woild be so scarce that the tribes barely made it through the tougher winters, and would resort to eating bark.
If a person is that hungry, that’s pretty desperate, but still to see a crab or lobster for the first time as food couldn’t have been easy lol
I keep thinking a new innovation will come along to combat these snakes.
A crazy idea, but some type of sound device that will drive the snakes to the surface or bait them to an open area, where they can be picked off quickly. Basically, some way to cause the snakes to move so they can be easier to locate and remove, while at the same time not destroying the existing ecosystem.
Hunting them one by one is never going to work unless you turned 10s of thousands of people into python hunters and have them hunt 24/7.
I have seen several videos made by the bounty hunters.
The pythons are long and large. Believe it or don’t but at night they are caught by hand and placed in a gunny sack. They are grasped up behind the head and seemingly handled easily into the sack
If you go to you tube and search there are python hunter videos to watch. I haven’t seen one in a while.
Years ago we camped in the Collier State Park surrounded on three sides by the everglades. We attended a nature program by the ranger. After it was over and everybody was gone, I asked her about Pythons in the park. She gave me a knowing look and said “we don’t talk about that”
How do they taste, pan fried?
Or start a rumor in China that the Everglades pythons are an aphrodisiac. They’ll all be gone in 5 years.
“That is a huge problem.”
Yep, one female Burmese python can lay up to 100 eggs every other year. So far 17,000 pythons have been captured in Florida and the trappers/hunters are losing ground.
Lots of great cowboy boots in that one
The headline reads like the pythons are using GPS data to nab the opossums.
That would likely cause an increase in the snake population. The Cobra Effect, an early defined example of perverse incentives:
The term cobra effect was coined by economist Horst Siebert based on an anecdote of an occurrence in India during British rule. The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
You mean like a python skin holster to hold my Colt Python Revolver?
lol would be better than bugs-
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