Most massive Burmese python ever caught in Florida - Press conference

welcome i'm ian bartozzak the python project manager here at the conservancy of southwest florida ian easterling biologist and kyle findlay our intern and this is the go ahead with your name for us sure ian bartozzak i a n b a r t o s z e k e oh do you need it do i need me to spell mine okay uh ian easterling i a n e a s t e r l i n g uh kyle finley k-y-l-e f-i-n-d-l-e-y all right okay so welcome to the conservancy's invasive species lab this team has been radio tracking invasive burmese pythons for about the last 10 years learning about their behaviors so we can find out methods to more effectively remove them from the ecosystem and we do that by implanting radio transmitters inside of our pythons and then we follow them around the landscape and the male pythons which we refer to as scout snakes lead us to these large reproductively active female pythons like you see here before you this female is the largest snake captured by mass by weight in the state of florida definitely the largest on our project by far and a very impressive animal and during necropsy here in the lab on this table with national geographic here we documented 122 eggs in this python an average clutch of eggs is of around 43 this is a little bit larger but imagine 122 of these developing inside of this python they were smaller when we caught her and she would have probably even put on more weight later in the season so all of these quite likely would hatch out into these small little hatchling pythons here's here's the cycle here's large female full of eggs that we captured before she had a chance to lay eggs and incubate them and right about now over the next few weeks eggs that are out there in the everglades are going to be hatching out and all these little hatchling pythons are are off to the races so for the true scale of the problem just kind of take this in so out of the egg these pythons are about as large as most of our native snakes and then look at the true scale of the problem that we have out there this is approaching 18 feet 215 pounds in weight it's a very impressive creature and this is what we are targeting with utilizing our male scout snakes it gives us an advantage out there in the wild so if the everglades system is a is a big haystack and we're looking for these needles our male scout snakes that are radio transmitted those are magnets that are helping us detect uh and locate and remove these female pythons so when also when this animal was necropsied here as we thought we've seen this quite a bit before here's the evidence that we found inside of her digestive tract these are hoof cores from an adult whitetail deer probably fairly large deer so these are big game hunters as you'd imagine at this size they are capable of taking down some considerably large prey and this is what we're dealing with here this is the why this is why we are learning more about this invasive animal because of the impact factor that they're having and we see this quite a bit often it feels like csi crime scene here in the lab wildlife crime scene and my team's here to tell you that often when we will do a necropsy on a python over 100 pounds we will find remains of white-tailed deer inside and many other species this is a hypothetical prey pyramid so artistic license here but at the at the hatchling size a little bit lower on the totem pole here they're eating mice rats and then they're very quickly graduating up the old food chain you know here is a male python just at the adult size juvenile to adult and so this one is already capable of eating further up the food chain and a python of this size is already capable of eating white-tailed deer and if you don't believe me look at the photograph on the on the screen over there that is a ten pound python with a six pound white-tailed deer fawn let's think about that for a second so snake of this size already capable of impacting white-tailed deer white-tailed deer are the primary prey base for our endangered florida panther so from the conservancy here with our wildlife hospital treating our native animals and conserving natural habitat this invasive species is a direct threat to our native fauna across the everglades bio region 1000 so yes if you have any questions we could take them but um i hope that framed it a little bit we've been doing this for about 10 years and we've learned quite a bit about the behavior of this animal and the moral of the story is don't underestimate the burmese python there have been many times throughout this project where we've said ah now we know something that very few people on the planet know well now you know that burmese pythons can get over 200 pounds in south florida 215 pounds 200 pounds used to be a bit of a line in the sand for us we always wondered i wonder if we'll ever catch a snake over 200 pounds so this crew this crew can tell you that this um this snake kind of tipped the scales how long did it take to capture this particular spike from when oh well so you spotted it until you actually when we spotted it until well um yeah we tracked out to dion uh one of our scout snakes and we got to his signal we were following it using an antenna we were very close to him when we heard kind of a russell a little bit off into the brush and look over we see a snake obviously significantly larger than ours so we just jumped on grabbed a hold of it um tried to restrain the head to prevent her from biting us and then it probably like wrestled her for about like 20 minutes just like well she was just yeah she she put up a pretty good fight she was very strong swinging her body around she took the uh she took her tail actually seemed to like ball it up it felt like in a fist and swung at uh kyle here he was able to dodge it but i looked right into it and she hit me squaring the nose um but yeah she i mean she she put up a good fight but we were able to restrain her and then you know take her out of the woods so she couldn't consume any more native wildlife i got a question okay an individual who's maybe not trained to capture one of these things could a snake of this size if the person attempted to subdue and capture it or whatever just think of this size kill about a bill so i have a corollary there it's probably more dangerous to drive in congress county than it is to wrangle with one of these snakes but you need to know what you're dealing with it's highly advisable this is a team effort right these guys are trained in battle um so this isn't their first rodeo we know what it's like to wrestle with a snake of this size and uh live to tell about it i got another question for you sorry for doubling up here um is there any evidence at this point over the 10 plus years that this program has existed that burmese pythons have um adapted especially to everglades environment versus their native range of southeast asia oh yeah well so what some of the findings that we have on this study is that uh we actually have a manuscript hopefully coming out soon on it um they use underground refugia so burrows made by gopher tortoises and armadillos other like you know underground structures they like to use them here we know they use them in the native range as well but it's that could be potentially helpful in assisting through the major threat for burmese pythons which would be like a freezing event so a lot of python mortality comes from you know cold events they're ectothermic cold-blooded so they need it to be a sub-tropical temperature in order to survive so if it gets too cold obviously they need a place to go and go for tortoises they dig those burrows and they stay at constant temperature so they can use those to probably hide in there but that's that's one way potentially another point to consider is um this is a product of the pet trade and so these animals were selected for early on as good feeders and good breeders so the genetics of this animal they already have a selection level event that's already occurred so way to look at is this snake is it's very much our everglades burmese python now it's one more reason why you know you can't take these send them back to southeast asia where they're vulnerable keep that in mind the genetics are a bit different it's a different beast now so evolution takes time as we know but there are likely small changes in behavior and other researchers will likely be reporting on that in the future so these are good questions but yes this is our large contrictor snake here now in the everglades and so should treat it as such are the males usually smaller than the females or generally yes generally the the females are like the egg factory so they have to get big relatively quickly right so they're making they have to fill their body with eggs so they get much bigger but we did actually in 2016 find the largest male as well you guys probably have already reported on it he was uh 16 feet and 140 pounds uh but we didn't know that male snakes got that big so it's possible for them to get that big but for the most part they are significantly smaller and how long does it kind of take to get to this pool size we don't really know how to age them because their age is determined by or their growth is determined by what they're consuming so the more they eat the bigger they get so you can't really tell how old they are but we would probably suggest this animal is over 15 like 15 to 20 years old for a greater physically removing them are there other things that the scientific community is looking at to produce their numbers perhaps introduce other pests i know there's problems so to your question currently there are no landscape level tools to control burmese pythons we're still all in the removal phase there isn't a reliable population estimate out there that's the 10 million dollar question it's going to take a lot of research to get at a number which we need because removal numbers don't matter too much unless you have a better understanding of what the background numbers are now what we can share from following our scout snakes around with some animals we've had familiarity following them for eight nine years or more so we look at them year by year are they finding a large female python for us are they finding many the snake dion that he mentioned that that located this python those pythons are another part of our team they're an extension of it that snake located this large 215 pound female and then four additional females over the next two months so that was from a high density zone now other snakes that we've tracked closer into town over many years they may go a long time without even finding a female or multiple scouts will come to that female so they're sourcing out searching out the largest most fit females for the most offspring we think and we're not getting them all we know that and this method isn't going to win the war but it's something that might be holding a bit of the line in some areas while we all develop better control removal tools so we're trying to buy some time we're not sitting on the sidelines we're very much in the game we've been doing this for 10 years now and this is very much a research and a removal program we we collaborate with a lot of researchers here on maybe looking towards the next line of offense against the python but until someone comes in this lab and shows us a better methodology to talk to find these large snakes off grid this this animals and was it kind of in the middle of nowhere now there are very effective contractors hunters able to cruise roads levees and find quite a bit of pythons the technology and the technique allows us to get off-grid and locate these animals um very frequently two more things where physically was she when you got her uh physically i i guess geographically uh she was found in the peking strand state forest so yeah so um west of fakahatchee and and east of naples are they evenly distributed through the everglades region or are there more in cyprus or unit or i mean if you were to do a heat map of where these triggers we have a heat map we could show you for our bioregion but um i we would say that the distribution seems uneven and there's probably be more evidence coming out in the future as we as we get more data there may be there may be evidence of multiple introductions that have occurred like inoculation sites of python we don't believe it was one spot one event in fact we like to say quite often it was if it was a multiple choice question how did the python get here was it a intentionally released b an escaped pet c some meteorological disturbance we would circle d all the above right and so in our bioregion where we're working maybe a hundred square miles which isn't that large for the greater everglades there are some areas like i mentioned with our scout snakes that seem to indicate the breeding background density is lower than in the area where this female came and we told you that that male got four additional females i mean he was the mvp the most valuable python for this season by far the reason why oh i was going to say a question for you for the average person the adrenaline that floats through you that maybe we can understand oh man i mean it's we've done this so many times to be honest with you it's uh it's very exciting but i can't even i don't know i don't have good context for it we look to get this guy excited each year this is old hat for for this crew kyle came to us already trained in the art of uh catching pythons but he doesn't really get terribly excited with a snake this snake i think did excite everyone it's just we misjudged how massive she was until she got back on the scale um so for me personally uh we don't we've caught so many of these over the years over a thousand pythons that until they get extra large it's like a five-hour energy drink you know once there is a little bit of adrenaline it's still in there it's like we caught a big snake because we get excited it's not the um there's no uh macho ismo factor on this it's we know that we removed another big egg laying female from the equation we have a lot of respect for these animals is a beautiful creature any way you look at it and they're here from no fault of their own and so um that's why for us it's humane euthanasia and how much science we can get from this animal there's still a lot of work to do for this python she had a partial necropsy with national geographic here documented the largest egg count ever in a python why does that matter because when people try to work these equations to get at the background population density those metrics are going to be important it's slow steady follow the science on this issue so we'll have other researchers come there's a lot to do this is such a large animal as ian easterling mentioned we caught the largest male python known in florida on this project it still shocks us he you can see that snake in the conservancy's carol and john walter discovery center he's freeze-dried he's there looking at a deer you can also see a snake skin on the wall of the third largest python we caught on this project and when those animals are stretched out fully and you're standing looking at them it's a it's another order of magnitude it's like the equivalent would be when you see an alligator in the pond and you see that head there and it looks big but then that animal gets out on the on the edge you're just like that's a dinosaur um that's kind of how it is with these animals if we curled her up in a circle you'd be like oh she's not that big but when you're putting it over the shoulder of three different people it takes it next level one of our anchors last night made the comparison that a giraffe is 19 feet tall yeah so if you stood the snake on his tail exactly same height i guess and you you may want to talk to katie and uh go to our discovery center and get some shots of um that python that's up on the wall it's one of them that the crew caught years ago pun intended it just shows you the scale factor that's what we're dealing with here look at the size of this animal and the question i would propose to you is what do you think this animal has eaten over the course of its life right it's it's quite likely a lot of this and then some probably more of those and here you go csi crime scene those are the hoof cores the last meal this animal had was a white-tailed deer in picky and strand state forest this is panther food and so they are you know we're not deer biologists we're invasive species minded but we're here to tell you that we see this often this is more of a thing than we realize right and so there are cascading effects on going through the greater everglades ecosystem how many snakes of this size there's got to be a larger snake out there in the everglades there's always a bigger snake we just haven't found it yet um but it'll come across everyone's radar screen sooner or later but if they're getting to this size what do you think it took to get to be this size these are big game hunters and as i mentioned at that size on the screen over there that is a 10 pound python with a six pound whitetail deer fawn this is a 215 pound python with the remains of an adult whitetail deer over 75 pounds most likely one of the reasons i asked about um you know whether or not the snake was adapting to the everglades is because i believe within the past six months a one would a 14 foot long one was cited in cape haze which you know according to the latest data is a little bit north of their geographic range in the state of florida i know you meant that mention that they've cross pollinated is there evidence that their range is creeping north both as a result of you know adaptations and you know a warming climate well they are programmed very well to our greater everglades ecosystem and they are on the move the furthest north i'm aware of for the for the core wild population is lake okeechobee but you'll always see satellites showing up you gotta wonder as i mentioned with that multiple choice question how they got there were they intentionally brought there you know there's a lot of reptiles getting moved around um that's just a matter of fact but on their own they'll do it just fine so yes you're gonna you're going well no i was gonna say also like one of the things that we've observed too is that they have been able to travel across marine you know marine you know salt water so if they are found along the coastline they can travel along the coast as well to get further up if they needed to so there's a lot of ways that a python could end up you know further north but it's the core population is like you said is kind of in the south florida make it smarter you would think but don't underestimate the python is the moral of the story as he mentioned earlier they have those um behaviors where they're using some we call subterranean refugia burrows cavities underground gopher tortoises nine banded armadillo those animals range all the way through the southeast so the a cold event will clearly check these animals freeze events will really knock them back and to that matter another vulnerability they have is with these egg clutches that i think that last tropical event that we had that put so much water on the ground these females need these eggs to be elevated or if they get inundated it will kill the eggs so the the female has to choose the highest spot possible this may be a bit tmi but it's something worth considering for how they're adapting to florida and let's just say how florida is pushing back and that's a really cool concept because these animals are getting checked at small sizes our team and collaborators with us geological survey big cypress national preserve we've documented that these hatchlings can be predated by cottonmouths that's in the literature and we've seen eastern indigo snakes eat these so the the story here is that the everglades is figuring it out she's trying to balance it back alligators will eat them um a host of our native predators will check python but clearly they're able to get to apex predator size quite often and um we have that now they are part of the system eradication does seem off the table but there's probably some hope in a localized control methodology over time but this won't be an easy fix as my director of science likes to say this is going to take a village it's going to take everybody isn't it one team's problem um you know we're we're three people here we've been getting after it the best we can but the state of florida the federal government everybody's putting resources where they can and now a lot of money is being thrown more into the research and so that will pay out in the future new techniques will be developed so um stay tuned cool calm follow the science on this issue how fast will they reproduce so there we have uh the literature says they can reproduce um they usually generally reproduce every other year so however you know we're working more on to the reproductive parameters and like how often they can reproduce because we you know we're learning more about it we're trying to count out all the follicles understand like how many eggs they can produce we did some rough math and said like over the course of their lifetime it could be up and over 500 eggs they make but that's you know that's a snake that makes it all the way to rough estimate this one had 122. you know how old was she best guess 15 plus 20 years rough math maybe 500 eggs or more now with this animal over time they all won't make it to adulthood that's clear like sea turtles they put they put their strategy is a lot of eggs overwhelm sort of you know storm the beach and uh see who makes it so we have some evidence that survival is quite low we still need more information as always we've tracked many hatchling pythons over the years to build a more complete picture about what's going on out there follow the science is the mantra but we've been using that information to better get after and remove humanely these animals and we couldn't do this without our partners we have funding from private philanthropy from the naples zoo conservation fund and south florida water management district and we also work with big cypress national preserve and the united states geological survey so when you put that all together that's a lot of heavy lifting but we know it's an extensive everglades but we feel like it's a win when we get when we can target animals of this size remove them from the bio region repeat each season this crew removes tons of python this was a two season 4 300 pounds or more snake came out since november add that into the tally 26 000 pounds of python have been come through these doors removed by this team over the years through these doors necropsied put back in the system um and repeat how long will it take for um a snake to replace this one in the ecosystem replace well i would say that the look where this snake was found we are still kind of learning more about that ecosystem specifically it's been heavily modified by people um and it's currently being restored uh the a lot of entities are working to restore that area to more natural hydrology and everything like that so we don't really understand that picture completely don't know how replaceable a snake this size is but we know that they do get up and over 100 pounds they do get up and over 150 pounds like and how many of those size class are out there they're doing the same kind of damage as a snake even this size so i know their growth their growth is based off of how much they're eating right so we can go incredible amounts of time without correcting correct so what we've seen from tracking hatchlings so this table is nine feet long in a year we've seen a hatchling of this size get to be seven feet in a year to give that its scale skinny seven feet but in one year from out of the egg as you mentioned if they're very good at eating they'll put on the pounds but same time reptile ectotherms they can go a very long time without eating that's an amazing survival strategy but much like a small python could you know ambush and get a rat another rat another rat it's probably worth thinking that these could do that similarly with deer no no reason why to think they couldn't in fact there's some papers out there that are suggestive of that right so we're just trying to raise the awareness more the why why are we doing this it's the wildlife impact factor here at the conservancy we have a native animal hospital they treat 5 000 native wildlife a year putting them back in the system meanwhile we have an invasive apex predator one of the largest snakes on the planet that's obviously up to no good so we need to be on it and we need help what the general public can do is you can be alert this you know clearly if the snake is larger than your arm without a rattle on the tail quite likely and it has patterning it's probably a burmese python very unlikely to see these small ones except for a certain time of year they're easily confused with some of our native constrictor snakes often the red rat snake but there is an app you have on the smartphone the eight i've got one app ive got one and there is a hotline that the florida game and fish commission monitors and that is 888 i've got one we're usually the crew that responds here around town um and this isn't to freak you out these animals aren't in people's backyards and uh this was this one was pretty remote where we found it but we do track and remove snakes on the edge of town quite often what does this correctly okay go ahead what this is like record-breaking discovery and the research you guys are doing here means for the conservancy and the area of naples what does it mean well this is one of many large snakes we've removed on this project i think we've lost count of how many pythons over 100 pounds this one just sort of raised the bar on just look at how big they can get and imagine how much bigger and this is the impact factor so this is raising awareness on the wildlife issue of our time i believe we believe for southwest florida for southern florida you're looking at the scale the problem the mass the weight we reported on 215 pounds what do you think it took to make a 215 pound snake out there that's a lot of native wildlife all of her friends all of her boyfriends out there doing the same we're on to them and so it's a cool calm follow the science on this issue we know we're not going to get them all but over time over a thousand snakes have come out of this region in excess of 26 000 pounds and so we we need help with this we need support we need people looking because we can't be everywhere and neither can the state of florida and so if you see one of these animals crossing the road and you know what's a python get out that smoke that smartphone call it into the hotline take if and if you can't get anyone take a picture at least note the location confirm it's a burmese python and that goes to say for other non-native wildlife as well florida has more non-native species of reptile and amphibian than most other countries of the world you know in the state of florida we have more non-native reptiles and amphibians than other countries so what that means is that we need everybody on point if it looks like it's not supposed to be here take a photo log it because this snake is very much out of the bag this had a long amount of time to get established in the everglades and so that ketchup is going to be quite likely impossible we're probably catching up on an animal that's been here in collier county for 20 years and she you're probably looking at her this could be one of the founding snakes from back then that was um you know intentionally released escaped pet who knows you're looking at the scale of the problem do you guys have any estimates of how many may be out there you know it's kind of hard to try well they say like throughout the everglades ecosystem the greater everglades ecosystem it's in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands but that's throughout the whole southern florida so don't don't have that's why we're doing the research we want to understand the population we're removing the snakes and then we're trying to figure out oh how many adult females are in this general area and then we can potentially you know help to model you know the background population so you mentioned it's hard to to track how um you know how old these snakes are just based off of their growth patterns but you believe it could be upwards of 20 years old that would be an educated guess yes based on what we've seen but that's shooting from the hip and captive records you'll hear about larger snakes in captivity they're force-fed you know they're out there this is you know this is out in the wild range this is a free-range python and a half like so on the east coast i mean the food is like declining so they're probably smaller snakes there's maybe there's not many of them on this coast so that means and there's but there's more habitat for me more wildlife larger wildlife would that make this a fatter snake than you might find like the east because of like they haven't really been over here quite likely yes i i think this is a bit of a different theater over here in the western portion of the state the greater everglades the river of grass out east um you know they may have been there earlier on the scene and you're you've already seen them kind of decimate some of the the meso mammals more so and because the you can talk to some other researchers of what they're seeing in the diet we are still seeing more meso mammals more raccoons possums and smaller ones and white-tailed deer on the eastern everglades i think it's primarily alligator and um birds and the smaller ones are showing up with more rodents so the maybe it was a different system all along or maybe that's a reflection of what those animals have already done for a decade or more out there but uh or there's might be other factors i do think down the road the genetics question will become answer a lot of um the genetics will answer a lot more questions like it might even give us a sense of how all these are we'll be taking tissue samples of these animals um the crew will be filling up some vials and you know these little cryovials are gonna when we do a complete necropsy renegade multiple tissues sample these animals we're going to bank these somebody probably smarter than us down the road is going to be able to tell us what's going on here we have samples of these animals from back in 2012 over here and we've been logging them for a long time and there may be a way with some genetic um investigation to place this animal where she sits here in our local population it's probably not too far to say that say we removed this fema we removed this female this season but two seasons out we find a python this size with some genetic detective work we might take a sample track it back that we already removed this snake's mother in the equation it might work like that detective wise if we ever want to get to that point i'm just trying to tip the hat to some other techniques but there are no landscape level tools yet there are no um there are no traps that will allow this snake to put itself in the box the common denominator is that it takes a human to put hands catch these animals and then humanely euthanize them once you've done your complete proxy what will become of this magnificent carcass well you see this really neat specimen here um florida gulf coast university put this together um why don't we just you know put this on the table real quick here at the other side yeah we don't really go there because this animal is vulnerable in their native range and slippery slope especially the conservation organization if you start putting value on the hide so i don't really want to speak to that much more we get as much science out of them as possible in fact it's pretty exciting this might be tmi but this was sent to florida gulf coast university forensics lab their beetle colony so we will likely some some poor intern will probably have to glue all of these bones together like it took for this one but it's a fabulous specimen and so we get a lot of students to come in here and look at this and so i mean um this was a snake that we caught in february 11th of 2014 we know her personally i was caught on my birthday and she's now a teaching tool so we'll get as much science there's a there's a visiting researcher flying down from cincinnati next week to do some more measurements on this animal um so we will get as much science we owe that to these animals i mean they're impressive beasts we will get as much science out of them as possible and if there's any meat we'll return it back to the system and put it back in the equation you say the uh they don't we we don't have to worry about these in our backyard they say that about bears too but yet as the man takes over the the wildlife's habitat we see these people the bears returning to their habitat will we see a python so all i can say is we fear what we don't understand this crew has had their hands on thousand snakes here and um we're more afraid of driving through town during season than we are dealing with burmese pythons but we don't want to sugarcoat the issue either because their ranges are expanding that's why people need to be alert there could be impacts with domestic wildlife operations we've seen it before these animals are apex predators they're not interested in us they're interested in wildlife for sure and that's why we're interested in them is this species out of the pet trade now uh meaning they're not you're not allowed to have them they're they're conditional no they're i don't know no in fl not no not anywhere in the united states florida the state of florida has these as a conditional species now but this animal is very much out of the bag the question is what's next you know and we have a vibrant pet trade and so there are things that can be perfectly programmed to florida and why are they here because you know we had many ports of entry here in in florida we have a temperate and sub tropical climate or tropical subtropical climate and a vibrant pet trade perfect storm for um one of the largest constrictor snakes on the planet to uh escape and become established so you're looking at the scale of the problem and we appreciate your interest on this and we'll take some more questions if you'd like and yes um you've mentioned that they're threatening the native range what's their native uh what's the issue in the native branch uh people actually uh people habitat loss um you know there are native predators like leopards and tigers that might take a burmese python but for the most part it's habitat destruction and human hunting for meat medicine and skin any evidence of uh panther interacting with we haven't seen anything um it's yeah we haven't seen anything the interaction that we're most worried about right now yeah would be that they're taking all their prey out from under them and but he's going to show now that there is evidence of them consuming smaller felines so to that point asking if have they um as anyone as a python shown to eat a florida panther yet not yet but or vice versa right i haven't shown you i haven't seen that yet but i'm sure somewhere in the everglades something really interesting has happened but what we can share is the evidence we do have here from this lab table this happens quite a bit often so in this petri dish these are additional claw cores just like the hooves of the of the white tail deer that did not digest and if you look at them closely they're re-curved they're very sharp so i remember the day where ian easterling was cropped seeing this python and he's like i felt something sharp and when we took them out and cleaned them off these are claw cores from a feline we were at first like wow that could could that be a florida panther and the state biologist came in and this was from an adult bobcat probably a 40 pound bobcat and in that specific python she was only 100 pounds and it had a bobcat and a an opossum right behind the bobcat so they don't discriminate and um so just last week you know a bob a 40-pound bobcat i mean smaller panthers are in that size class it uh in my estimate it has occurred and it will occur further so stay tuned [Music] for all apex predators there seems to and remember we have the american alligator out there and crocodiles and so those battles you've seen those battles go both ways python wins sometimes i'm gonna put my money on alligator um that seriously that is uh that is our everglades guardian and uh that's something to keep in mind a lot of times people call when there's a gator in the pond you know on the edge of town that gator's probably running frontline offense uh for us on the python problem so keep the wagon in the moat keep the dragon in the moat well said who can go longer without eating alligator or python that's a good question no we would probably like to know that so report back when you get that gonna be close answer yeah no this you just you really can't make this stuff up here florida is wild and it's super cool and we're living with this wildlife and we need to keep that in mind obviously the burmese python is uh the fault of the pet trade and people you know releasing them or escaped and whatnot so um that's on us but uh we are very much living with wildlife we as you know we're pushing into their habitat and so as more people come in florida and wildlife still looking for a place to be you're going to see more of these encounters the way is to just sort of learn how to live with the wildlife make the right choices whatever that may be i know fwc is tightening down a little bit on the pet drain does the conservancy have a position about the way that should go um well we're focused on the burmese python problem and so all i can tell you is with action we're after this issue raising awareness on it while you're here while you're why you all are here and that's enough for us to keep focus on but yes you know we're supportive of those type of measures that um this is a learning lesson here this snake is out of the bag the burmese python and so um i think it's trying to tell us something here and um you know but this one has become established for decades and so that's something to keep in mind when we're all looking about how many are out there how are you getting them all it's like this animal's had 20-year plus head start yeah more um in our area and we've been doing this for 10 years to the tune of 26 thousand pounds a thousand snakes in a hundred square miles a thousand snakes out how many more are there is that ten percent is that one percent we don't know we're not sitting waiting to figure out we're actively pulling them out working with research partners to see if we can better get at that metric and uh move the science forward whereabouts right here um it's more of an indentation it could actually could be not well you know that a lot of i mean this is first it's just the egg mass that's where the egg mass is that's where the egg mass starts yeah she's got a pregnant there are others where you can see battle scars from wrapping up with prey i saw one up here yeah when they when they would wrap you know the prey is gonna if they have these sharp bobcat claws they're gonna put up a fight but this is a just for if this animal's been out in an ironman for decades it's a beautiful beautiful animal i mean they're very good at what they do um yes but we have seen other large snakes that look like there's a bit of a semi-circular scar that maybe an american alligator attacked them at some point i've noticed the camouflage pattern looks darker than you see in the pet trade too it's variable because um when an animal is about to go into shed they get darker they get darker so we have seen high yellow we've seen even alternate patterns show up we've seen quite a range of colors but yes if you're familiar with them i mean it takes uh it takes a keen eye to start teasing out the burmese python pattern these giraffe saddles are kind of a giveaway but we've seen a lot of color variation from almost as dark as this table to high yellow not albino but we've seen um which might be an expression from the pet trade showing itself or that natural variation expressing it's it's really cool we really feel on the front lines of this uh maybe even evolution on sometimes as we're tracking these hatchlings and we're seeing who predates upon them we're seeing the everglades push back and that's a cool place to be and there's not many examples of that on the project most of the time we're seeing the evidence of what they're doing bad out there but we've also documented multiple times of native wildlife pushing back our native snake species eating python there is still a uh a mammal predator out there that we haven't determined yet that seems to be doing quite damage on these pythons but the small transmitters we put in them get chewed up and spit out and we don't see this happening whereas when they get captured by a snake and swallowed one day we'll be tracking burmese python then the next day we're tracking an endangered eastern indigo snake that's super cool so what's your best guess ah the best guess guesses probably ask the scientist to guess it's not no don't say that i'll put that in there um it's quite likely the opossum or raccoons are raccoons yup and just uh if you search what google like opossum eating snake on you'll see that they they look unassuming our only marsupial left here in north america but at that small size they're probably doing a number but then you know we've seen a lot of opossums show up in um in burmese pythons as well so the everglades is figuring it out it's happening real time this is the true scale of the problem i was gonna say think about like anything that eats probably a baby alligator probably would eat a baby python too they're similar raccoons i mean i imagine they get into the eggs a lot wading bird great blue herring comes along and sees one of these it's gonna you know snatch it out so you know yeah it's it's exciting i mean who would have thought we'd have one of the largest snake species on the planet here in south florida and we may have more burmese pythons here in south florida than southeast asia geographic yeah here for the necropsy was coincidence or well we invited them for the necropsy we you know we're like hey come come take a look at this and uh they were here to document you around no no maybe next year but no i i think that you know this this will get you in the door gentlemen would probably know the species what is the largest snake in the world kyle tell them the largest one largest largest and longest heaviest is the green anaconda and then the longest would be the reticulated python what size are we talking about reticulated python i mean it's skeptical on the actual size but i've heard up to 30 feet and then the anaconda we have to look it i mean there's a green anaconda out there that would probably put this snake to shame on the table biomass yeah the green anacondas are very massive are you guys so you mentioned you're going to be taking some files for genetic analysis people who are going to be doing those genetic analysis are they going to be comparing uh florida pythons to native range burmese we have not identified those people yet and that's we're banking the samples so that when we do get that that research affiliate that research group together that we will have the specimens needed to address those questions but sky's the limit on what we can do with the genetics and we put these tissue samples we've done this with a study already on paternity of pythons that paper came out as a partnership with u.s geological survey last year basically how many males can sire the offspring we didn't know this in the pet trade there it was so i could cut to the chase and tell you that we know they can at least have the genetics of two males in an egg clutch in a single clutch but probably quite a bit more right so that's what the genetics can tell you the dna does not lie and so i think if we put more time and investment in this it'd be pretty fascinating to fit this female python into the tree of python here at least for southwest florida my hypothesis would be is she was probably one of the founding stock early on 20 years ago or just a really good eater over the years or both and so i mean that would fascinate us i think to see how all the genetic um the genetics we've collected pair up we could probably get to a better population metric in our opinion looking at what the genetics can tell us then some model from how many snakes we caught on the road and whatever we need to get down to the order of magnitude basically we don't need to know there's 735 in an area we need to know is it seven hundred thousand seventy thousand seven thousand that'll get us closer to the mark um as we keep on this um problem so and that genetic analysis will allow you to basically count the number of generations back to theoretically so we're speaking of these land potential future landscape level approaches needed and that's going to take investment over time this clearly this is not going to this problem is not going to solve itself overnight um so we're going to have to put the money to the problem and get after it unless we we want to let this problem just kind of go on its own you know but you're looking at the scale of the problem here and this team has been on it for 10 years actively learning how the behaviors of these animals where they put themselves and how we can get better after them and we're working with research partners to help them design better landscape tools over that you should time of is we're spending 16 billion to restore the everglades right it's one of the most ambitious restoration projects in the history of the world it's on our doorstep right we have the western everglades here and you have this in the middle of the western everglades so you can imagine a future is is there a future where the western everglades is silent right you can imagine going out and there's no wildlife there's no bird life because this apex predator is just devouring what is out there or it's an everglades that's slightly more imbalanced probably still with this snake but not at the volume and level characteristics that are if we if left unchecked and not developing a better tool will be the future so this has a lot to do with the help of the ecosystem and the team that's working here has really done an incredible job with really hard-earned labor as you can see of of getting knowledge that we'll develop a better tool we hope in the future and sharing and collaborating with so many partners because this is an all-in situation there's no one group that's going to solve this problem but you know i think if you frame it from an everglades perspective it's a huge element of a healthy everglade system or an unhealthy system and this is rob mohair ceo and president of the conservancy and uh this is the leadership that's behind this effort uh for getting after this invasive species and we couldn't do it without the internal conservancy support private philanthropy support from naples zoo our partners here another ngo think about that we have two ngos coming together here to get after this problem strengthen numbers it takes a village everybody working together to better understand and come up with techniques to remove this invasive apex predator from the greater everglades pretty ecosystem

Channel: Conservancy of Southwest Florida

Views: 945,106

Keywords: burmese python, invasive species, burmese pythons, florida everglades, everglades python

Id: R-duTqrqh5M

Length: 48min 6sec (2886 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 22 2022