North to south it covers more than a hundred miles. It is essentially a wide, shallow, extremely slow-moving river-sometimes called a “river of grass”-that flows from Lake Okeechobee across the southern quarter of the state. The Everglades, a vast subtropical wetland, is unlike any other place on earth. That’s when I understood that these snakes were amazing-and we were in trouble.” “I looked and looked, but I could not see the front end of a snake that I was holding onto. “I was holding the back end of the snake, and the front end was in some shallow water,” Mazzotti said. Frank Mazzotti, a scientist who has been studying them for more than a decade, told me about a time when he and his colleagues caught a python, attached a radio transmitter for research purposes, and released it. They are good swimmers and can stay underwater for half an hour or more. Their black-brown-tan camouflage fits perfectly in the marsh, as well as in the higher sandy ground that makes up another part of their range.
A problem with trying to count them is that they’re what scientists call “cryptic”-hard to detect. Estimates run from 10,000 to perhaps hundreds of thousands.
No one knows how many pythons are out there now. Scientists say that the snakes are responsible for a recent 90 to 99 percent drop in the small mammal population in the national park. A 2013 study found that, of a group of marsh rabbits fitted with radio transmitters and released into python territory, 77 percent of those that died within a year had been eaten by pythons. Given the extremely stretchy cartilage joint connecting their jaws to their heads and their ability to extend their windpipe, snorkel-like, outside their mouths, so they can breathe while their mouths are entirely occupied with swallowing-that’s a lot of animals. For 25 years they have been eating any animals they can get their mouths around. Probably, at some point, python owners who no longer wanted to care for them let them go in the Everglades.īy the mid-1990s, the pythons had established a breeding population. It is now illegal to import or purchase Burmese pythons in Florida. In Miami, a center of the exotic pet trade, dealers used to import them from Southeast Asia by the tens of thousands. Native wildlife species had never seen them before, and may not recognize them as predators. Large constrictor snakes have not existed in North America for millions of years. Larger animals are seized wherever is convenient, and crushed and strangled in the coils before and during swallowing. They kill smaller animals by biting them on or near the head and suffocating them as they are swallowed. The pythons are mostly ambush hunters, and constrictors. About two feet long when hatched, Burmese pythons can grow to 20 feet and 200 pounds they are among the largest snakes in the world. The marsh’s weird outdoor quiet is the deep, endlessly patient, laser-focused quiet of these invasive predators. The raccoons and marsh rabbits and opossums and other small, warmblooded animals are gone, or almost gone, because Burmese pythons seem to have eaten them.
This article is a selection from the July/August issue of Smithsonian magazine BuyĪs recently as a century ago, the Everglades covered most of the peninsula south of Lake Okeechobee, which was nearly twice its current size. Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12
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