A scientist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences -- and a bit of a snake wrangler – is watching a Florida invasive species closely. Not just any snakes – snakes that can reach 18 feet long; Burmese pythons are not in North Carolina right now, but, as he told PRE’s Annette Weston for Weird Science, they likely will be eventually.
Dr. Mike Cove is an applied conservation ecologist and mammologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and has been researching the impact of the Burmese Python on the Florida Keys – in particular their destruction, in some spots, of the mammals they feed upon.
Cove's research includes Survey optimization for invasive Burmese pythons informed by camera traps.
Burmese pythons are believed to have been introduced to Florida's Everglades through the exotic wildlife trade; they were once sought-after pets and have thrived in the Everglades ecosystem.
As of April, the United States Geological Survey estimated the Burmese python population in Florida ranged from at least 30,000 to over 300,000. However, Florida Fish and Wildlife put the figure between 100,000 to 300,000.
In the 2000s, Cove was a zoologist in the Florida Keys, and that’s how, his interest in the invasive Burmese Python came about. For a more detailed (and hilarious) account of his encounter with the snake, and how he had to explain to a park ranger why he wasn’t wearing any pants, click on the blue “listen” button above.
Since 2020, Cove has been working in the Florida Keys, not too far off the coast from the Everglades, studying endangered small mammals that include the Key Largo Wood rat and Key Largo Cotton Mouse.
That research has shown that in places like the Everglades, the Python population has boomed so much that there are it's effectively a mammal desert. Cove said, “There's almost no mammals left because they've basically been just consumed.”
And it’s a problem, Cove said, that will eventually be a concern in eastern North Carolina.
More research: Mammal declines correspond with increasing prevalence of Burmese pythons at their southern invasion front in the Florida Keys.
“There's been a lot of research in Python ecology in North America. Right now, they're in the Florida Everglades, but there are documented cases of them expanding further north, north of Lake Okeechobee, even documentation upwards of Tampa and Orlando.
"As part of the research, a lot of ecologists have used climate models to try to predict the space use and capacity of the expansion of pythons.
"Not considering climate change and a warming environment, but just with the status quo, current mean temperatures throughout the southeastern U.S., pythons could survive and make it all the way throughout coastal North Carolina.
"It's not to say that this is a rapid expansion by any means, but they have shown that they are expanding northward in Florida, they're expanding southward, where I work in the Florida Keys, and we are still at the very early stages of learning how to detect them when they establish somewhere and then how to better manage them and get them out of the environment.
“So, it's not to cause concern or hysteria here in our home state of North Carolina, but there we have a lot of learning to do so that we could manage them before they slither their way north and that population expands northward.”
Read more: Telescoping prey selection in invasive Burmese pythons spells trouble for endangered rodents.
And if the creepy factor, particularly for those with ophidiophobia, isn't great enough at the sheer though of an 18-foot snake slithering across your path, mating season for the Burmese python may unlock new fears even for those that aren't snake phobic.
Pythons reproduce in breeding aggregations, or "mating balls."
“We actually found one in the Keys and a lot of snakes actually reproduce in this manner," Cove said, "Where the female snakes are larger than the males and they reproduce with chemical signaling. So, they have these really strong pheromones that attract the males and what will happen is that many, many males -- remember they're quite a bit smaller than the females -- will come together with the females and kind of wrestle each other and fight to get at that one female and it will create kind of like this mass breeding ball.
“So, typically it's a huge female ,the big reproductive females can be upwards of 14 to 18 feet long, and then slew of reproductive males that could be as small as 8 feet to upwards of 12 feet.
“The one that was discovered in the keys when I was working down there had one. She was 16 feet and there were four males with her and they ranged, I think from 6 1/2 feet to 10 feet.”
USGS says there have been no known human deaths from Burmese Pythons in Florida, and that all known constrictor-snake fatalities in the United States have been from captive snakes. However, those federal experts also say attacks are improbable but possible anywhere the pythons are people are both present.
