Everyone knows about the crocodiles in Florida, but not everyone is aware of the pythons that eat these crocodiles in Florida. I certainly didn’t know. There’s a national park here—Everglades. It’s vast, covering a quarter of the Florida peninsula. To the south, it’s covered with swamps teeming with alligators, its shores hide mangrove thickets, and to the north, tropical forests rise.
In the early nineties, keeping Burmese pythons as pets became fashionable. The juveniles seem completely harmless, plus they are calmer than other large reptiles, and they are not that hard to feed. Pet traders imported thousands of pythons into Miami and sold them for a pittance. At one point, baby snakes could be purchased for $20-30.
Buyers rarely considered what would become of their pets later on. And then they start to grow. A typical length for a dark Burmese python is 3.7 meters, and that’s not the limit. 5-meter individuals are not uncommon, and the largest recorded specimen of this species reached up to 5.7 meters. It’s possible that longer pythons lurk somewhere in the tropical swamps, but there’s no documentary proof of this.
A grown python can hardly be called harmless. Its jaws are lined with several rows of sharp, curved teeth. The reptile sinks its teeth into its prey with a deathly grip, wraps its entire body around it, and begins to constrict. Even a small Burmese python can inflict dangerous wounds, and adult individuals are capable of swallowing a leopard or an alligator whole. They are rather dim-witted, tending to snatch at anything within reach. However, they then digest it for months.
From captured pythons, remnants of mice, rats, rabbits, muskrats, raccoons, squirrels, bobcats, opossums, otters, deer, ducks, herons, and cormorants have been retrieved, and—in one particularly tragic case—a house cat named Francis. These exotic reptiles have almost completely exterminated the raccoons, opossums, and bobcats. Other mammals are visibly declining in numbers, particularly in areas with a high concentration of these snakes.
The population has long since crossed the threshold of 100,000 individuals. In other words, they are simply irradicable now.
Python meat is inedible, so hunting them is more a sport and for their skin. The mercury level in their meat is very high—up to 3.5 ppm. According to Florida standards, fish with mercury levels above 1.5 ppm are considered dangerous.
Quite remarkable. Living here all this time, I didn’t know that relatively nearby, we have these multi-meter, toothy pythons crawling around.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 