Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
Speaker 1: bog bitten in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't
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Speaker 1: you stand with on X. All right, folks, before I
Speaker 1: even introduce what we're um, this question is going to reveal.
Speaker 1: This question will reveal what we're talking about. But before
Speaker 1: I introduced who we're talking about it with, I just
Speaker 1: gotta get one of these. I gotta get something out
Speaker 1: of the way. Um, Dr Bob Reid, Is it true
Speaker 1: that a Burmes that day? Is this really? They found
Speaker 1: a Burmese python on that had the remains of three
Speaker 1: different deer and its lower GI tract that was That's
Speaker 1: probably the publication I'm proudest of because I got an
Speaker 1: entire peer reviewed publication out of a single poop. And yeah,
Speaker 1: so this was a This was a python that was
Speaker 1: picked up. It was about a forty eight kilo python,
Speaker 1: so a little over a hundred pounds, and it had
Speaker 1: a fourteen pound poop inside it. And in that poop
Speaker 1: were the hoofs of three different deer. Um, and my
Speaker 1: buddy Scott bo back we we uh, he had his
Speaker 1: buddies collect deer legs and he made a graph of
Speaker 1: hoof size of the deer that his friends were shooting
Speaker 1: and correlated with the cuff size to the tier that
Speaker 1: we're in the poop. So we figured out how big
Speaker 1: they were and how many had eaten and uh yeah, um,
Speaker 1: one dough and two fons all in one python poop
Speaker 1: from the everglades. Do they feel that that one python
Speaker 1: had been carrying those like to the hooves last a
Speaker 1: long time? Like maybe it'd be like if you opened
Speaker 1: up an alligator and found a bunch of old dog
Speaker 1: collars because they just never moved through the tract. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so is that it's like is that a life's collection
Speaker 1: of deer or is that last week's dear it so
Speaker 1: carroton doesn't get digested and we you know we pass
Speaker 1: hair too, um, so hair and hooves get past. But
Speaker 1: it looks like this snake was actually impacted. That it
Speaker 1: had eaten a dough that was of its own body mass,
Speaker 1: followed by two fonds that we estimate with thirty of
Speaker 1: its body mass and Basically it just got plugged with hair,
Speaker 1: and so we think this thing was probably gonna die.
Speaker 1: But based on the fawning period in Florida and when
Speaker 1: the snake was found, we think that have been in
Speaker 1: there for a maximum of about six months. So that's
Speaker 1: about maybe six months worth of eating deer, including during
Speaker 1: the fawning period. Alright, with that cover, because I had
Speaker 1: to get that out of the way, tell everyone to
Speaker 1: tell tell everyone what you what you do. We've had
Speaker 1: other fellers from the We've had other fellers from the
Speaker 1: U s G S. On. I think you're our third
Speaker 1: U s GS guest. Alright, was that right? Honest? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, at least Brant Mixel U s
Speaker 1: G S does research on waterfowl. Yeah, Bran, Brant took
Speaker 1: me salmon fishing last summer. Okay, so you guys run
Speaker 1: in a pack, and I feel I feel like we
Speaker 1: had another U s G S guy on. We've had
Speaker 1: two more the no Steve's he's Wildlife Services. Who you're
Speaker 1: thinking of is our c w D expert Brian Richards,
Speaker 1: he's USGS. So go ahead, Bob, all right, Um, while
Speaker 1: I'm with US Geological Survey based in Fort Collins. I'm
Speaker 1: the chief of the Invasive Species science branch. We've got
Speaker 1: a bunch of researchers who work on everything from invasive
Speaker 1: vertebrates to invasive plants. But my history and expertise is
Speaker 1: in snake biology, and I've done a lot of work
Speaker 1: and overseen a lot of work on Burmese pythons in
Speaker 1: Florida and the brown tree snake on Guam. That's actually
Speaker 1: where the majority of our staff are is out on Guam,
Speaker 1: and then we're we dabble in other invasives. Were working
Speaker 1: on big old tegue lizards that are in southern Florida
Speaker 1: as well, and invasive water snakes from the Eastern US
Speaker 1: that are introduced into the Western US. But a big
Speaker 1: part of our work has focused on invasive pythons in
Speaker 1: the Everglades for the last decade. Can you can you
Speaker 1: tell people about the limits of what you're allowed to
Speaker 1: talk about? Um? Sure? So, like, which I guess encompasses
Speaker 1: you know what your mandate, what your professional mandate is.
Speaker 1: I don't want to put it in terms of a negative,
Speaker 1: but we could sell it as a positive, like what
Speaker 1: is your mandate as a researcher? So the U s
Speaker 1: Geological Survey is the research arm of the Department of
Speaker 1: the Interior. So we do the science, and we stick
Speaker 1: to the science. And then it's the job of agencies
Speaker 1: like the U S. Fish and Wildlife Service to take
Speaker 1: the science and turn it into regulation um and policy.
Speaker 1: And so we try to keep those two shops really
Speaker 1: separate so that the policymakers aren't unduly influencing the researchers
Speaker 1: and vice versa. And so I can talk about anything
Speaker 1: in regards to biology or research results, but I can't say,
Speaker 1: for example, that the State of Florida should engage in
Speaker 1: some particular policy because that's not related to the science.
Speaker 1: Would you be able to say something like Janice should
Speaker 1: cut that mohawk off. You know, the headphones help with it,
Speaker 1: the help help keep it down. Otherwise it would look
Speaker 1: like some punk rocker from London And like seventy two.
Speaker 1: The log cabin kind of throws it off too, that
Speaker 1: he's sitting in a little log cabin with it just
Speaker 1: makes I'll just get real mixed signals from that haircut.
Speaker 1: I can't stop talking about it. I'm all mixed up.
Speaker 1: Oh you know what, I just have another USGS guy,
Speaker 1: Yanni do you remember the Grizzly bear, the guy that
Speaker 1: did the population modeling for Yellowstone Grizzlies. He was USGS. Oh,
Speaker 1: there was the lead of the inter agency team, Frank. Frank,
Speaker 1: help me out, Bob, you know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: You're you're putting me on the spot. Now I'm blanking.
Speaker 1: I work with chat Dickinson, um who does grizzly work,
Speaker 1: but he's also the U s g S Firearms program manager. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was a great show. People to want to go
Speaker 1: want to want to learn a lot about bears, should
Speaker 1: go back and find that episode. Um, all right, so
Speaker 1: let's keep let's keep plugging along. Here's here's my here's
Speaker 1: my next Burmese python question. And now for people listening.
Speaker 1: When you're scrolling through social media and all of a
Speaker 1: sudden you find a picture like eight dudes staying in
Speaker 1: the road holding a giant snake, you're probably looking at
Speaker 1: a picture from Florida from the Everglades of Burmese pythons.
Speaker 1: It's like it's just the same. The media like certain
Speaker 1: stories about it, where you'll see on social media a
Speaker 1: Burmese python gagging on something giant that is trying to
Speaker 1: eat that's a popular one about someone catching one that
Speaker 1: was bigger, the biggest so far biggest, this biggest thing
Speaker 1: is a popular story, and people staying in the role
Speaker 1: to holding up a big one is a popular story.
Speaker 1: And so people, I think, have this this awareness of
Speaker 1: how these giant snakes are colonizing, taking over impacting a
Speaker 1: large swath of Florida. But we're gonna dive in here
Speaker 1: to sort of what's really going on. How did it
Speaker 1: come to be, how bad is it? Is there an
Speaker 1: end in sight? Is this normal now? Um? And and
Speaker 1: get into some of that. But my first question laying
Speaker 1: this out, and this is I'm always puzzled by this.
Speaker 1: How do we not know exactly where they came from
Speaker 1: and how they got cut loose? If you can look
Speaker 1: at the genetics, can't you trace it to a population
Speaker 1: bottleneck of one or two snakes? Or is it more
Speaker 1: complicated than that? Um, it's it's a little more complicated
Speaker 1: than that, but maybe not that much. So one of
Speaker 1: the problems is that there hasn't been any good range
Speaker 1: wide genetic analysis from the Native range, so we can
Speaker 1: say that you tell us about the Native ranges. The
Speaker 1: Native range is a big swath of Asia from UM
Speaker 1: Indonesia up to southern China and then all the way
Speaker 1: over through northern India, um barely into Pakistan. So it's
Speaker 1: a really wide ranging species, lots of different habitats, and
Speaker 1: no one's really gone through to sample from that whole
Speaker 1: range to figure out UM where the Florida pythons specifically
Speaker 1: are from, although we can say that they're almost certainly
Speaker 1: from Southeast Asia based on the site's import records explain
Speaker 1: that UM well so UM all boas and pythons are
Speaker 1: on the sights to list, which means that countries that
Speaker 1: are trading them have to report the numbers. And that's
Speaker 1: because python skins are such a big commodity. And then
Speaker 1: they extend that to UM live animals as well, and
Speaker 1: we imported tens of thousands of pythons from Southeast Asia, UH,
Speaker 1: mostly during the eighties and early nineties dead or live,
Speaker 1: live live. We brought in UM I think a hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand between what was it nineteen eighty and
Speaker 1: about nineteen No, about two thousand five for what for
Speaker 1: the pet trade, So hundred and fifty thousand, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: these wereld So that's where it just gets more complicated.
Speaker 1: These were one of the most popular snakes during that
Speaker 1: time period, and it's partially because they are cheap as
Speaker 1: hell and they're impressive. You know, it's a really it's
Speaker 1: a gorgeous snake. And I've got to admit that when
Speaker 1: I was a sophomore in college, I bought a hashling
Speaker 1: Burn's Python and so you're part of the You're part
Speaker 1: of the problem absolutely. I mean I was the last
Speaker 1: person you want buying a Python that's going to get
Speaker 1: that big, because I was not doing it for good reasons.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I like snakes a lot, but um, I
Speaker 1: was doing it because it was going to be impressive
Speaker 1: and it would probably get girls to my dorm room.
Speaker 1: And yeah, but I mean, like of what caliber? I mean, well,
Speaker 1: I mean this was Berkeley, so you know there it's
Speaker 1: pretty uniformly high. I'm not saying it. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: it worked. But you had a theory that if you
Speaker 1: could say, would you like to come up and see Um,
Speaker 1: I don't even want to say it. Yeah, at that
Speaker 1: point I was as weill had to try anything. You're desperate,
Speaker 1: you got a big party thought. Yeah. So anyway, Um,
Speaker 1: we know we brought lots of Mover, and we know
Speaker 1: that there were also lots of importers based in the
Speaker 1: Miami area, and I gotta, we gotta, we gotta back.
Speaker 1: I can't leave that hanging them. What did you take
Speaker 1: yours down and let it go on the Everglades or
Speaker 1: died of old age, or you sold it like what happened?
Speaker 1: I had mine all the way through my master's degree
Speaker 1: at Arizona State, and when I left Arizona State to
Speaker 1: start my PhD at auburn Um, I gave it to
Speaker 1: a friend of mine whose garage had just burned down
Speaker 1: and he lost his whole snake collection. So you're helping
Speaker 1: that rebuilt. Yeah. By that point she was about fourteen
Speaker 1: and a half feet, about pounds, and I had to
Speaker 1: go out in the desert and shoot jack rabbits for
Speaker 1: her um because she was just eating me out of
Speaker 1: house and home. Huh okay, So go on. So Florida, Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: So Southern Florida was an epicenter for both importing and breeding.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of controversy about how the snakes
Speaker 1: became established, and so some people say that it was
Speaker 1: individual snakes that were released by pet owners in the Everglades,
Speaker 1: you know, trying to find them a nice home after
Speaker 1: they got too big for their their cages. And then
Speaker 1: there's people who say that Hurricane Andrew knocked down a
Speaker 1: bunch of these importer and breeder facilities and released snakes
Speaker 1: into the Everglades. That that was reported widely, including in
Speaker 1: the in the New Yorker. Yep, yep. And I've been
Speaker 1: looking for evidence of that for a decade and there's
Speaker 1: so far I found no one who can provide eyewitness
Speaker 1: accounts of these facilities that got down, that got knocked down,
Speaker 1: and lots of snakes are known to have escaped. Couldn't
Speaker 1: have happened, absolutely, But it's interesting because some of the
Speaker 1: folks who um are advocates for pet owners say, hey,
Speaker 1: don't blame us, it was Hurricane Andrew knocking down the importers.
Speaker 1: But I just think it's a really silly dichotomy because
Speaker 1: we know the reason they were there. They were there
Speaker 1: because we imported them and bred them, and by one
Speaker 1: means or another, they got out. So there could have
Speaker 1: been not could have been, probably was, but potentially dozens
Speaker 1: of release occurrences. Yeah, it's possible. Um, there's a paper
Speaker 1: that a couple of friends of mine put out recently
Speaker 1: showing that there's actually, uh, potentially two different populations that
Speaker 1: were established, one that started in the southern Everglades, one
Speaker 1: that started closer to Naples that got slight differences um
Speaker 1: in d na um. But again they're still probably from
Speaker 1: Southeast Asia, and we know that we brought them in intentionally.
Speaker 1: What was the first what year was the first known
Speaker 1: instance of natural wild reproduction? Two thousands? So um uh.
Speaker 1: There's a paper out there that models generational times and
Speaker 1: it suggests that they might have been established in the
Speaker 1: mid eighties at low numbers in the Everglades, and then
Speaker 1: if so, then Hurricane Andrew would have just augmented it
Speaker 1: a little bit. But the first hatchlings were found not
Speaker 1: until two thousand and even then there were people who
Speaker 1: were trying to say that, oh, that those are just
Speaker 1: individual releases, and that was true for most pythons until
Speaker 1: about two thousand three two four, when they started finding more.
Speaker 1: Up until that point, it was easier for folks to say, oh,
Speaker 1: that we found a python, But pythons are from tropical
Speaker 1: areas and they can't survive in Florida, and so this
Speaker 1: must be a recent release or escape, Tell me why,
Speaker 1: and you can go on as long as you want.
Speaker 1: Who cares about these snakes, Like like, why is it
Speaker 1: such a big issue that they got caught loose? Well,
Speaker 1: it's not. It's not like legitimately a human safety issue. No, no,
Speaker 1: we we've actually reviewed that, and the risks to humans
Speaker 1: are extremely low. Um. We collected reports of so called
Speaker 1: python attacks from free ranging pythons over the course of
Speaker 1: a decade, and we found five instance is where people
Speaker 1: had seen a python strike at a human. The python
Speaker 1: only made contact on two of those occasions, only broke
Speaker 1: the skin on one, didn't try to constrict on any
Speaker 1: of them. And all of those attacks were on professional
Speaker 1: biologists who are walking through flooded areas in the Everglades,
Speaker 1: And generally that's not something we'd want the public to
Speaker 1: be doing anyway, in a place that's full of gators
Speaker 1: and cotton mouths. So the chances of some visitor to Everglades,
Speaker 1: and there's a million of them a year, being attacked
Speaker 1: and killed by a python is extremely low. It's not
Speaker 1: to say it couldn't ever happen, but in the scope
Speaker 1: of potential risk to humans, it's pretty much a non factor.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean in twenty years there's bad. I mean,
Speaker 1: in twenty years of known wild reproduction, there's been zero
Speaker 1: human fatalities, no human fata. Is not even a human attack,
Speaker 1: um that I'd consider serious. Now. You know, during that
Speaker 1: time period, there have been people killed by captive Burmese pythons,
Speaker 1: but still not many of those, and those are spread
Speaker 1: throughout the U. S. And Canada. Yeah. Yeah, And he's
Speaker 1: got a question for you. He was we need to
Speaker 1: back up a little bit because he's got a good
Speaker 1: question for you. All right. UM, My question was if
Speaker 1: is the pet trade and then the affinity for the
Speaker 1: snake hides is big in the snake's native range as
Speaker 1: it is here in the United States. Um, So let's see,
Speaker 1: the great majority of the trade and snake skins has
Speaker 1: reticulated pythons, and that trade is in the you know,
Speaker 1: million skins per year range um globally, and Burmese pythons
Speaker 1: are in much less demand for the skin trade. Um.
Speaker 1: But it sort of just I'm gonna loop back to
Speaker 1: the human attacks things. So the reticulated python versus Burmese
Speaker 1: python question. Reticulated pythons are actually known to attack humans
Speaker 1: regularly in the native range, whereas even Burmese pythons in
Speaker 1: the native range aren't. They're very different animals. There is
Speaker 1: a study of a tribe in the Philippines and of
Speaker 1: the adult males reported being attacked by reticulated pythons, they
Speaker 1: were multiple instances of fatalities, and so that there are
Speaker 1: sort of personality differences among these giant snake species. Um,
Speaker 1: we can only find two records of a Burmese python
Speaker 1: ever even eaten any kind of primate, whereas reticulated they
Speaker 1: just consider a biped as another suitable prey atom. So
Speaker 1: go back to your question, let me know if I
Speaker 1: answered it. Okay, Well, no, the hides, you're talking about
Speaker 1: the hides. That was that answers the hides. But is
Speaker 1: there a pet trade as well over there in its
Speaker 1: native range for those snakes. Well, what's happened is that
Speaker 1: there there's still a pretty big trade in people who
Speaker 1: catch pythons opportunistically in the fields, and then these animal
Speaker 1: traders will come around periodically and buy them from them,
Speaker 1: and those animals might go into the pet trade, might
Speaker 1: go into the skin trade, depending on where they can
Speaker 1: get more money. But they've also found that they can
Speaker 1: farm pythons for both skins and meat, and they've come
Speaker 1: up with really intensive production of pythons in the last
Speaker 1: few years. Um. And they can get them to eat
Speaker 1: things with some amount of training as juveniles that they
Speaker 1: wouldn't eat in the wild. So things like you know,
Speaker 1: chicken necks that are waste products. Um, they can get
Speaker 1: the pythons to eat those. They're they're making giant sausages
Speaker 1: and feeding these things too pythons and getting really high production.
Speaker 1: I mean, that might be another Western hook up, but
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. Man, that sounds like a horror moving
Speaker 1: movie location in the making. Right there at the place
Speaker 1: I don't want to go see is the python factory.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I know, it's just like it Just it's
Speaker 1: kind of the more you think about, the less advertising
Speaker 1: it becomes. Man. Yeah. Well, the you know, the traditional
Speaker 1: way um was definitely um, not great. They would they
Speaker 1: would take a pretty big snake, stick a hose in
Speaker 1: his mouth and basically fill it up with water and
Speaker 1: then stick a rubber band around its head and it
Speaker 1: would suffocate and the water stretches the skin out and
Speaker 1: makes it easier to skin afterwards. So it was you know,
Speaker 1: definitely inhumane, would not pass any kind of animal care
Speaker 1: laws um around here. But apparently they're now going to
Speaker 1: much more humane methods of euthanizing animals for the skin trade.
Speaker 1: So tell me why. Okay, it's not a people thing.
Speaker 1: Explain what the real problem is. So the real problem
Speaker 1: is that snakes are phenomenally efficient predators. And one thing
Speaker 1: that people don't realize is that snakes can exist at
Speaker 1: very high densities. And we don't realize that because they've
Speaker 1: got low individual detection probabilities. That means we don't see them.
Speaker 1: So in your backyard on any given day, you might
Speaker 1: see the same damn squirrel over and over again. That
Speaker 1: squirrel is a biological exhibitionist. He's letting you see most
Speaker 1: aspects of his life. But meanwhile, that's a that's a
Speaker 1: great term, man. Yeah, I mean look, I mean, come on, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's like here, I am a barking at you. In
Speaker 1: most part to the US, there are twenty snakes for
Speaker 1: every score at least, but how many of them do
Speaker 1: you see? In Kansas? There can be over a thousand
Speaker 1: ringneck snakes per hector. Really, yeah, and that's one species
Speaker 1: of snake. And so when you look at the total
Speaker 1: number of snakes in an ecosystem, they can exhibit massive
Speaker 1: top down effects on pray species. And in a regular ecosystem,
Speaker 1: those prey have evolved with those snakes, and so there's
Speaker 1: a trade off. You know, you don't have those pray
Speaker 1: species going extinct usually because of snake predation, because they've
Speaker 1: got behaviors that allow them to escape it. But when
Speaker 1: you take something like a Burmese python and dump it
Speaker 1: in the everglades with animals that don't have those kinds
Speaker 1: of adaptations to a large ambush foraging snake, um you
Speaker 1: can have really big effects. So UM, I just got
Speaker 1: some data from Christina and Romagosa. There's a colleague at
Speaker 1: the University of Florida, and we've been sending her all
Speaker 1: of the stomach examples from the two thousand one pythons
Speaker 1: that our staff have dissected, and as of now, we're
Speaker 1: at seventy one native species that have been identified from
Speaker 1: python guts. Oh it's it's it's forty five birds, twenty
Speaker 1: four mammals, two reptiles. It's everything from rends to alligators.
Speaker 1: And do they cannabalize each other? No? Now, the only
Speaker 1: way that a python is gonna need another python is
Speaker 1: if they start at opposite ends of the same prey
Speaker 1: item and then basically they keep going. Really that happens, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it with that spaghetti noodle hold on. This is then
Speaker 1: known occurrence. It mostly happens in captivity. I mean I've
Speaker 1: had it happened with with captive snakes that I've had.
Speaker 1: They got so they got a rabbit and they start
Speaker 1: eating the rabbit. Then they meet and then one of
Speaker 1: them just keeps eating and eats the other one too. Yeah. Basically,
Speaker 1: when a snake starts eating, they keep going. Yeah. Um, discussing,
Speaker 1: I mean, the the range of the range of species
Speaker 1: is is pretty phenomenal. I mean, you've got the things
Speaker 1: you'd expect, like rabbits and raccoons, um, most of the herons,
Speaker 1: but then they eat surprising numbers of rails. And a
Speaker 1: rail is another bird that we don't see that often, right,
Speaker 1: you know, they're really good at hiding, but snakes are
Speaker 1: able to find them easily. Um. There's some records that
Speaker 1: are just bizarre. They got a frigate bird out of
Speaker 1: a python that was in the middle of the everglades.
Speaker 1: Even though frigate birds don't land on the mainland in Florida.
Speaker 1: They only land on the offshore Mangrove Islands. So how
Speaker 1: this snake ended up with a frigate bird in it
Speaker 1: three kilometers from the coast is a mystery. Um. They
Speaker 1: can eat very large meals. So the biggest meal is
Speaker 1: a fawn from a python over near Naples, and the
Speaker 1: fawn was a hundred and of the snake's body mass.
Speaker 1: What so it is successfully ate it? Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's that's like you know, me eating a two
Speaker 1: pound cheeseburger. It's like you eating Janice yep with with
Speaker 1: no hands and one sitting. Yeah. So they're there, ah there, disgusting,
Speaker 1: phenomenally efficient. You have such a freaking ENDOTHERM bias man, dude,
Speaker 1: real bad, real bad, real bad man. You wouldn't even understand.
Speaker 1: It's like real bad. Can you explain when an ENDOTHERM biases? Please?
Speaker 1: It means Steve's scared of scaling and slimy things. I think, No,
Speaker 1: it's not scared, it's repulsion. I have repulsion about Like
Speaker 1: I'll tell you where it came from real quick. You know,
Speaker 1: in high school and you gotta dissect frogs, yep. I
Speaker 1: opened my frog up and I found a giant mouse
Speaker 1: inside my frog and it had like psychological impact. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I had a psychological impact. I've never recovered. Wow, never recovered, Bob.
Speaker 1: I think we should keep going down the diet alright,
Speaker 1: the diet route, but I think beforehand, maybe like, just
Speaker 1: can you explain how a python hunts and how it
Speaker 1: gets like, you know, eight to z of how he
Speaker 1: gets his prey scots. That's a good question because the
Speaker 1: rent one is confusing to me, like a rent is confusing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we think of pythons as being primarily ambush foragers,
Speaker 1: and some people think that me and stage sit somewhere,
Speaker 1: but really they're sequential ambushers. So they move around in
Speaker 1: the environment until they detect praise scent, and then they'll
Speaker 1: investigate that area until they find an area with higher
Speaker 1: concentrations of praiscent, and then they'll set up, often perpendicular
Speaker 1: to a game trail. And yeah, they may then sit
Speaker 1: there for ten to fifteen days without moving. But they
Speaker 1: have heat sensing pits on their lips, so they can
Speaker 1: use vision and the body temperature of an approaching prey item,
Speaker 1: and to some degree they'll use smell but that's pretty
Speaker 1: minimal in inducing strikes. Do you have any idea how
Speaker 1: far out they can sense the heat? Uh? You know,
Speaker 1: there are papers on that, but I would say that
Speaker 1: it's unlikely it's going to be effective more than about
Speaker 1: two meters in most environments anyway. And that's that's going
Speaker 1: to be about the limits of a strike for a
Speaker 1: big python anyway. Um. And then they they strike, they
Speaker 1: grab hold and constrict the strike. Though is it usually
Speaker 1: like do you guys know like where the strike is
Speaker 1: aimed on on animals or is it just anywhere to
Speaker 1: get ahold of it? You know, my buddy Scott's been
Speaker 1: looking at that on some deer that have been regurgitated,
Speaker 1: and it does seem like they're more likely to strike
Speaker 1: it up in the chest thorax region than other places.
Speaker 1: But really, if a big snake hits a prey item,
Speaker 1: it usually knocks it off balance and the snake then
Speaker 1: retracts and as soon as it's it's got one good
Speaker 1: wrap around that prey it, Um, it's not going to
Speaker 1: be able to get away. Um. And then death is
Speaker 1: usually not caused by suffocation. UM. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: interesting new evidence now suggesting that the pressure is so
Speaker 1: strong that it raises blood pressure above the level that
Speaker 1: the heart can pump against. So it basically just stops circulation.
Speaker 1: And if you think about it, once you stop circulation
Speaker 1: to the brain, the animal can be unconscious really quickly.
Speaker 1: And so um it. We've learned a lot, probably just
Speaker 1: in the last five years about some of the things
Speaker 1: on how pythons constricting, what causes death. My buddy Scott
Speaker 1: Boback took rats and then inserted little tiny balloons inside
Speaker 1: their chest. This is these are muthanized rats with a
Speaker 1: little tube to a pressure gauge. He would give those
Speaker 1: to the to a bow constrictor. They constricted and then
Speaker 1: they start to relax because it's not moving. And then
Speaker 1: Scott has this pressure gauge starts simulating a heartbeat with
Speaker 1: a little balloon that's inside it. As soon as that
Speaker 1: heartbeat starts, they clamp down again and so they can
Speaker 1: feel the heartbeat. Yeah, they can feel the heartbeat, and
Speaker 1: they squeeze until it's gone. Whoa the um. So anyway,
Speaker 1: let's let's go back to I guess all this stuff
Speaker 1: they're eating. Yeah, so they can eat really large prey items,
Speaker 1: like I said, and you think about it. If you
Speaker 1: don't have your own body heat, it's going to be
Speaker 1: challenging to digest something that big. So a big snake
Speaker 1: will bask that raises its body heat, but it also
Speaker 1: has this enormous metabolic response where it raises its metabolism
Speaker 1: eighteen fold, which is the difference basically between a sleeping
Speaker 1: horse and a galloping horse. So a snake that's digesting
Speaker 1: a really big meal is just raging internally even though
Speaker 1: you can't see that. And within twenty four hours, the
Speaker 1: mass of their heart increases, the mass of their liver increases,
Speaker 1: their gut gets hugely increased in terms of the little
Speaker 1: tiny folds and the gut the villi that increased surface
Speaker 1: area for digestion. So they're taking stored energy from their
Speaker 1: last meal and almost instantaneously turning it into all this
Speaker 1: organ mass that they need to digest this new meal.
Speaker 1: And if it stored stuff, that's that's primarily going to
Speaker 1: be um conversion of fat and conversion of of uh yeah,
Speaker 1: mostly fat. I guess you know. We're done in South
Speaker 1: America and uh we're fishing with some amor Indians and
Speaker 1: they were telling me that they like to use the
Speaker 1: was it the anaconda fat? Johnnie, I don't remember this.
Speaker 1: Probably they as a as a when you're arthritic, they
Speaker 1: say that if you rubbed the anaconda's fat into your joints,
Speaker 1: it's helpful. I'm not I'm not asking you if this
Speaker 1: is like pharmaceutically sound. I'm just telling you it's like
Speaker 1: a weird that that was why they killed them. If
Speaker 1: you killed one, it was to get the fat. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, there's there's a reason why snake oil salesman
Speaker 1: is a term. That's a good point. Man. It's been
Speaker 1: it's been used as medicinal you know, all kinds of
Speaker 1: cultures around the world. I mean, oh, you know, I
Speaker 1: never that's funny. I never put that together, Like I know,
Speaker 1: the expression selling snake oil. I never thought about like
Speaker 1: actually selling snake oil. Yeah. Yeah. And and something like
Speaker 1: a python. I mean, I've removed ten kilos of fat
Speaker 1: from a single python, you know, twenty two pounds of fat.
Speaker 1: I've got several bars at ball jars of rendered python
Speaker 1: fat in my freezer right now because I'm thinking that
Speaker 1: eventually I could become a snake oil salesman. Can you
Speaker 1: send me? Is it legal for you? To send me
Speaker 1: one of those jars. Absolutely, I just want like a
Speaker 1: little pint sized jar. Yeah. Do you ever cook with
Speaker 1: bomb um? I haven't? You know it? It's not nasty
Speaker 1: smelling by any means, but it doesn't have that nice, clean,
Speaker 1: large smell either. Uh. Do you like eating the meat off?
Speaker 1: These are people into the meat on the in their
Speaker 1: native range, and then also in Florida. I think that
Speaker 1: I think in the native range they're probably eaten, you
Speaker 1: know occasionally when people come across them. Um. I don't
Speaker 1: really know what's done with the carcasses in the skin trade,
Speaker 1: but in Florida, So the Everglades has an interesting atmosphere
Speaker 1: because all that greenery puts out huge amounts of water
Speaker 1: into the air that turns into these towering clouds, and
Speaker 1: those clouds reach so high that they in turn pull
Speaker 1: airborne mercury out of the air and those upper air
Speaker 1: layers and deposit it as rain. And so the Everyglades
Speaker 1: are known for having um fairly high mercury levels for
Speaker 1: a lot of say game fish. And you know, the
Speaker 1: the safe limits for mercury, depending on where you are,
Speaker 1: anywhere between point five and one point five parts per
Speaker 1: million um pythons have come out as high as three
Speaker 1: point five parts per million, So you definitely would want
Speaker 1: to have a python tested before you eat it because
Speaker 1: they can have mercury loads that are insane. Can you
Speaker 1: explain to people bio accumulation, like how that mercury builds up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the mercury is deposited um into primarily into waterways,
Speaker 1: and it gets transformed into methyl mercury that can be
Speaker 1: taken up by various small organisms, and then successive layers
Speaker 1: of predators then build up more and more of it
Speaker 1: in their tissues, and so by the time you get
Speaker 1: to something like an alligator or a python that's been
Speaker 1: eating everything from fish to heron's that might have slightly
Speaker 1: elevated mercury. They can end up with pretty high levels themselves.
Speaker 1: But people, but there's no problem eating Florida gator. I mean,
Speaker 1: well maybe there is, but we've eaten it, and it's
Speaker 1: commercially available. You can go online and have it delivered
Speaker 1: in a day or two to your house. Yep. Of course,
Speaker 1: most of those are farmers gaping, so they're they're fed
Speaker 1: controlled food, um, so they might not be as high
Speaker 1: in mercury. Yeah, you'd think they'd probably be very low.
Speaker 1: And then when you go north of the Everglades um,
Speaker 1: you don't have quite those same atmospheric conditions and you
Speaker 1: don't have quite as much build up to the north um.
Speaker 1: You know that said, I would definitely have a really
Speaker 1: big gait or tested before I ate it. So let's
Speaker 1: let's let's jump back into the impact that they're having
Speaker 1: on the landscape. There's a ton of them. We don't
Speaker 1: know how many. I want to talk about that too,
Speaker 1: like how many of these things are there? But let's
Speaker 1: talk first about what have you seen in terms of
Speaker 1: the impact they're having on these dozens of species of
Speaker 1: native wildlife that they feed on. Oh and do they
Speaker 1: like wild pigs? Uh? They do, although there's only a
Speaker 1: few records of wild pigs. Most of the pigs are
Speaker 1: pigs start getting common farther north. There aren't really all
Speaker 1: that many pigs in every Glades National Park itself. But
Speaker 1: more generally, there's three lines of evidence you can use
Speaker 1: for assessing impacts. Ones just the list of species, and
Speaker 1: like I said, we've got seventy one species. Some of
Speaker 1: those are federally endangered, like the Key Largo wood rat um,
Speaker 1: where the wood stork. But that doesn't tell you much
Speaker 1: about impacts to populations, and so the next best step
Speaker 1: is a correlative study, and so UM I was involved
Speaker 1: with one a few years ago, and that involved driving
Speaker 1: roads in areas in every Glades Park with pythons, in
Speaker 1: areas where pythons had just recently reached in in areas
Speaker 1: with no pythons, And I think we ended up with
Speaker 1: about six of driving that we did, and we were
Speaker 1: recording every snake and every native species that we saw.
Speaker 1: And the upshot of that is that in the areas
Speaker 1: with pythons in every Glades National Park, we had a
Speaker 1: decrease in raccoons, decrease in opossums, we had decrease, Yes,
Speaker 1: we had ro marsha rabbits. We had an eighties seven
Speaker 1: percent decrease in bobcats. And so there's there's a range
Speaker 1: of species that are essentially gone from every Glades National Park.
Speaker 1: They tend to be midsized mammals, marsha rabbits. Uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: what you gave it that there was zero So I
Speaker 1: understand like increase, but of these different species, what, um,
Speaker 1: what do you know about it in terms of raw
Speaker 1: numbers for people to think about is there an estimate
Speaker 1: of pre python bobcat population. Yeah, so this was actually
Speaker 1: neglected to mention that this was pre imposed. Um. So
Speaker 1: we we looked at it two ways. We looked at
Speaker 1: it based on surveys from nineteen six before pythons were
Speaker 1: abundant in the park versus surveys from about the mid
Speaker 1: two thousand's, and then we looked at it along that
Speaker 1: that trans act of high python abundance to zero pythons.
Speaker 1: So as far as pre abundance, there are lots of
Speaker 1: anecdotal reports and field field notes from people um in
Speaker 1: the say early nineties driving levees in the Everglades and
Speaker 1: saying saw over a hundred marsh rabbits. They used to
Speaker 1: be incredibly commonly seen because when it's the wet season,
Speaker 1: all the rabbits are on the dry land and that
Speaker 1: means tree islands and levees, so they get concentrated. Um.
Speaker 1: I've been going to the Everglades since two thousand and six.
Speaker 1: I have never seen a marsh rabbit in every Glades
Speaker 1: National Park. They're gone. Well, they got wiped out by pythons.
Speaker 1: They got wiped out, and so that's the question. What
Speaker 1: did it? And so that led to the manipulative experiment
Speaker 1: that we did a few years later. And this was
Speaker 1: led by some college exit University of Florida. And I
Speaker 1: need to give a shout out to A. D. S.
Speaker 1: O Vi who was the grad student who did it,
Speaker 1: because the amount of work she did was inhuman. It
Speaker 1: was I still can't believe she pulled this off. So
Speaker 1: in that study, we took rabbits from north of the
Speaker 1: python distribution marsh rabbits, trapped them. Then we established two
Speaker 1: populations of fifteen rabbits. But I got I got a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of questions, Yeah, how are we catching them?
Speaker 1: How are you catching the marsh rabbits basically have the
Speaker 1: hearts yep, um, So let's see it would be really
Speaker 1: interested in this area. Yeah, where you're getting these marshas,
Speaker 1: Where you're getting these marsh rabbits from? Yeah, So she
Speaker 1: she trapped ninety five rabbits. She's got She established two
Speaker 1: populations of fifteen each in every Glades National Park. She
Speaker 1: established another population of fifteen outside of the python range.
Speaker 1: And that's the procedural control to see whether relocating rabbits
Speaker 1: kills them. Got you? And then she left the remaining
Speaker 1: forty something in place as a regular control and and
Speaker 1: presumably put some kind of track and device on all
Speaker 1: these things. Every single one of them had a radio collar.
Speaker 1: And how do you know you've established a population of
Speaker 1: fift that's that good question. Um. So, marsh rabbits like
Speaker 1: to poop on latrines that they use over and over again,
Speaker 1: just like you know swamp rabbits pooping on logs. You
Speaker 1: walk through the swamp looking for a log that has
Speaker 1: poop on it, and you know there's swamp rabbit around. Oh.
Speaker 1: I thought, okay, okay, this is helpful because I thought
Speaker 1: when you're saying marsh rabbits, I thought you were talking
Speaker 1: about swamp rabbits. Yep, so you swamp rabbits with the
Speaker 1: big boys, marsh rabbits are more the size of a
Speaker 1: cotton tail. Oh so we're not talking big like expound
Speaker 1: Leviathan cotton tales nor um. So, we established artificial latrines,
Speaker 1: which were basically just elevated pieces of plywood with a
Speaker 1: piece of astro turf on top, and the rabbits start
Speaker 1: using them. And we saw that in all these locations.
Speaker 1: Initially we had rabbits using the latrines and we had
Speaker 1: reproduction because they were small pellets that showed up to
Speaker 1: We only translocated adult rabbits, so we knew there was
Speaker 1: reproduction going on, and we tracked them for a year
Speaker 1: and during that year almost all the rabbits died. That's
Speaker 1: expected because they're rabbits, they don't last very long. But
Speaker 1: was what was interesting was that in every Glades National
Speaker 1: Park you had these two rabbit populations, there was some predation.
Speaker 1: Most of it was pythons, and we know it was
Speaker 1: pythons because we would track the rabbit signal and it
Speaker 1: would be inside up ithon. That's that's a dead giveaway. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a that's a pretty good indicator. But then towards
Speaker 1: the end, as the water levels rose in the summertime,
Speaker 1: the rabbits get a little more concentrated and they just
Speaker 1: got hammered. So sev of the rabbits in Everglades were
Speaker 1: known to have been eaten by pythons. And at the
Speaker 1: end of the year there were no rabbits left in
Speaker 1: the Everglades, so even all the juveniles were gone, and
Speaker 1: those those little populations had been wiped out. Whereas in
Speaker 1: the areas where we had no pythons. Yeah, most of
Speaker 1: our original rabbits were dead, because that's what happens to rabbits,
Speaker 1: but those latrines were still used because you still had
Speaker 1: lots of rabbits left. And so that was for me
Speaker 1: kind of the nail in the coffin, showing that, yes,
Speaker 1: we had lists of species, we know what they're eating,
Speaker 1: we had correlative evidence that they've suppressed a bunch of species,
Speaker 1: and now we can say mere mentally, they can drive
Speaker 1: this muso mammal population to extinction, which it's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: Have you thought about replicating that study with something that's
Speaker 1: longer lived, like like getting some coons or something, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're in my mind. I'd love to do it with raccoons,
Speaker 1: um raccoons. I don't know how much we know about
Speaker 1: translocating raccoons. You know, rabbits tend to like to hang
Speaker 1: out with other rabbits, so if you put them in
Speaker 1: an area, they'll probably stay there. I got you moving raccoons,
Speaker 1: I really might display they're just just take off and
Speaker 1: not find each other, not start. Yeah. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: they might be big enough to take satellite tags, so
Speaker 1: you could actually follow them without having to walk out
Speaker 1: in the marsh um and you can get a satellite
Speaker 1: tag with the mortality sensor and no when it stops moving.
Speaker 1: But yeah, but the problem with that is it wouldn't
Speaker 1: stop moving, It would just move around inside a snake. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's a question whether a digesting python moves enough
Speaker 1: to trigger immortality sensor. I don't know. There's a there's
Speaker 1: a massive deer known Fate study that's going on in
Speaker 1: southern Florida right now, and it's been going on for
Speaker 1: three or four years. But unfortunately, all those colored deer
Speaker 1: are almost all of them are north of the Python distribution,
Speaker 1: so we won't be able to say much about whether
Speaker 1: Python's knocked out the deer in the Everglades. Part of
Speaker 1: the reason for this study was that dear populations have
Speaker 1: been decreasing by quite a bit in southern Florida, and
Speaker 1: no one knew why. But they couldn't find enough in
Speaker 1: Everglades to call or to figure out if it was pythons. Uh.
Speaker 1: Are you familiar with the theory? I think you can
Speaker 1: qualify this as a conspiracy theory. I don't mean that
Speaker 1: in a negative way. Are you familiar with the theory
Speaker 1: that at the Florida panther as it recovers and expands,
Speaker 1: is killing all the deer and all the game, and
Speaker 1: all the raccoons everything else right, And the people who
Speaker 1: are pro panther and who don't want any kind of
Speaker 1: mortal control of panthers want to hide the fact of
Speaker 1: the panthers are killing all the game from the public,
Speaker 1: so they blame all the missing game on the pythons
Speaker 1: in order to protect the panthers. I think anytime your
Speaker 1: explanation takes that long to get to what you're trying
Speaker 1: to say. Have you ever heard what we have you
Speaker 1: ever heard what we heard about why wolves were reintroduced? Um,
Speaker 1: there's a theory that there's a it's a long play
Speaker 1: by the Clintons that if they reintroduced wolves, the wolves
Speaker 1: would kill all of the game, No one would have
Speaker 1: a reason to hunt anymore, no one would buy any guns,
Speaker 1: and that would help you take over the country. Wow,
Speaker 1: were they breeding the wolves in the basement of a
Speaker 1: pizza shop and d C? Yes? Yeah, okay, Um, Well,
Speaker 1: going back to your question, you know, yes, there are
Speaker 1: lots of conspiracy theories about pythons, and I would love
Speaker 1: to hear all of them. But I think I think
Speaker 1: that that question can be answered very shortly by saying
Speaker 1: that the highest panther densities are well north of the
Speaker 1: pythons and well west, you know, up in the panther refuge,
Speaker 1: for example. There's no pythons up there, And so trying
Speaker 1: to say that the pipe the panthers are knocking down
Speaker 1: game doesn't make much sense because there's still plenty of
Speaker 1: game in the areas where there's the most panthers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but did you see that, Uh, this is not conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1: Did you see those mortality studies they did on deer.
Speaker 1: Uh in Florida. Panthers are are I mean, they're not
Speaker 1: out there whistling Dixie. Yeah, Well, that that's that, that
Speaker 1: dear mortality study I was talking about, you know, and
Speaker 1: and but I mean they're not they're not eliminating from
Speaker 1: them from the landscape, but they're definitely eating them. Yep, yep,
Speaker 1: that's that's what they're supposed to do, right, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: would gather I would do that as well. Um, So,
Speaker 1: how I got a couple of questions for you. You're saying,
Speaker 1: you say snakes are hard to count. What is you
Speaker 1: if you had to guess like God's got a gun
Speaker 1: to your head, right, and you had to guess how
Speaker 1: many snakes per unit of space exists in the highest
Speaker 1: ab London's areas? What would you what would you guess
Speaker 1: if you if it was a life or death situation?
Speaker 1: Oh cheese, like if you get it? Like I know, Okay,
Speaker 1: let me paint the picture for you. I'm this omniscient
Speaker 1: being that knows all truth. I'm the boss of all knowledge,
Speaker 1: and I know the truth. And I say to you
Speaker 1: how many are there? And you have to get it
Speaker 1: right or else you have to die and you just
Speaker 1: gotta take a wild stab in the dark. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is I know as a scientist, this is boiling your blood.
Speaker 1: But what would you what would you throw out there?
Speaker 1: What would you throw out? I think I'd book end
Speaker 1: it by saying that I don't know if I don't
Speaker 1: know if any herpetologists, I don't know if any any
Speaker 1: herpetologists experienced in snake population estimate, who would say that
Speaker 1: there's less than ten thousand pythons in the Everglades and
Speaker 1: so that would mean, you know, for per square kilometer,
Speaker 1: But we know that giant snakes can reach higher densities,
Speaker 1: and that based on some limited studies of you know,
Speaker 1: a similar species in Africa um and some of the
Speaker 1: preliminary work that we've done on removing snakes from levees.
Speaker 1: You know, there are individual levees from which over a
Speaker 1: hundred snakes a year are being removed right now by
Speaker 1: paid python hunters. Those levees might be ten kilometers long,
Speaker 1: So from you know, ten thousand, two hundred thousand, I'm
Speaker 1: really comfortable with anywhere in that range. It's that wide.
Speaker 1: Once you get over a hundred thousand. I know people
Speaker 1: who say absolutely, and I say other people who say, oh, no,
Speaker 1: that's not possible. But that's because generally those people don't
Speaker 1: understand detection probabilities, and detection probability is the most important
Speaker 1: factor you need to understand if you want to know
Speaker 1: something about snakes. They are just phenomenally good at staying
Speaker 1: hidden from us. You know, all the time we get
Speaker 1: people saying, hey, we wiped out most of the bison,
Speaker 1: we wiped out the passenger pigeon. Just you know, let
Speaker 1: the bubbas at them and we'll have no more pythons
Speaker 1: very soon. You know, I can see a bison from
Speaker 1: four miles away out in the prairie. They're easy to
Speaker 1: wipe out. But in contrast, I've had a twelve ft
Speaker 1: python that contains a radio transmitter in it, and we've
Speaker 1: got six people standing in a six ft circle around
Speaker 1: that snake. It's in six inches of water and you
Speaker 1: cannot see it. It is invisible. And then while you're
Speaker 1: standing there talking about how amazing it is that you
Speaker 1: can't see this python, you turn the receiver on again
Speaker 1: and it's fifty ft away. Huh. So they're just incredibly
Speaker 1: stealthy and secretive, and that colors everybody's perception of them
Speaker 1: in one way or the other. If you understand detection probability,
Speaker 1: you understand that there's far more of them out there
Speaker 1: than most people want to believe. And if you don't,
Speaker 1: you think, wow, look at all these snakes were removed.
Speaker 1: We must be really knocking down that population. That makes
Speaker 1: you feel like you're not scratching it. You know, right now,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of effort and a lot of money
Speaker 1: going towards paying people to remove pythons um from the
Speaker 1: Greater Everglades ecosystem, both in and out of the park,
Speaker 1: and um the people who are doing that, they're you know,
Speaker 1: they're mostly great folks. They care a lot there, um,
Speaker 1: spending lots of time out in the field, and the
Speaker 1: removed a lot of pythons, you know, um, over two
Speaker 1: thousand last year. We had a recent study where we
Speaker 1: had several known telmetered pythons along a levee and then
Speaker 1: we did walking surveys um and in I'd have to
Speaker 1: look at how many Yeah, we had about five of
Speaker 1: walking that we did over the course of a few
Speaker 1: months with known snakes that were available for detection. And
Speaker 1: I'll give you up. Let you guess how many times
Speaker 1: we saw one of our kilometered pythons zero. Oh damn,
Speaker 1: you're right man self whisper. So, so that means like
Speaker 1: we we calculated at the chance. It's like, you've got
Speaker 1: this python named George. It's out in the ecosystem in
Speaker 1: an area that that humans can get you along a
Speaker 1: levey our chances of detecting it on any given day
Speaker 1: are probably less than one percent, and probably more than
Speaker 1: of the total area occupied by pythons is way less accessible,
Speaker 1: so it's hard for people to even get in there.
Speaker 1: So if we're taking two thousand pythons off of canal
Speaker 1: edges and roads, which is where the great majority come from.
Speaker 1: Does that mean we're having an impact on the population. Um?
Speaker 1: I think that's we don't have any evidence to suggest
Speaker 1: that we're doing much by removing those snakes. However, there's
Speaker 1: a philosophical difference. You know, people say every snake we
Speaker 1: take out is one less snake that's eating native animals,
Speaker 1: and I'm not going to argue with that. You know,
Speaker 1: it's the difference between people who say that, um, they
Speaker 1: care about the welfare of individual animals versus the people
Speaker 1: who say they care about you know that the persistence
Speaker 1: of dative animal populations and that you know that comes
Speaker 1: up in the hunting world a lot. I know what
Speaker 1: side of the spectrum I fall out on in terms
Speaker 1: of which which one of those I think we should
Speaker 1: be pushing for. But I'm not going to tell those
Speaker 1: people they're wrong. It's more of a philosophical difference than
Speaker 1: a science difference. Yeah, like they're not. Is it's fair
Speaker 1: to say that if you're like a python hunter, you're
Speaker 1: not hurting anything. You you may well be doing good. Um.
Speaker 1: I just think that from an evidentially standpoint, where it
Speaker 1: would be nice if we could get the scientists together
Speaker 1: with those folks and really come up with a way
Speaker 1: two estimate the impacts on overall population size. And I
Speaker 1: think we're moving that way with UM. We're going to
Speaker 1: have some pretty big telemetry studies going on, and we're
Speaker 1: doing that to understand what the snakes are doing. But
Speaker 1: it also means we know the number of known snakes
Speaker 1: out there, and we'll be able to know when one
Speaker 1: of them gets picked up by a python hunter. And
Speaker 1: you compare those you know, known snakes removed to the
Speaker 1: total number removed, maybe we can start zero again in
Speaker 1: a population estimate. How what's a big python? And how
Speaker 1: old is it? When it gets that big? Um? Big python?
Speaker 1: I think the biggest We've got several that are over
Speaker 1: eighteen ft and um fifty pounds, and those are pretty rare,
Speaker 1: you know, once you get up past about the thirteen
Speaker 1: foot range, they're pretty much all females and snakes over
Speaker 1: fourteen ft feet represent probably less than five percent of
Speaker 1: our our data set. UM Yeah, age wise, UM, we
Speaker 1: don't know. Because we remove every snake that's found and
Speaker 1: euthanize it. We don't have individuals that are followed over
Speaker 1: multiple years. So we get a good idea of Asian
Speaker 1: survival things like that. You know, if you've got a
Speaker 1: fifteen foot snake, I'd be surprised if it's less than
Speaker 1: eight or ten years old. And then how much ground
Speaker 1: with one of these snakes covered surprising amounts UM. So
Speaker 1: back in the early days, when people were just starting
Speaker 1: to do some telemetry work, UM, they decided to put
Speaker 1: radios in some pythons, but they wanted to have it
Speaker 1: in a limited area so that they could track every
Speaker 1: snake every day, And so they took snakes from other
Speaker 1: places and brought them into an area east of every
Speaker 1: Glass National Park UM, and the snakes hung out there
Speaker 1: for most of the dry season, had home ranges of
Speaker 1: you know, five to twenty acres, so not a huge amount.
Speaker 1: But then when the wet season came and everything flooded,
Speaker 1: a number of those snakes went back to their original
Speaker 1: capture locations and sometimes to within a couple hundred yards
Speaker 1: distance of how much over twenty miles no way, yep.
Speaker 1: So they were navigating back to an area that you know,
Speaker 1: they've been driven in a long circuitous route from one
Speaker 1: spot to the other. UM. But they navigated not quite
Speaker 1: straight line, but pretty close back to capture locations and
Speaker 1: then landed within a couple hundred yards where they came from.
Speaker 1: Yep ye, many activity they landed where they came from.
Speaker 1: They somehow knew where home was and got back to it. Wow.
Speaker 1: Years ago, I was talking to a buddy mine. He's
Speaker 1: not a snake guy. He's a biologis been, not a
Speaker 1: snake guy. And he had had proximity to or participated
Speaker 1: in some research where they were testing the limits of
Speaker 1: python expansion and he was saying that there's sort of
Speaker 1: a line, um, an invisible line north of which it
Speaker 1: just becomes not suitable for them. What is that line
Speaker 1: like like in in are Do we have them just
Speaker 1: like where we can have them and that's it? Or
Speaker 1: are there expansion potentials for these things? It's a good question.
Speaker 1: I think it's not well answered yet. You know, um
Speaker 1: our research group produced the very first climate matching study
Speaker 1: for pythons, and that was based on native range records.
Speaker 1: Um In hindsight, we may have been a little bit
Speaker 1: too credible in accepting some of those records because that
Speaker 1: produced a pretty large match to the southeast us US.
Speaker 1: Another group then put out a paper showing that no
Speaker 1: based on this modeling approach. They're limited to extreme South
Speaker 1: Florida and only the area that is currently occupied. We
Speaker 1: looked at that found him, found an error, corrected that error,
Speaker 1: and that then their method showed all of Florida. I
Speaker 1: can I tell you what his what his thing was,
Speaker 1: because I'm sure you know about it. I think they
Speaker 1: were actually taking and building these little enclosures, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: just sticking them there and see if they could survive
Speaker 1: the winn or not. You know, this was a long
Speaker 1: time ago. And again this wasn't like his work. You're
Speaker 1: not gonna hurt his feelings. Right, Um, that's been done
Speaker 1: at several locations. Um. One of them was up in uh,
Speaker 1: South Carolina, and all this one he's talking about, Yeah,
Speaker 1: all those snakes died. That was during that enormous cold
Speaker 1: snap of when we had ice even in every Glades
Speaker 1: National Park. Um. But yeah, those snakes died, and I
Speaker 1: would think that that area is almost certainly not suitable.
Speaker 1: The expansion is really slow. It looks like it's always
Speaker 1: been slow. We definitely have snakes farther north, towards places
Speaker 1: um like Lasahatchie National Wildlife Refuge where we didn't have records.
Speaker 1: A few years ago. But still that's only in the
Speaker 1: you know, tens of kilometers north of the National Park,
Speaker 1: so you know, my hunch is they're not going to
Speaker 1: get too much farther north. Um. But there was a
Speaker 1: really cool study with tissue samples from pythons that were
Speaker 1: taken um starting in the early two thousand's in Florida
Speaker 1: and going through that cold snap and afterwards, and they
Speaker 1: found molecular evidence of adaptation in gans that are controlling
Speaker 1: things like response to temperature. And so the snakes appear
Speaker 1: to have gone through a cold snap and there were
Speaker 1: a lot of snakes that died during that period, and
Speaker 1: there may have been a selection event for snakes that
Speaker 1: have a better ability to tolerate cold temperatures. The the
Speaker 1: scale of that, we don't know. Does that mean that
Speaker 1: they're you know, one degree better? Um, I'm not really sure.
Speaker 1: Speaking of the temperature adjustment, I was reading I think
Speaker 1: it was in one of the papers that you shared
Speaker 1: with us, about how the female will increase your body
Speaker 1: temperature eleven and fourteen degrees to regulate her nest. Can
Speaker 1: you talk a little bit about that. Yeah, So there's
Speaker 1: a few species of pythons that engage in shivering thermiogenesis.
Speaker 1: So you know, when you get cold, you shiver, and
Speaker 1: that's because you are um shivering. It's basically a mechanical
Speaker 1: way of increasing the temperature of those muscles that they
Speaker 1: work better. And snakes that are coiled around eggs go
Speaker 1: through these sequencing sequences of shivering and that raises their
Speaker 1: body temperature. They're coiled around the whole pile of eggs,
Speaker 1: that raises the egg body temperature or the egg temperature
Speaker 1: as well, and so that allows them to maintain the
Speaker 1: egg temperature in the range that's best for development. You
Speaker 1: know how you can control like with snap. I know
Speaker 1: this is true with snap and turtles that you can
Speaker 1: control the sex of the turtle by the soil temp
Speaker 1: And it goes in bands, right, it's not like hot
Speaker 1: as male, cold as female. But there's like a band
Speaker 1: of temperature, a temperature band at which you'll get predominantly males,
Speaker 1: and then there's a band of temperature higher than that
Speaker 1: which you'll get predominantly females. But then it could be
Speaker 1: a next band of temperature band they would go back
Speaker 1: to making males. Do they do that? Is that part
Speaker 1: of the is that part of the regulating nest temperature
Speaker 1: or is it just the the need to keep the
Speaker 1: eggs warm so they don't die hear your cold snap? Yeah?
Speaker 1: That that temperature dependent sex determination is typical of UM
Speaker 1: A lot of reptiles, but not the giant snakes, so
Speaker 1: they have straight genetic sex determination. UM. The wrinkle with
Speaker 1: Burmese pythons and several other large pythons and antacondas and
Speaker 1: boas is that they can also be parthenogens. So there
Speaker 1: are records of several of these species producing young with
Speaker 1: no contact with a male m hm, and so that
Speaker 1: that's problematic. You know, as an invasive species biologist, you know,
Speaker 1: we we worry about things like propagule pressure. You know
Speaker 1: that that's the number of potential invasion organisms that are
Speaker 1: reaching a certain in an area, because the more there are,
Speaker 1: the more likely they are to find each other and breed.
Speaker 1: If you have an animal that is capable of being
Speaker 1: a parthenogen, then you could have a population started by
Speaker 1: one female. And that's that's a lot more worrisome to
Speaker 1: me as someone who thinks about this stuff. How are you, like,
Speaker 1: how is that possible? Uh? You know, I mean part
Speaker 1: of genesis, um it you basically you have a hiccup
Speaker 1: in terms of during myosis. You know, during myosis, which
Speaker 1: is the process of making sex cells like sperm, you're
Speaker 1: taking the two copies of DNA, splitting them apart, and
Speaker 1: each sex cell only has one copy, so you sperm
Speaker 1: only has one half of your DNA. But if that
Speaker 1: process has some hiccup in that in it, then you
Speaker 1: can end up with both bees in a sex cell,
Speaker 1: which means that that organism can develop. Yeah, but how
Speaker 1: does it mate with itself? Um? It doesn't. It's it's
Speaker 1: all females that do it. And so it just means
Speaker 1: that the um like, how does this it's producing a sperm, Well,
Speaker 1: the female is not. But so the female has got
Speaker 1: a follicle. Yeah, and so instead of producing a follicle
Speaker 1: that's got um half of the DNA during that biotic process,
Speaker 1: all of it ends up in one half, and so
Speaker 1: that follicle now has both copies of DNA. Oh, I
Speaker 1: got you? Is that a less fit creature because it
Speaker 1: has less genetic diversity going into it, probably because it's
Speaker 1: a clone and we don't know much about it because
Speaker 1: oftentimes it's been reported in captive snakes and we don't
Speaker 1: know how often it happens in wild snakes because we
Speaker 1: don't we don't genetically sample every individual python that comes out, um,
Speaker 1: just because that would get cost prohibitive. Are there are
Speaker 1: other species that that happens in? Um? Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty widespread across the animal kingdom altogether, you know.
Speaker 1: But in snakes, it's known from a number of the
Speaker 1: primitive snakes like uh, some of the boas, some of
Speaker 1: the pythons. But it's also known from um, some more
Speaker 1: advanced snakes. Um, you know, some of the colubrid snakes
Speaker 1: that that's uh, most of the snakes were familiar with
Speaker 1: in the in the continental US, you know, water snakes,
Speaker 1: garter snakes, king snakes, things like that. Um. So it's uncommon,
Speaker 1: but probably more widespread then we know. Ah. Can you
Speaker 1: tell everybody some of the stories about using using judas,
Speaker 1: like Judas from the Bible, using judas snakes to catch snakes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, it's really interesting because so when you have
Speaker 1: a male python and you put a radio transmitter in
Speaker 1: it and release it during the breeding season, that male
Speaker 1: will engage in mate searching behaviors. It'll go and try
Speaker 1: to find females and in Burmese pythons, you have breeding
Speaker 1: aggregations of a large female and then several males that
Speaker 1: are all around it, all vying to mate with her,
Speaker 1: and those those can persist for over a month sometimes um.
Speaker 1: And so if you then follow your radio tag mail,
Speaker 1: it might lead you to a breeding aggregation. You take
Speaker 1: all those snakes out, let your mail go again, it's
Speaker 1: going to go search for another one. And so it's
Speaker 1: potentially a method of increasing the removal rate of your
Speaker 1: pythons without putting in a whole lot more search effort,
Speaker 1: because all you gotta do is check where your mail is,
Speaker 1: say once a week, and see if it's found a
Speaker 1: female yet. Um. As far as that term, it's really
Speaker 1: interesting because we had pushback recently from folks who said
Speaker 1: that the term Judas snake is anti Semitic, and it
Speaker 1: is a term I've heard and wildlife bothers you for
Speaker 1: a year and for years, and I've never thought about it,
Speaker 1: but I actually went back and started looking and historically
Speaker 1: there's a lot of support for that notion. And so
Speaker 1: just recently we had a we had a pole among
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of snake people. What terms shall we use?
Speaker 1: We gave him all these options. And so because because Judas,
Speaker 1: Judas betrayed Christ, but but but Christ, but but Christ
Speaker 1: was a Jew. Yeah, but I guess it's been used
Speaker 1: um as a pejorative um like betray like someone who
Speaker 1: betray a Christian. As of as of last month, we
Speaker 1: now have a scout snake project and uh so anyway
Speaker 1: it can work. How many how many have you ever?
Speaker 1: How many have you ever uncovered using this strategy? Uh? Boy?
Speaker 1: I think the biggest aggregation might still be eight that
Speaker 1: I know of, So that'd be like six other males
Speaker 1: and one female yep yep um. In one of those
Speaker 1: there was there was one aggregation that was six males
Speaker 1: and one ft female and all of them were in
Speaker 1: a single gopher tortoise burrow. Uh and they were jammed
Speaker 1: in there like a tent in a stuff sack man.
Speaker 1: I mean, there there were so many snakes and I
Speaker 1: can't imagine that they could have pulled off a breeding event,
Speaker 1: you know. Um. And then after after pulling all these
Speaker 1: snakes out in the very back of the borough, there
Speaker 1: was this poor gopher tortoise who had been stuck there
Speaker 1: for god knows how long with this you know, python
Speaker 1: orgy going on right in front unless he's some kind
Speaker 1: of pervy voyeur who liked the whole thing. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, Tortoise is probably forty years old. I guaranteed
Speaker 1: never seen anything like that before. When he goes to
Speaker 1: tell his buddies about it, they're gonna be like, no way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the ask your questions Johnny about the pipe. These are
Speaker 1: good questions about the python hunters. Yeah, back to the
Speaker 1: PI python hunters, And I think this can lead into
Speaker 1: like what are going to be like the ways to
Speaker 1: actually get rid of some of them? But the python hunters,
Speaker 1: how do they do their thing? And then can you
Speaker 1: talk about like what they're actually paid? Like is this
Speaker 1: something that they make a living at? Is it just
Speaker 1: a hobby? Yeah? Um, I don't know all the details
Speaker 1: of it because I'm only you know, on the outskirts
Speaker 1: of it. I think mostly they're getting a minimum wage
Speaker 1: plus a certain amount of money per python, plus a
Speaker 1: certain amount of money per foot, So they get paid
Speaker 1: for snakes. But it's also scaled by size um. And
Speaker 1: most of them are going by vehicle. A lot of
Speaker 1: that is at night, and they're using spotlights. Some of
Speaker 1: them have towers on the back of their trucks and
Speaker 1: they are cruising levies primarily. And you know, we they've
Speaker 1: actually taught us a fair amount about searching for snakes
Speaker 1: because we used to mostly drive levies in the daytime
Speaker 1: and look for snakes that are out basking. That still
Speaker 1: works sometimes, um, but they're finding a lot of their
Speaker 1: snakes right on the water's edge in ambush positions. But
Speaker 1: the bodies are in the water and so there are
Speaker 1: a lot harder to see that way unless you've got
Speaker 1: a little elevation. Um. But I mean if you you know,
Speaker 1: you look around online and there's there's uh, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of coverage of of the python hunting that's going on,
Speaker 1: and they the media, Yeah, they love that story. And
Speaker 1: like I said, I mean I only know a few
Speaker 1: of them personally, but they're all great folks, you know,
Speaker 1: and they deeply care about the everglaze ecosystem. Now today
Speaker 1: when they see one, say you see a ten footer
Speaker 1: and only it's six inch head is sticking out of
Speaker 1: the water. Did they shoot it? Do they put last
Speaker 1: all around it? Like, how do you get it? It's
Speaker 1: almost all handcapps. So um, when most of the time
Speaker 1: if a snake sees something big and scary like us approaching,
Speaker 1: it's gonna just freeze because it knows it's well camouflaged
Speaker 1: and so probably I don't know the time. You can
Speaker 1: walk up and just grab it behind the head real quick,
Speaker 1: pull it out of the water, and um, figure out
Speaker 1: how to control it and get into a bag. Sometimes
Speaker 1: as you're approaching, they'll turn around and start moving off,
Speaker 1: and then you grab the tail and pull it out
Speaker 1: that way. Um. When you've got it by the tail,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be trying to turn around on you and strike.
Speaker 1: But if you jerk the tail real hard every time
Speaker 1: it strikes, basically you'll you'll throw it off. Um, and
Speaker 1: then they tire out fairly quickly, or at least they
Speaker 1: calm down fairly quickly, and then you can work your
Speaker 1: way up to the head and get into bag. Why
Speaker 1: don't they when when the guys are going after the
Speaker 1: python hunted, why don't they just run up and chop
Speaker 1: his head off? Um? There are some animals that are
Speaker 1: killed by with firearms, Um, chop his head off or
Speaker 1: something us way harder than you'd think. Um. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: especially for the ones that are in the water. But
Speaker 1: there they're pretty dang muscular. Um. And also the you know,
Speaker 1: decapitation alone is not considered you know, the acceptable youth
Speaker 1: in Asia because you have to then destroy the brain
Speaker 1: right afterwards. So, um, you can do that pretty easily
Speaker 1: if you just you know, destroy the brain tissue after
Speaker 1: the heads off. But so if you if you walk
Speaker 1: out in your yard there's one laying there, what is
Speaker 1: the best practice to go kill it? Uh? Boy, start
Speaker 1: getting into the what what should you do? Questions? Um?
Speaker 1: Never mind? No, I mean I think that probably the
Speaker 1: best possible thing is to do the same thing as
Speaker 1: with a rattlesnake, which is just turned around, go back
Speaker 1: inside and call call animal control or call your game
Speaker 1: inficial agency. Um. That's you know that that minimizes minimizes risk, Steve.
Speaker 1: But people, if if you if you shoot a snake
Speaker 1: in the head, it's going to be dead. But any
Speaker 1: snake over about seven ft, I would not recommend that
Speaker 1: someone inexperienced try to catch it by themselves. And that's
Speaker 1: because you know, a seven snake seven foot snake might
Speaker 1: only be pounds. But if that snake somehow manages to
Speaker 1: get a wrap around your neck, you're probably toast you'd
Speaker 1: be the first guy to get killed by a snake
Speaker 1: in Florida, by a Burmese parthon Florida. Yep. So what
Speaker 1: will what will end up? Crystal ball? Right? Crystal ball situation.
Speaker 1: I'm sure we can all imagine the crystal ball scenario
Speaker 1: where they kill everything off. There's a greatly reduced food base.
Speaker 1: You see a reduction in pythons, but they never go
Speaker 1: all the way away because as they starve off, you know,
Speaker 1: they're popular prey, population rebounds a little bit and they
Speaker 1: just kind of hit some equal librium. That's kind of
Speaker 1: shitty for animals, but it's an equilibrium. Um, what's a
Speaker 1: better crystal ball scenario? Um? I think in the absence
Speaker 1: of some silver bullet intervention, you you pretty much outlined it. Um.
Speaker 1: The main thing to remember about snakes is that they're
Speaker 1: incredib ofly low energy organisms. So a snake can persist
Speaker 1: in the environment and and actually a lot of snakes
Speaker 1: can persist in the environment in a given area even
Speaker 1: if they don't have that much prey, because they only
Speaker 1: need a very small number of calories per year to
Speaker 1: keep them going as cold blooded organisms, so they're really efficient,
Speaker 1: and so that that whole. You know, the the hair
Speaker 1: and links cycles that we remember from our biology classes.
Speaker 1: You know, when the rabbits tank, the links tank even harder,
Speaker 1: but with a because they feel it immediately. Yeah, with
Speaker 1: a python, if the prey tanks, the snakes don't go
Speaker 1: down nearly as far. So it's kind of like having
Speaker 1: this pathogen that's just hanging out the environment waiting for
Speaker 1: the conditions to get better, and they can respond really
Speaker 1: fast when those conditions do get better. So I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't have a rosy future in terms of those
Speaker 1: mammals somehow coming back unless we get some sort of
Speaker 1: silver bullet. And so that's that's the next thing that
Speaker 1: people are thinking about is all these synthetic biology questions.
Speaker 1: So can we manipulate genomes in a way that drives
Speaker 1: the animals extinct? And I don't know if you previously
Speaker 1: talked about things like crisper or RNA interference or things
Speaker 1: like that. We have not on this show, but um,
Speaker 1: well no, I don't think we have like introducing introducing
Speaker 1: genetically manipulated animals into the environment in order to enter
Speaker 1: the population and have a long term impact on the population. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So some some people are familiar with the term gene drive,
Speaker 1: and in these in these tools, regardless of whether it's
Speaker 1: the crisper or the RNA interference, what you're trying to
Speaker 1: do is get one allele in every single organism, and
Speaker 1: it's the allele that you've manipulated. So, you know, going
Speaker 1: back to what we talked about earlier, your parents have
Speaker 1: two copies in their DNA. You get one from each parent.
Speaker 1: In a gene drive, what we're trying to do is
Speaker 1: make sure that only one allele has passed on, and
Speaker 1: we wanted to be the one that we've messed with.
Speaker 1: So in New Zealand, for example, they're working on daughterless mice,
Speaker 1: so that you insert a gene in in a male mouse.
Speaker 1: When it mates with the female, it knocks out the
Speaker 1: ability to produce female offspring, and so only males are produced.
Speaker 1: It's like it's like a bar and anchorage man yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: or guam um. And then all those males have that
Speaker 1: gene two, and so every female they produced with only
Speaker 1: produced males, and so you end up swamping the population
Speaker 1: with these manipulated males and eventually there's no more mice.
Speaker 1: That works pretty well potentially with something like a mouse
Speaker 1: that has really fast generation times. UM, it's largely untried
Speaker 1: in something like a python that has extended generational times.
Speaker 1: But right now we're working on a research strategy that is,
Speaker 1: what do we need to know in the next three
Speaker 1: years to be able to assess whether these tools will
Speaker 1: work for pythons. What about some kind of disease agent UM,
Speaker 1: you know, disease. I think if you look at the
Speaker 1: record of UM diseases introduced to Australia to control rabbits,
Speaker 1: you find that the initial knockdown is real hard, and
Speaker 1: then you're left with a resistant population, so you have
Speaker 1: a really strong selection gradient and the remaining animals don't
Speaker 1: really have to worry about it that much. UM. We
Speaker 1: don't know of many diseases that would hit pythons that hard. UM.
Speaker 1: But the a twist there is that the pythons brought
Speaker 1: over a penist dome parasite with them from Southeast Asia.
Speaker 1: We don't know the full life cycle of that thing,
Speaker 1: but we know that it goes probably from maybe amphibians,
Speaker 1: two mammals like rats, and then two pythons. And it
Speaker 1: turns out that native snakes are more competent hosts of
Speaker 1: this penistone parasites than the pythons are, and the peniston
Speaker 1: is now over a hundred kilometers north of the python range.
Speaker 1: So we've got this introduced parasite that came in with
Speaker 1: an invasive snake that is now infecting native snakes and
Speaker 1: actually having a pretty strong impact on them that may
Speaker 1: spread throughout the continent. So we could end up having
Speaker 1: this this python effect in you know, Arkansas, even though
Speaker 1: the pythons arement at a thousand miles Oh man huh.
Speaker 1: And then I know how this one always goes, but
Speaker 1: I gotta ask it anyway. Let's say you do like
Speaker 1: the old Hawaii trip where you got a rat problem,
Speaker 1: so you bring in some mongooses. Um, what likes to
Speaker 1: eat pythons? Um. The one that I get to email
Speaker 1: us about is king Cobra's. That that that's a solution,
Speaker 1: that's yeah, yeah, what you do is you get a
Speaker 1: big truck of King Cobra's. You sound like my father
Speaker 1: in law. Um, yeah, I mean that's that's that's a
Speaker 1: legitimate suggestion that we get. I mean, that's not the
Speaker 1: best control tool suggestion we get. My absolute favorite is
Speaker 1: the pig goat raft and the pig goat raft. Since
Speaker 1: the winds are mostly from the west, you make a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of rafts on the west end of the
Speaker 1: everglades during the wet season, and you tie a goat
Speaker 1: in the front, and then you put a small pig
Speaker 1: on the back, and the wind starts blowing the raft
Speaker 1: through the everglades and whenever, whenever it hangs up on vegetation,
Speaker 1: the goat eats the vegetation and clears the way so
Speaker 1: the raft can keep going. And then the pig is
Speaker 1: a lure for your pythons. And so as you move
Speaker 1: through when a when a snake smells, the pig's going
Speaker 1: to crawl up and eat the pig, and you get
Speaker 1: the pig tethered, and then the snake will be stuck.
Speaker 1: And what's wrong that? I would just I mean, wouldn't
Speaker 1: that be awesome? Um? I'd just like to take pictures
Speaker 1: of that solution. I like it. So it took the
Speaker 1: time to lay that out. Yes, someone really really thought
Speaker 1: about that. Okay, what have we not asked you that
Speaker 1: we should have asked you? Oh man, Um, like if
Speaker 1: you were thinking, if these boys had half a brain,
Speaker 1: they would have asked me x Well, I mean I
Speaker 1: feel like, you know, as an invasive species guy and
Speaker 1: a snake guy, UM, I should say something about the
Speaker 1: fact that these risks are not over. You know, we
Speaker 1: continually have new individuals of non native snakes showing up
Speaker 1: all over the country. UM. Burmese pythons are not the
Speaker 1: only giant snake that's established in the US. We've got
Speaker 1: the Northern African python, which is just as big, established
Speaker 1: in a small area in western Miami. UM we've got
Speaker 1: boa constrictors, a Central South American version of boat constructors,
Speaker 1: actually very similar to what you would have seen in
Speaker 1: u in Guyana um In Park in Miami. UM We've
Speaker 1: and then we've got a range of smaller snakes that
Speaker 1: are established too. And so you know, we keep on
Speaker 1: doing this to ourselves, and we really don't have very
Speaker 1: good mechanisms for prevention. And prevention is the most important
Speaker 1: part of invasive species management. If you can keep things
Speaker 1: from getting established in the first place, then you're gonna
Speaker 1: save a lot of money. But if you can't do that,
Speaker 1: you need early detection and rapid response, and you need
Speaker 1: to be able to say, hey, we found a couple
Speaker 1: of these, we're gonna go in with all of our resources,
Speaker 1: we're gonna try to knock them out. And going back
Speaker 1: to the detection probability, that's really hard to do for
Speaker 1: snakes because the chances of finding the first one or
Speaker 1: the second one are just not that good. And so
Speaker 1: what I tend to tell people, and they're not crazy
Speaker 1: about hearing it, is that if you find one, you
Speaker 1: should go and put in a moderate effort and see
Speaker 1: if there's more. If you find two, you should really
Speaker 1: go in with all guns blazing. And if you find three,
Speaker 1: you should assume you have a population. And when you
Speaker 1: compare that with a lot of other species that people
Speaker 1: are used to responding to, it's a it's a much
Speaker 1: lower bar for when you responded when you don't. We
Speaker 1: had a guy on talking about wild pigs one time,
Speaker 1: and we're talking about why they live, where they live,
Speaker 1: and where they could live. He was just saying that
Speaker 1: that they could live virtually anywhere, like they could they
Speaker 1: have the potential to colonize any part of the country.
Speaker 1: But the thing he brought up is it's just easy
Speaker 1: to detect them and eradicate them in certain landscapes, and
Speaker 1: certain landscapes you don't have a prayer, yep, of finding them, Like,
Speaker 1: there's no reason they couldn't be on in the Great Plains.
Speaker 1: But the thing is you'd find them. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: Colorado CPW just put out a notification that they had
Speaker 1: eradicated the hogs um from southeast Colorado. You know, they
Speaker 1: were they were working their way up into the grassland
Speaker 1: down there and there. They feel pretty confident they got
Speaker 1: them all. But you know, that's it's kind of whackable.
Speaker 1: There's no reason to think that they won't be able
Speaker 1: to get back in. You do, I want to have it?
Speaker 1: Go ahead? Now, go ahead next time you come on.
Speaker 1: You know what I want to talk about? What's up
Speaker 1: with this? Uh, what's up with this invasive monkey in Florida?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, um yeah, And and that it's protected what? Um? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the crazy thing. There's an invasive protected monkey in Florida.
Speaker 1: Well it's it's not it's not considered a species that
Speaker 1: is a pest that you can legally um removed by
Speaker 1: any means, as opposed to some other species. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: monkeys are cute. Monkeys are cute and people care about them,
Speaker 1: and it's you know, it's the feral cat thing all
Speaker 1: over again. Um. You know if you want to go
Speaker 1: down the feral cat road, we can. But um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'd love I'd love to get a quick synopsis of it, please.
Speaker 1: Um you mean that that that that feral cats are
Speaker 1: bad news and they kill a billion and a half
Speaker 1: birds in this country every year. But people get taught
Speaker 1: to you about shooting cats. Um. Absolutely, And that there's
Speaker 1: a whole lot of people that try to use really
Speaker 1: bad evidence to suggest that cats aren't that bad. But
Speaker 1: the you know, the trapped newter return policy, which has
Speaker 1: been adopted by increasing numbers of municipalities and counties and
Speaker 1: things like that, UM as a so called control mechanism. UM.
Speaker 1: Almost no evidence that it works at all. Plenty of
Speaker 1: evidence that cats in cat colonies live nasty, short, brutish
Speaker 1: lives for the most part, that it's not a humane
Speaker 1: thing to do for the cats or the wildlife. UM.
Speaker 1: And it's you know, in some ways, it's uh just
Speaker 1: kind of a convenient way for hard decisions to be avoided.
Speaker 1: Got you, alright, So when this monkey thing blows up,
Speaker 1: you gotta come back on. That's love too. Yeah. You know,
Speaker 1: me and Yanni have we've at monkey is that down
Speaker 1: in South America? That's right loves it. Hey, can I
Speaker 1: can I say something about your brother real quick? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't care. Yeah, all right, So I know, I
Speaker 1: just feel like I need to shout out to Dan
Speaker 1: Ronella because you know, I came to hunting late in life.
Speaker 1: You know, I didn't kill my first year till I
Speaker 1: was thirty. And Dan and I overlapped at Auburn when
Speaker 1: we were in grad school and Dan took me for
Speaker 1: my first, second, third, fourth, and fifth duck hunts. Huh,
Speaker 1: and water fowling is now like a really big part
Speaker 1: of my life. And I'm just really I'm just really
Speaker 1: grateful that I was such a nube and he took
Speaker 1: me out, and um, I just always consider that as
Speaker 1: super generous. Um. And you know, I just reconnected with
Speaker 1: him again a couple of years ago, and you know,
Speaker 1: have made a couple of trips to Alaska in the
Speaker 1: last two years, going again in August, tagged along with
Speaker 1: him on his sheep hunt last August. And yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I I'm just super appreciative of what a what a
Speaker 1: sort of giving guy he is is, um, And it's
Speaker 1: made a lot to me. Oh that's great to hear.
Speaker 1: What's funny about this? Is that our producer. When I
Speaker 1: told her to go find a Burmese python guy, the
Speaker 1: best one out there is what I asked for, she
Speaker 1: independently found you and then one day said, I found
Speaker 1: a guy and it turns out I think he knows
Speaker 1: your brother, which I thought was pretty funny. Which I
Speaker 1: thought it was funny. Yeah, yeah, Well, you guys had
Speaker 1: Harry Green on the Hunting Collective podcast, and Harry was
Speaker 1: my undergrad mentor in Berkeley and he's one of the
Speaker 1: snake gurus, but he also came to hunting late in life,
Speaker 1: and it's it's really fun to sit and talk with
Speaker 1: him and talk about how our non hunting life has
Speaker 1: informed our hunting life and made us, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: a lot more empathic with the opinions of people who
Speaker 1: don't know a lot about it. And way is to
Speaker 1: engage with him, and that's uh, that's another thing that's
Speaker 1: been you know, an unexpected benefit of meeting the Freezer.
Speaker 1: You know that that philosophical side of it um and
Speaker 1: why we do it and justifying why we do it.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a fun thing to think about. That's great.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much for coming on keep us surprised.
Speaker 1: Keep us surprised at those monkeys. Yep, yep, we'll do
Speaker 1: Thanks again, all right, take thanks