The Strange Way a 12-Foot-Long Invasive Python Was Caught
For immediate release ‐ March 27, 2023
Contact: Jon Pishney, 919.707.8083. Images available upon request
In Key Largo, Fla., scientists are looking to protect endangered native rodents and slow the invasion of massive Burmese pythons
By Meghan Bartels on March 20, 2023, Scientific American
An opossum nicknamed Prairie Dog met a gruesome fate last fall in Key Largo, Fla., when it was squeezed to death and then swallowed whole by a massive, 12-foot-long Burmese python. But you could say it got revenge, thanks to an unusual accessory: a tracking collar that led scientists to its killer.
Prairie Dog was one of dozens of opossums and raccoons that scientists equipped with tracking collars as part of an ongoing study to try to understand how these mammals move across nature reserves on Key Largo, a 33-mile-long island off the coast of southern Florida. But the researchers also hoped that tracking potential prey could lead them to invasive Burmese pythons, which are relative newcomers to Key Largo but have wreaked havoc in the Everglades in mainland Florida for decades with their voracious appetites for mammals.
“A secret, underlying potential application was that [this initiative] could lead to python captures,” says Michael Cove, a conservation ecologist on the project and a research curator of mammalogy at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. “That was kind of a hope—not a hope that these animals get eaten but a hope that if they do, they lead to captures and removals.”
Read the full article on Scientific American
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