Pythons are invading Florida. Meet the scientists fighting back.

The Burmese python mating season can be a cramped affair. In southwestern Florida, the snakes sometimes gather in burrows dug by gopher tortoises. For python-tracking scientists, this presents an opportunity. In 2015, Ian Bartoszek was searching for pythons amongst the scrub when he got a ping from one of his radio-tagged snakes, dubbed Kirkland. He and his team quickly located the burrow this snake had sought out—and realized that Kirkland was not alone. Another tagged male was in the hole, along with four other males and a 14-foot female.
“There were 240 pounds of python in one hole in the ground,” says Bartoszek, a wildlife biologist at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida in Naples. “They just kept coming out, one after the other, and it just didn’t stop.”
The scientists gathered their scaly bounty, and rescued a gopher tortoise they discovered trapped at the back of the burrow. “He was forced to watch all of this snake behavior,” Bartoszek says.
While the snake bonanza made for an intense extraction day, it was not the only time Kirkland has been extracted from a girlfriend's scaly embrace. The team is nabbing every female and stray male they can find on their patrols, and they’re not the only ones. Every year, hundreds of pythons are dragged from the South Florida wilderness and roads. Scientists worry that that is nowhere near enough.
They’re stepping up the fight against the invasive snakes that have been plaguing Florida for more than 15 years. Their weapons include “Judas snakes” like Kirkland that lead the way to their fellow pythons, sex pheromones, and volunteer python patrols. Year by year, they’re learning more about the snakes and how to find them. They aren’t likely to vanquish the Burmese python, but they might yet knock the population down to manageable levels.

Read More at:
https://www.popsci.com/florida-invasive-pythons

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