Pythons discovered in abandoned missile base
USA - Four pythons slithered their way into an abandoned missile base in the Florida Keys, discovered earlier this year through the aid of specially trained dogs and a tribe from India renowned for catching snakes. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced the snakes’ capture this month, the result of a partnership between researchers, public officials and Irula tribesmen to hunt down pythons before the damaging predators spread farther. “Hopefully, we can manage or eradicate an invasive species that is wreaking havoc on the ecosystem,” Frank Mazzotti, a University of Florida wildlife ecology professor assisting the effort, told the university. The four large snakes, including a female nearly 16 feet in length, turned up inside two old bunkers at a site which sits within the 6,500-acre Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge. Now experts worry the pythons could thrive farther south on the Keys as easily as they have on the Everglades, the service said, where multiplying numbers of big snakes over the past 20 years have devastated native birds and deer, with some even devouring alligators. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission contacted Mazzotti and Christina Romagosa, an assistant research professor at the school, with hopes of eradicating the Burmese python in the state’s southern parts, according to the university. Together, the two professors came up with a unique proposal: Mazzotti would reach out to the Irula tribesmen, whom he learned of through an acquaintance in India, and Romagosa would employ a team with trained dogs from Auburn University. “The job of the tribesmen is to find the snakes, catch them and teach us how to do it better,” Mazzotti told the university’s UF News. “They are better at finding snakes than anybody else in the world.” No estimate exists for the number of Burmese pythons infesting Florida’s Everglades, Mazzotti said, but researchers believe they escaped as pets or were released there.