Dog detectives sniff out pythons in Upper Keys

Burmese pythons slithered into the hardwood hammocks of North Key Largo where the invasive and elusive reptiles secreted themselves into the dense foliage.

That was before Floyd and Vito, environmental heroes with expert noses and wagging tails, got on the case.

The two Labrador retrievers, previously trained as bomb-detection dogs, sniffed out five pythons on North Key Largo during their four-month assignment to the Upper Keys.

“A snake can be sitting right in front of you and you’ll never see it; that’s how cryptic they are,” said Christina Romagosa, an invasive-species biologist with the University of Florida’s Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation.

“The dogs don’t need to see them. They just have to smell them,” said Romagosa, who helped bring the dogs to the program.

Floyd, 3, tracked down the fifth unwanted constrictor on North Key Largo after a Card Sound Road resident reported a python sighting to the Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge on Feb. 13.

Two days later, dog trainer and handler Bart Rogers from the Eco Dogs division of Auburn University’s Canine Performance Sciences program followed Floyd into a natural area with waist-high growth, about 100 yards from the sighting locale. Floyd sat down and stared, the learned passive response to indicate where the python was — or had been.

“It was under two or three feet of grass. No one would have seen it,” Rogers said. “I basically was standing on the snake.”

Team member Alex Dyson, a University of Florida wildlife technician, reached into the foliage and came up with a box turtle.

“That really threw us a curve. We didn’t know why the dog was responding to a turtle,” Rogers recounted. “Then the grass started hissing at us.”

Floyd, trained to stay beyond a snake’s striking distance, was returned to the work truck. Dyson and Rogers “were on our hands and knees” looking for the snake. Soon a python estimated at 7 to 9 feet long was permanently evicted from the Florida Keys.

That capture followed a nationally publicized incident from January where two snake-hunting experts from India’s Irula tribe found and captured four pythons on the abandoned Nike missile base inside the North Key Largo federal refuge. The Irulans combed the old missile base after 2-year-old Vito and Floyd signaled that pythons had been in the area.

“We typically don’t find the targets and take them out right away,” Rogers said. “The dogs tell you where the targets have been. That identifies areas that need to be monitored — telling you where the snakes are, and where they aren’t.”

Floyd celebrated the Feb. 15 find with an enthusiastic chew on his favorite ball toy. “That’s the reward,” Rogers said. “They associate the odor of the snake with the ball. They love the ball.”

“We go days without finding anything. The dogs cover 10 to 12 kilometers in a day, up to 17 kilometers,” Rogers said. “They have to be mentally tough. A lot of dogs would just quit.”

Crocodile Lake refuge manager Jeremy Dixon said the dog team’s assignment to North Key Largo “does give us some peace of mind and has led to five Burmese python captures.”

“For us, the best information is that the dogs have detected much less, compared to their work in the Everglades,” Dixon said “That suggests python numbers on North Key Largo are fewer.