Pet industry is decimating wildlife of Everglades

Imagine an industrial mishap that utterly decimated the native wildlife in a beloved national park.

Imagine if a product peddled by certain business pursuits had caused

99.3 percent of the park’s raccoons to vanish, along with 98.9 percent of the opossums and 87.5 percent of the bobcats. And imagine if the park’s rabbits and foxes had become so scarce that wildlife biologists conducting a years-long survey could hardly find any to count.

Imagine the public reaction. Surely, hell would be raised. The din of angry politicians would echo through the corridors of government.

Not so much.

A biological catastrophe has indeed devastated the small mammal population in Everglades National Park, along with 94 percent of the white-tailed deer. A sevenyear study published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences documented “severe declines” among the 1.5 million-acre park’s native mammals. And that was in 2012. Since, the outlook has only become more dismal.

South Florida is suffering a full-blown ecological disaster created by commercial interests that import, breed and sell Burmese pythons – creatures with no utilitarian value other than to amuse fellows who imagine giant snakes lend them that elusive cool factor. Because nothing quite turns a girl on like a constrictor slithering around her date’s dark and dingy bedroom.

Eventually, however, snake guys notice that the aphrodisiac qualities of pythons are overrated. The “pets” are dumped along rural roadways and allowed to slither off into the wild.

Which pretty well explains how pythons moved to the top of the predator chain in Everglades National Park, where they’re now breeding . . . well . . . not like rabbits, given that the snakes have gobbled up most of the park’s cottontail and brown marsh rabbits. A 2015 experiment led by University of Florida conservation biologist Robert McCleery outfitted dozens of marsh rabbits with radio transmitters and released them in the national park. McCleery’s team reported that 77 percent of the bunnies were devoured by pythons.

Yet the pet industry has been spared much blame and criticism. Sugar cane growers, who are currently catching hell for Florida’s toxic algae blooms, must wonder how reptile importers managed to escape rebuke despite fostering a biological calamity that appears to be irreversible. At least the algae will be gone by winter. The python invasion might not go away until rising seas turn the Everglades into a fond memory.

True, the feds – much too late – finally banned the importation of four species of pythons and four anacondas, but lobbyists for the reptile dealers trade group managed to keep boa constrictors – which may already be breeding in the glades – off the banned list. Maybe boas will be able to compete with the pythons to finish off the Everglades’ mammals and wading birds.

Of course, exotic pet importers have given Florida more than just snakes. We’ve got monkeys on the loose. Parrots, parakeets and Eurasian collared doves have escaped their cages and become dominant species in South Florida. Screeching green parrots have replaced songbirds as harbingers of morning. Parakeet nests have become fire hazards along power lines. South Florida’s canals are infested with tilapia, Asian eels, piranha and other creatures that have outgrown their aquariums.

The feds finally put a stop to the importation of Nile monitors, nasty giant African lizards that are roaming wild in Southwest Florida (and terrorizing house cats and chihuahuas.) But last month, a Davie family was menaced by an alligator-sized Asian monitor, an even bigger species than their Nile cousins and, as David Fleshler of the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported, available for on-line purchase from importers for less than $200.

For truly twisted collectors, reptile dealers also offer – by mail – the world’s most venomous snakes. Another reason to worry about what that creepy guy next door is up to.

Florida, at least, has rules about who can own the deadly creatures, including training requirements and on-site inspections (about

250 Floridians have permits.) But if some snake chump finds the regs too cumbersome, he can simply drive to South Carolina – which doesn’t bother regulating killer snake commerce – and come back home with that green mamba he’s always coveted.

An ex-con and sometime Miami resident named Ashtyn Rance (who was busted on Cudjoe Key last year with an illegal cache of snakes, lizards and crabs) was intercepted by Georgia police last summer as he drove from the Atlanta airport to South Carolina in a van packed with 220 terrifying African snakes, including spitting cobras, bush vipers, Gaboon vipers and a couple of black forest cobras. All could probably survive in the Florida subtropics.

Pythons, boas, monitors and other scary exotics who’ve taken over the Everglades might only be a preview of what slithery nightmares inhabit South Florida once the real killers get loose.