The invasive reptiles taking over Florida
Brought in as pets, the Burmese python and the Nile monitor lizard are eating their way through Florida’s endangered species, said Chris Sweeney in Now more exotic reptiles may join them.
I T’S A SWEATY June morning on the outskirts of Tampa, and droves of reptile enthusiasts are streaming into an air-conditioned expo center. Some have woken early to trek out to the Florida State Fairgrounds to get first crack at the animals of Repticon, a weekendlong extravaganza that’s similar to a baseball card convention, except instead of mint-condition Mickey Mantles and Pete Roses there are green anacondas and meat-eating lizards. A guy strolls by wearing a “Snakes Lives Matter” T-shirt. Another man, who has a 3-foot-long lizard slung across his chest like a bandolier, is at a nearby booth admiring a young boa constrictor that’s twirling around his girlfriend’s fingers. Price? $100. Sold.
Roughly 60 Repticons take place each year, from Phoenix to Oklahoma City to Baltimore, attracting an estimated 200,000 visitors. These shows represent but a tiny sliver of the live-reptile trade. In much of the continental United States, these cold-blooded creatures aren’t likely to fare well outdoors should they escape or be set free. But the subtropics of South Florida are different, and the best adapted have not only survived in the wild, they have thrived. To date, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, or FWC, has identified 50 types of non-native lizards, turtles, crocodilians, and snakes within state limits, more than anywhere else in the world.
For the birds of Florida, this blitz of exotic predators poses an existential-scale threat. The Burmese pythons, which stalk wading birds in the Everglades, have become so menacing that the state has hosted derbystyle competitions to catch them. Farther north, Nile monitors—the largest lizards in Africa—have been terrorizing a population of burrowing owls in the city of Cape Coral. And on the outskirts of Florida City, just outside Everglades National Park, egg-eating Argentine tegus could soon raid the nesting grounds of one of the last remaining populations of the endangered Cape Sable seaside sparrow. Each of these reptiles found its way to Florida via the pet trade—but while most people acknowledge that’s a leaky pipeline, few agree on whether and how to plug it. Take Ed Poelsma, who’s wandering Repticon with Pugsly, a 5½-foot-long black-throated monitor that’s a close relative of the Komodo dragon. Pugsly is a stunning creature that looks to be from prehistoric times, with claws like steak knives, camouflaged skin, and a muscular tail. What does Pugsly eat? “Meat,” Poelsma says. “He would eat anything you put in his cage that’s meat. Literally anything.” You don’t need a permit to buy a Pugsly of your own, and that’s how Poelsma thinks it should be. It’s a sentiment that almost everyone I meet at Repticon echoes, including Greg Graziani, who has starred on National Geographic’s The Python Hunters and now runs a reptile-breeding facility. “The bird people are worried,” he says. “I understand their concern. But I haven’t seen the science.” Truth is, scientists have never seen anything quite like this. I T’S THE MONDAY morning after Repticon and I’m in a vacant lot in Cape Coral watching Bob Mondgock smack a package of frozen chicken with the claw end of a hammer. He pries free a hunk of raw poultry and tosses it to the back of a springplated trap in hopes of luring in one of the invasive Nile monitors that haunt this Gulf Coast city. Mondgock works for the Cape Coral Environmental Resources Division, a six-person unit that could easily have been the inspiration for Parks and Recreation. Over the years, he has tangled with more monitors than he can remember.
Nile monitors have no business in this hemisphere. As their name implies, they should be basking along the shores of Africa’s Nile Delta, but they got popular in the pet trade, and rumor has it that the owner of a now defunct pet store, scheming a source of free inventory, let some loose behind his shop so they would breed in the wild. These reptiles can top 7 feet, swim like Michael Phelps, and eat rodents, birds, rabbits, wasp nests, venomous rattlesnakes, poisonous cane toads, and, according to some residents, cats and dogs.
There’s no telling how many Nile monitors are out here. Since 2000, the city has logged more than 2,500 sightings and trapped 564 of the animals. Over all those years, though, no one has uncovered a monitor nest, an unsettling tidbit given that the lizards can lay up to 60 eggs at a time. Conservative estimates put their population at 1,000, a lowball number in Mondgock’s eyes, because many residents are so accustomed to the animals that they don’t bother calling one in. Today, Mondgock will bait 11 traps, all within view of nice homes with pools, screened-in porches, and garages.
As we drive from site to site, we pass a handful of dusty lots where burrowing owls perch on wooden stakes and look like adorable stuffed animals. That the city is home to one of the world’s largest populations of burrowing owls is a point of pride among some residents, not to mention a good tourism draw. The owls are staring down a long list of threats, including significant habitat loss, and FWC declared them a threatened species in November 2016.
It’s known that Nile monitors eat burrow-