The following article appeared in the Florida Weekly Bonita Springs edition.
Pythons are slithering into more areas of Florida, but scientists take innovative strides to stop them.
By Staff
December 14, 2023
BY ROGER WILLIAMS
rwilliams@floridaweekly.com
It’s breeding season again, not just eating season.
Now entering his 11th year of a consuming battle against the most potent and effective predator in the 5,000-year history of the vast Everglades ecosystem, Ian Bartoszek is both disheartened and undaunted by that fact.
On the one hand, the predator in question, the Burmese python, is spreading north and west — an invasive tube of muscle that can reach 18 feet in length and weigh more than 200 pounds but seemingly disappear into the swamp like a ghost.
They eat and they multiply: at least 24 species of mammal, 47 bird species and three reptile species have appeared in their diets so far. Females have delivered clutches of more than 100 eggs at a time, with 46 as an average, notes Ian Bartoszek, a wildlife biologist and the science coordinator at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, citing research from the University of Florida.
One 215-pound female was carrying 122 eggs.
“I’ve developed a great respect for them. They’re just doing what they’re doing, well,” he says, which is surviving and thriving in a place and a time they were never designed to inhabit, facing natural predators unable to restrain their numbers. Various animals eat hatchlings and smaller pythons, which is why only about 5% of a given clutch will mature to adulthood, but that is enough to do terrible damage to many native species.
On the other hand, the Conservancy’s scout-snake program is working, now using 40 males implanted with transmitters adept at locating and leading hunters to females during the November to April breeding season. But it operates only east of Naples in Collier County.
“They find needles in the haystack,” Bartoszek explains. “All other hunting methods are on roads and levees. But this method takes it off grid. We go where they go.” Each scout can locate as many as five females in a season.
That 10-year effort by two wildlife biologists and volunteers at The Conservancy has removed about 32,000 pounds of invasive python from an area of roughly 100 square miles. In comparison, Everglades National Park alone is 2,357 square miles, a region adjoined by other wilderness or agricultural python habitats.
“I think we’ve made a dent in their numbers here,” Bartoszek says of Southwest Florida. The male scouts appear to have a much harder time reaching females now, and the females they do find are much smaller than once upon a time. The big picture, however, can be troubling.
“I’m encouraged by that — we’ve reduced their numbers in one area, which is hopeful for other areas. But I’m objective. When I look at satellite photos of the state, or every time I drive the Alley back to the east coast, it’s just sort of disheartening. How cryptic pythons are, how expansive the Everglades is.”
Equally disheartening, perhaps, is the now decade-old study that shows pythons have reduced fur-bearing mammals in the eastern Everglades by more than 90%, something the wildlife biologists say hasn’t changed.
But a common misperception may be that the statistic is Everglades wide. That’s not yet the case, says Bartoszek, although the statistic should serve as a loud alarm.
Larger success has to be achieved in concert with other technologies and strategies, and the coordination of all agencies: a nonprofit such as the Conservancy, with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (the FWC) and the sprawling, 16-county South Florida Water Management District.
The SFWMD has 50 hunters under contract, like the FWC, and an effective Python Elimination Program led by Michael Kirkland, senior invasive animal biologist in the Land Resources Bureau of the SFWMD.
A veteran of seven years at the helm of the Python Elimination Program, “it’s consumed my life, since day and night I’ve worked on this issue,” he notes.
“Making a dent in their numbers in Collier around Naples is quite an accomplishment. I think it shows promise for other regions and management efforts.
We all build off of each others work, and I think multiple strategies working in concert is our best path forward.”
His view of the massive, many year Everglades restoration effort, like Bartoszek’s, is about more than water.
“We’ve spent (vast sums) on Everglades restoration. That would all be wasted if we let an apex predator like the python take over. And it has, in Everglades National Park and surrounding areas.”
He’s not as concerned as some about the Environmental DNA tests from north of the lake. “Me and my partners don’t think they’ve gotten (that far) yet,” Kirkland says.
And some news is encouraging: “In the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, with the FWC and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, we’re not seeing pythons. They’ve been caught around but not in the refuge. It seems to be one of last bastions for native wildlife in south Florida… there’s an abundance of native wildlife.
“Why is that? Python expansion hasn’t gotten that far north? Or too much water in the refuge and maybe it doesn’t provide enough habitat for pythons to establish themselves? We don’t know answer, could be both.”
Meanwhile, the Python Elimination Program pays 50 contractors a premium rate — $18 an hour — to patrol and survey “fringe areas where we think densities are low or non-established, and $13 an hour to survey core python populations.”
Contractors are paid a set fee for the first four feet of a python killed, and a per-foot fee for every foot in length beyond that.
“The contractors are very skilled, but detection, finding the pythons, is still our biggest management obstacle,” Kirkland acknowledges.”
Again like Bartoszek, he’s optimistic over the long term.
“I think we’ll continue to get better and better at removing these, and we’re working on other projects, working on technology — all that is coming on line faster and faster.”
