Sunday, September 16, 2018

The Giant Snakes in the Garden of Eden



Columnist Fred Grimm writes in The Florida Sun-Sentinel:

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 seven-year 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.

...[T]he 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.

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