Just don’t tell their rental car company.
Davidson College biology professor Mike Dorcas and one of his students had just captured a python in Florida’s Everglades National Park when they encountered an unexpected dilemma. The snake, which measured more than 16 feet long, didn’t fit in the canvas bag Dorcas had brought along to carry the python.
“We ended up just putting it in the trunk of our rental car,” Dorcas says with a smile.
The rental company was none the wiser when Dorcas turned in the car. And, who knows? In the 1.4-million-acre swamp that is the Everglades, a 16-foot python might not be the most unusual passenger ever to ride in a car trunk. What is certain, though, is that the python has become among the most unwelcome visitors to Everglades National Park.
Dorcas and co-author J.D. Willson chronicle the unwelcome Everglades rise of the massive snake in a new book, Invasive Pythons in the United States: Ecology of an Introduced Predator (University of Georgia Press).
Dorcas, who says he’s made at least 15 trips to Florida to study and capture pythons, estimates that “there are probably tens of thousands, if not a million” pythons in the Everglades, an invasion that has made national and international headlines, and was the subject of a recent National Geographic Explorer program.
The National Park Service first sought Dorcas’ help in 2005, when it realized the python population had become impossible to control. Dorcas had experience using implanted radio devices to follow the movement of snakes, and park officials wanted to get a better idea how pythons moved.
“Pythons are eating a wide range of mammals and birds, including imperiled and endangered species, and it makes us very concerned,” Dorcas says. “Understanding the movements of pythons may help us understand their impacts and how to control them.”
How’d they get here?
Over the past two decades, Burmese pythons have escaped or been released into Florida’s Everglades by humans who kept them as pets until the snakes became too large to handle. The pythons have thrived and multiplied in that environment, and have become an increasing concern of biologists and park rangers. They reach sizes of up to 20 feet in length and 200 pounds, which puts them at the top of the food chain and creates a threat to native species such as wading birds, bobcats, white-tailed deer and even alligators, says Dorcas, who has written six books about snakes and frogs, including Snakes of the Southeast in 2005.
Dorcas and Willson compare the rude introduction of pythons in the U.S. to the importing of another invasive species — kudzu.
Dorcas and his colleagues have implanted dozens of pythons with radio transmitters to learn about their movements. One surprising finding has been that pythons appear to have a sophisticated homing instinct. One of the snakes the team captured was released more than 30 miles away, then traveled all the way back to the area where it was captured.
Dorcas and Willson have published several papers in scientific journals about pythons, which led the University of Georgia Press to invite them to write Invasive Pythons in the United States. Willson is a 2002 Davidson graduate who has collaborated with Dorcas on several projects and publications both during his undergraduate career and beyond. Willson is a postdoctoral research associate at Virginia Tech University.
More than 1,000 pythons have been removed from Everglades National Park and surrounding areas since 2008, the National Park Service reports.
Dorcas — as he does twice a year — spent the past week at Kiawah Island, S.C., where he now leads a nearly three-decades-old study of the island’s dwindling terrapin turtle population. The project is a collaboration between Davidson College and the University of Georgia Savannah River Ecology Laboratory.
