The python, a staple creature in the tales of Rudyard Kipling’s India, is poised to move to Ernest Hemingway’s Florida Keys, and a new study by scientists at the United States Geological Survey indicates that it may happen sooner than later.
On Christmas Day, a Dade County family called the local rescue service after discovering a 13-foot python in their swimming pool, The Miami Herald reported. In Everglades National Park, 600 pythons have been picked up in the last decade; the total population is estimated to be more than a thousand.
The original snakes are assumed to be onetime exotic pets whose owners decided that they had bought more pet than they really wanted after all; the National Park Service’s Web site indicates that 112,000 Burmese pythons have been imported since 1990. Their ability to flourish in the River of Grass, as the Everglades is known, comes as no surprise. What is surprising is their potential for surviving the salinity levels of estuaries and even the ocean.
Working with python hatchlings that were more than seven months old, the new study, done entirely in the laboratory, found that salinity levels had a major impact in decreasing their survival rate. Nonetheless, “Hatchling pythons exposed to full-marine salinity did not die immediately,” the study’s abstract reported.
The implications of the study, which was published in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, is that the water-loving snakes will not be confined to the freshwater environments of South Florida but may survive a trip through ocean waters to the Florida Keys.
“Because reptiles, in general, have poor salinity tolerance, it was hoped that saltwater would naturally hinder pythons’ ability to expand their range beyond the Everglades,” Kristen Hart, a research ecologist and the study’s lead author, was quoted as saying in an agency press release. “Unfortunately, our results suggest saltwater alone cannot act as a reliable barrier to the Everglades python population.”
Hatchlings survived about one month at the highest level of marine salinity and about five months in brackish water, the authors wrote in the abstract summarizing the study. They added that their data might underestimate the ability of hatchling pythons to survive in saline habitats in the wild.
In an interview, Dr. Hart said she and her colleagues were also studying the movements of adult snakes, 31 of which have been fitted with radio transmitters. The group has received reports of python sightings well to the west, near Naples.
Scientists have not yet evaluated the possibility that a hatchling could catch a ride on floating debris and reach the Keys, she said. Still, “this study shows we need to consider the sea and saltwater pathways as important pathways that can get them to other places,” Dr. Hart suggested.
The snakes (actually cousins of Indian pythons like Kaa, Mowgli’s benefactor in Kipling’s “The Jungle Book”) are capable of swallowing their prey whole. In October, Everglades Park personnel captured and killed a snake that had just ingested a 76-pound doe. Its girth at the time of capture was nearly four feet.
Their standard diet, however, is “small mammals, medium-size mammals — and certainly birds are vulnerable,” Dr. Hart said. She also cited “sensitive critters” like Key Largo wood rats.
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