Nature Will Find A Way

"The effort to eradicate pythons in the Everglades resulted in 170 being removed last year, up from 95 in 2005, national park spokeswoman Linda Friar said." – Naples Daily News

Naples reporter Jeremy Cox, on Saturday, January 20, 2007, details (in part below) the real story about giant snakes being found in Florida:

Deborah Jansen plopped the white plastic trash bag onto the grass and reached inside to reveal its contents: a Burmese python, flattened the night before along U.S. 41 East.

Blood dripped from the snake’s mouth as Jansen, a wildlife biologist, uncoiled the snake to its full length and measured from mouth to tail. This one was 7 feet long, not even half-grown yet.

Last year, five pythons were found in Big Cypress National Preserve, up from three in 2005. For every python that is spotted, 10 more might be slithering around unseen, meaning the preserve in eastern Collier County could be home to 50 pythons, scientists estimate.

Wildlife officers and biologists are on high alert across Southwest Florida for the giant snakes, which can grow more than 20 feet long. A python will eat any animal that fits in its mouth, up to the size of a small deer.

Even alligators, which long have reigned at the top of the Everglades food chain, aren’t safe. A photograph of a 6-foot alligator exploding out of the gut of a python made national headlines in the fall of 2005.

The effort to eradicate pythons in the Everglades resulted in 170 being removed last year, up from 95 in 2005, national park spokeswoman Linda Friar said.

The python Jansen was measuring had been squished Monday night or Tuesday morning in front of the preserve’s main office, about three miles east of State Road 29. Pythons have been spotted inside the preserve as far from Everglades National Park as the Bear Island Unit, a popular deer-hunting area north of Alligator Alley, just east of S.R. 29.

So far, Fakahatchee Strand State Park, sometimes called “the Amazon of Florida” because of the wealth of wildlife it contains, hasn’t had any python sightings, said Mike Owen, a biologist.

But he suspects pythons are in his midst, and it’s more than a hunch. In the fall of 2004, a vehicle ran over an 8-foot exotic green anaconda on U.S. 41 East, which dissects the Fakahatchee, Owen said.

Pythons are becoming a regular sight at Rookery Bay, resource manager Keith Laakkonen said.

A 5-foot python was flattened on Barefoot Williams Road a little more than a year ago. A 6-footer was spotted crossing Collier Boulevard in the middle of the night in the direction of the reserve. And another was lying in the middle of Shell Island Road when someone gently moved the snake off the road.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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