The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 219: Snake Oil

Episode Date: May 4, 2020

Steven Rinella talks with Dr. Robert Reed and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: an entire peer reviewed publication from a single Burmese python poop; three dead deer inside a snake; death by hair; the Florida Everglades; being a sophomore at UC Berkeley and buying a snake to get girls to your dorm room; where the hell did they all come from?; low detection rates are a bitch; squirrels as biological exhibitionists; how Steve has a really bad endotherm bias; bio accumulation of mercury; python hunters; pivoting from Judas snakes to scout snakes; a python orgy in a gopher tortoise burrow; manipulating genomes to drive extinction; big props to Steve's bro, Dan; how the non-hunting life informs the hunting life; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with Onyx. Alright, folks. Before I even introduce what we're talking about, this question is going to reveal what we're talking about. But before I introduce who we're talking about it with, I just got to get one of these

I got to get something out of the way. Dr. Bob Reed. Is it true that a Burmese, they found a Burmese python that had the remains of three different deer in its lower GI tract? That's probably the publication I'm proudest of because I got an entire peer-re peer reviewed publication out of a single poop. And yeah, so this was a this was a python that was picked up. It was about a 48 kilo python, so a little over 100 pounds.

And it had a 14-pound poop inside it. And in that poop were the hooves of three different deer. And my buddy Scott Bobak, he had his buddies collect deer legs, and he made a graph of hoof size of the deer that his friends were shooting and correlated with the hoof size of the deer that were in the poop. So we figured out how big they were and how many had eaten and uh yeah um one doe and two fawns all in one python poop from the everglades do they feel that that one python had been carrying those like do the hooves last a long time like maybe it'd be like if you opened

up an alligator and found a bunch of old dog collars because they just never moved through the tract yeah so is that like is that a life's collection of deer or is that last week's deer it so keratin doesn't get digested and we you know hair too. So, hair and hooves get passed, but it looks like this snake was actually impacted, that it had eaten a doe that was 94% of its own body mass, followed by two fawns that we estimate were 35 and 25% of its body mass. And basically it just got plugged with hair. And so we think this thing was probably going to die, but based on the fawning period in Florida and when the snake was found, we think that had been in there for a maximum of about six months. So that's about maybe six months worth of eating deer, including during the fawning period

huh all right with that covered because i had to get that out of the way tell everyone tell everyone what you what you do you we've had other fellers from the we've had other fellers from the usgs on i think you're our third usgs guest all right well is that right, Giannis? Yeah, I was going to say at least. Brant Mikesell, USGS does research on waterfowl. Yeah. Brant took me salmon fishing last summer.

Oh, okay. So you guys run in a pack. And I feel like we had another USGS guy on. We've had two more. No, Steve, he's Wildlife Services. I thought we had another USGS guy on. Oh. We've had two more. Steve. No, Steve, he's Wildlife Services. Who you're thinking of is our CWD expert, Brian Richards. He's USGS.

So go ahead, Bob. All right. Well, I'm with US Geological Survey based in Fort Collins. I'm the chief of the Invasive Species Science Branch. We've got a bunch of researchers who work on everything from invasive vertebrates to invasive plants. But my history and expertise is in snake biology. And I've done a lot of work and overseen a lot of work on Burmese pythons in Florida and the brown tree snake on Guam. That's actually where the majority of our staff are, is out on Guam. And then we dabble in other invasives.

We're working on big old tegu lizards that are in southern Florida as well. And invasive water snakes from the eastern U.S. that are introduced into the Western U.S. But a big part of our work has focused on invasive pythons in the Everglades for the last decade. Can you tell people about the limits of what you're allowed to talk about? Sure. Which I guess encompasses what your mandate, what your mandate, what your professional mandate is. I don't want to put it in terms of a negative, but we could sell it as a positive. Like what is your mandate as a researcher? Right. So the U S geological survey is the research arm of the department of the interior. So we do the science and we stick to the science.

And then it's the job of agencies like the U S fish and wildlife service to do the science and we stick to the science. And then it's the job of agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to take the science and turn it into regulation and policy. And so we try to keep those two shops really separate so that the policymakers aren't unduly influencing the researchers and vice versa. And so I can talk about anything in regards to biology or research results, but I can't say, for example, that the state of Florida should engage in some particular policy because that's not related to the science. Yeah. Would you be able to say something like, Giannis should cut that mohawk off? You know, the headphones help with it. They help keep it down. Otherwise, it would look like some punk rocker from London in, like, 72.

The log cabin kind of throws it off, too, that he's sitting in a little log cabin. I'll just get real mixed signals from that haircut. I can't stop talking about it. I'm all mixed up. Oh, you know what? I just saw another USGS guy. Yanni, do you remember the grizzly bear, the guy that did the population modeling for Yellowstone Grizzlies?

He was USGS. Oh, that was the lead of the interagency teamstone Grizzlies. He was USGS. Oh, that was the lead of the interagency team? Frank. Frank. Help me out, Bob. Do you know who I'm talking about? God, you're putting me on the spot now. I'm blanking.

I work with Chad Dickinson, who does Grizzly work, but he's also the USGS firearms program manager. Oh, okay. Yeah yeah that was a great show people that want to go want to learn a lot about bears should go back and find that episode um all right so let's keep let's keep plugging along here's here's my here's my next burmese python question and now for people listen when you're scrolling through social media and all of a sudden you find a picture like eight dudes staying in the road holding a giant snake, you're probably looking at a picture

from Florida, from the Everglades of Burmese pythons. It's like it's just the same. The media likes certain stories about it where you'll see on social media a Burmese python gagging on something giant that it's trying

to eat. That's a popular one. About someone catching one that was bigger, the biggest so far, biggest this, biggest that, is a popular story. And people standing in a row holding up a big one is a popular story. And so people, I think, this this awareness of how these giant snakes are colonizing taking over impacting a large swath of florida but we're going to dive in here to sort of what's really going on how did it come to to be? How bad is it? Is there an end in sight? Is this normal now?

And get into some of that. But my first question laying this out, and I'm always puzzled by this. How do we not know exactly where they came from and how they got cut loose. If you can look at the genetics, can't you trace it to a population bottleneck of one or two snakes, or is it more complicated than that? It's a little more complicated than that, but maybe not that much. So one of the problems is that there hasn't been any good range-wide genetic analysis from the native range. So we can say that... Can you tell us what the native range is?

The native range is a big swath of Asia from Indonesia up to southern China and then all the way over through northern India, barely into Pakistan. So it's a really wide range of species, lots of different habitats, and no one's really gone through to sample from that whole range to figure out where the Florida pythons specifically are from. Although we can say that they're almost certainly from Southeast Asia based on the CITES import records. Explain that. Well, so all boas and pythons are on the CITES 2 list, which means that countries that are trading them have to report the numbers. And that's because python skins are such a big commodity. And then they extend that to live animals as well. And we imported tens of thousands of pythons from Southeast Asia, mostly during the, 1980 and about 19, no, about 2005.

For what? For the pet trade. 150,000? Yeah. Yeah. These were- Oh, so that's where this gets more complicated. These were one of the most popular snakes during that time period. And it's partially because

they were cheap as hell and they're impressive. It's a gorgeous snake. And I've got to admit that when I was a sophomore in college, I bought a hatchling Burmese python. So you're part of the you're part of the problem i am absolutely i mean i was the last person you want buying a python that's going to get that big because i was not doing it for good reasons so yeah i like snakes a lot but um i was doing it because it was going to be impressive and it would probably get girls to my dorm room. Yeah, but I mean, like, of what caliber? I mean, this was Berkeley, so, you know, it's pretty uniformly high. I'm not saying it worked.

But you had a theory that if you could say, would you like to come up and see um i don't even want to say it yeah at that point i was i was willing to try anything okay you were desperate you got a big python yeah yeah so anyway um we know we brought lots of them over and we know that there were also lots of importers based in the Miami area. And there were breeders. I can't leave that hanging, though. Did you take yours down and let it go in the Everglades? Or it died of old age?

Or you sold it? What happened to it? I had mine all the way through my master's degree at Arizona State. And when I left Arizona State to start my PhD at Auburn, I gave it to a friend of mine whose garage had just burned down and he lost his whole snake collection. Okay. You were helping her get rebuilt. Yeah. By that point, she was about 14 and a half feet, about 85, 90 pounds. Wow. And I had to go out in the desert and shoot jackrabbits for her

because she was just eating me out of house and home. Huh. Okay. So go on. So Florida. Yeah. So Southern Florida was an epicenter for both importing and breeding. And there's a lot of controversy about how the snakes became established. And so some people say that it was individual snakes that were released by pet owners in the Everglades, trying to find them a nice home after they got too big for their cages. And then there's people who say that Hurricane Andrew in 1992 knocked down a bunch of these importer and breeder facilities and released snakes into the Everglades. That was reported widely, including in the New Yorker. Yep. Yep. And I've been looking for evidence of that for a decade. And so far, I've found no one who can provide eyewitness accounts of these facilities that got knocked down and lots of

snakes are known to have escaped. Could it have happened? Absolutely. But it's interesting because some of the folks who are advocates for pet owners say, hey, don't blame us it was hurricane andrew knocking down the importers but i just think it's a really silly dichotomy because we know the reason they were there they were there because we imported them and bred them and by one means or another they got out so there could have been not could have been, not could have been, or probably was, potentially dozens of release occurrences. Yeah, it's possible. There's a paper that a couple of friends of mine put out recently showing that there's actually potentially two different populations that were established. One that started in the southern Everglades, one that started closer to naples they've got slight differences um in dna um but again they're still probably from southeast asia and we know that we brought them in intentionally What was the first, what year was the first known instance of natural wild reproduction?

2000. So, there's a paper out there that models generational times, and it suggests that they might've been established in the mid 80s at low numbers in the Everglades. And then if so, then Hurricane Andrew would have just augmented it a little bit, but the first hatchlings were found not until 2000. And even then there were people who were trying to say that, oh, those are just individual releases. And that was true for most pythons until about 2003, 2004, when they started finding more. Up until that point, it was easier for folks to say, oh, we found a python.

But pythons are from tropical areas and they can't survive in Florida. And so this must be a recent release or escape. Yeah. Tell me why, and you can go on as long as you want, who cares about these snakes? Why is it such a big issue that they got cut loose well it's not like legitimately a human safety issue no no we've actually reviewed that and the risks to humans

are extremely low um we collected reports of uh so-called python Python attacks from free-ranging pythons over the course of a decade. And we found five instances where people had seen a Python strike at a human. The Python only made contact on two of those occasions, only broke the skin on one, didn't try to constrict on any of them. And all of those attacks were on professional biologists who were walking through flooded areas in the Everglades. And generally, that's not something we'd want the public to be doing anyway in a place that's full of gators and cottonmouths. So the chances of some visitor to everglades and there's a million of them a year being attacked and killed by a python is extremely low it's not to say it couldn't ever happen but in the scope of potential risk to humans it's pretty much a non-factor so yeah mean, in 20 years, there's, I mean, in 20 years of known wild reproduction, there's been zero human fatalities?

No human fatalities, not even a human attack that I'd consider serious. Now, you know, during that time period, there have been people killed by captive Burmese pythons, but still not many of those. And those are spread throughout the U S and Canada. Yeah. Yanni's got a question for you. He wants, we need to back up a little bit cause he's got a good question for you. All right.

My question was if, is the pet trade and the affinity for the snake hides as big in the snakes native range as it is here in the United States? So let's see. The great majority of the trade in snake skins is reticulated pythons. And that trade is in the, you know, million skins per year range globally. And Burmese pythons are in much less demand for the skin trade. But sort of just, I'm going to loop back to the human attack thing. So the reticulated python versus Burmese python question. Reticulated pythons are actually known to attack humans regularly in the native range, whereas even Burmese pythons in the native range aren't.

They're very different animals. There is a study of a tribe in the Philippines, and 26% of the adult males reported being attacked by reticulated pythons. And there were multiple instances of fatalities. And so there are sort of personality differences among these giant snake species. We can only find two records of a Burmese python ever even eaten any kind of primate. Whereas reticulated, they just consider a biped as another suitable prey item. So go back to your question and let me know if i answered it okay yeah well no the hides you're talking about the hides that was that answers the hides but is there a pet trade

as well over there in its native range for those snakes well what's happened is that there there's still a pretty big trade in people who catch pythons opportunistically in the fields, and then these animal traders will come around periodically and buy them from them. And those animals might go into the pet trade, might go into the skin trade, depending on where they can get more money. But they've also found that they can farm pythons for both skins and meat. And they've come up with really intensive production of pythons in the last few years. And they can get them to eat things with some amount of training as juveniles that they wouldn't eat in the wild. So things like, you know, chicken necks that are waste products, they can get the pythons to eat those. They're making giant sausages and feeding these things to pythons and getting really high production.

I mean, that might be another Weston hookup, but I'm not sure. Man, that sounds like a horror movie location in the making right there that's a place I don't want to go see is the python factory oh yeah I know it just like it just it's kind of the more you think about the less appetizing it becomes man yeah well that you know the traditional way um was definitely um not great they would uh They would take a pretty big snake, stick a hose in its mouth, and basically fill it up with water, and then stick a rubber band around its head, and it would suffocate. And the water stretches the skin out and makes it easier to skin afterwards. So it was, you know, definitely inhumane, would not pass any kind of animal care laws around here.

But apparently they're now going to much more humane methods of euthanizing animals for the skin trade. Yeah. So tell me why. Okay, it's not a people thing. Explain what the real problem is. Yep. So the real problem is that snakes are phenomenally efficient predators. And one thing that people don't realize is that snakes can exist at very high densities. And we don't realize that because they've got low individual detection

probabilities. That means we don't see them so in your backyard on any given day you might see the same damn squirrel over and over again that squirrel is a biological exhibitionist he's letting you see most aspects of his life but meanwhile i like that's a good that's a great term, man. Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, come on. Yeah. He's like, here I am. I'm barking at you. In most parts of the U S there are 20 snakes for every squirrel at least.

But how many of them do you know? In Kansas, there can be over a thousand ringneck snakes per hectare really yeah and that's one species of snake and so when you look at the the total number of snakes in an ecosystem they can exhibit massive top-down effects on prey species. And in a regular ecosystem, those prey have evolved with those snakes. And so there's a trade-off. You don't have those prey species going extinct usually because of snake predation, because they've got behaviors that allow them to escape it. But when you take something like a Burmese python and dump it in the Everglades with animals that don't have those kinds of adaptations to a large ambush foraging snake, you can have really big effects. So I just got some data from Christina Romagosa, who's a colleague at the University of Florida,

and we've been sending her all of the stomach samples from the 2,100 pythons that our staff have dissected. And as of now, we're at 71 native species that have been identified from python guts. Give me some examples. Oh, it's 45 birds, 24 mammals, two reptiles. It's everything from wrens to alligators. Do they cannibalize each other? No. No, the only way that a python is going to eat another python is if they start at opposite ends of the same prey item, and then basically they keep going.

Really? That happens. It's like laying in the tramp with that spaghetti noodle. Yeah. Hold on. This is a known occurrence? It mostly happens in captivity. I mean, I've had it happen with captive snakes that I've had.

So they got a rabbit. They start eating the rabbit. Then they meet, and then one of them just keeps eating and eats the other one too? Yeah, basically when a snake starts eating, they keep going. Yeah. Disgusting. But yeah, I mean, the range of species is pretty phenomenal.

I mean, you've got the things you'd expect, like rabbits and raccoons, most of the herons. But then they eat surprising numbers of rails. And a rail is another bird that we don't see that often, right? They're really good at hiding, but snakes are able to find them easily. There's some records that are just bizarre. They got a frigate bird out of a python that was in the middle of the Everglades. Even though frigate birds don't land on the mainland in Florida, they only land on the offshore mangrove islands. So how this snake ended up with a frigate bird in it 30 kilometers from the coast is a mystery. They can eat very large meals. So the biggest meal is a fawn from a python over near Naples. And the fawn was 113% of the snake's body mass. What?

And it successfully ate it? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So that's like me eating a 200-pound cheeseburger. It's like you eating Giannis. Yep. With no hands. And one sitting.

Yeah. So they're just phenomenally efficient. You have such a freaking endotherm bias, man. Oh, dude, real bad. Real bad. Real bad. Man, you wouldn't even understand. It's like real bad.

Can you explain what an endotherm bias is, please? It means Steve's scared of scaling and slimy things, I think. No, it's not scared. It's repulsion. I have repulsion about... I'll tell you where it came from real quick. You know in high school when you got to dissect frogs? Yep.

I opened my frog up, and I found a giant mouse inside my frog, and it had a psychological impact on me. Cool. Yeah, it had a psychological impact. I never recovered. Wow. Never recovered. Bob, I think we should keep going down the diet.

Yeah, all right. The diet route,, I think we should keep going down the diet. Yeah, all right. The diet route. But I think beforehand, maybe like, just can you explain how a python hunts and how it gets like, you know, A to Z of how he gets his prey into his guts? That's a good question because the Wren one is confusing to me.

Like a Wren is confusing. Yeah. So we think of pythons as being primarily ambush foragers and some people think that means they just sit somewhere but really they're sequential ambushers so they move around the environment until they detect prey scent and then they'll investigate that area until they find an area with higher concentrations of prey scent. And then they'll set up, often perpendicular to a game trail. And yeah, they may then sit there for 10 to 15 days without moving. But they have heat sensing

pits on their lips, so they can use vision and the body temperature of an approaching prey item. And to some degree, they'll use smell, but that's pretty minimal in inducing strikes. Do you have any idea how far out they can sense the heat? You know, there are papers on that, but I would say that it's unlikely it's going to be effective more than about two meters in most environments anyway and that's that's going to be about the limits of a strike for a big python anyway um and then they they strike they grab, hold, and constrict. So with the strike, though, is it usually like, do you guys know where the strike is aimed on animals? Or is it just anywhere to get a hold of it?

You know, my buddy Scott's been looking at that on some deer that have been regurgitated. And it does seem like they're more likely to strike it up in the chest thorax region than other places. But really, if a big snake hits a prey item, it usually knocks it off balance and the snake then retracts. And as soon as it's got one good wrap around that prey item, it's not going to be able to get away. And then death is usually not caused by suffocation. There's a lot of interesting new evidence now suggesting that the pressure is so strong that it raises blood pressure above the level that the heart can pump against. So it basically just stops circulation. And if you think about it, once you stop circulation to the brain, animal can be unconscious really quickly. And so we've learned a lot probably just in the last five years about some of the things

on how pythons constrict and what causes death. My buddy Scott Bobak took rats and then inserted little tiny balloons inside their chest. These are euthanized rats with a little tube to a pressure gauge. He would give those to a boa constrictor. They constrict it. And then they start to relax because it's not moving. And then Scott has this pressure gauge start simulating a heartbeat with the

little balloon that's inside it. As soon as that heartbeat starts, they clamp down again. Really? And so they can feel the heartbeat. Yeah. They can feel the heartbeat and they squeeze until it's gone. Whoa.

So anyway, let's go back to, I guess we'll go back to eating. Yeah. So they can eat really large prey items, like I said, and you think about it, if you don't have your own body heat, it's going to be challenging to digest something that big. So a big snake will bask, that raises its body heat, but it also has this enormous metabolic response where it raises its metabolism 18-fold, which is the difference basically between a sleeping horse and a galloping horse. So a snake that's digesting a really big meal is just raging internally, even though you can't see that. And within 24 hours, the mass of their heart increases, the mass of their liver increases, their gut gets hugely increased in terms of the little tiny folds in the gut, the villi, that increase surface area for digestion. So they're taking stored energy from their last meal and almost instantaneously turning it into all this organ mass that they need to digest this new meal.

And is it stored as fat? That's primarily going to be conversion of fat and conversion of, yeah, mostly fat, I guess. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX x club y'all you know uh we're down in south america and uh uh we're fishing with some amerindians and they were telling me that they like to use the was it the anaconda fat yanni i don't remember this probably as a as a when you're arthritic they say that if you rub the anacondas fat into your joints it's helpful i'm not i'm not asking you if this is like pharmaceutically sound I'm just telling you it's like a weird that that was why they killed him if you killed one it was to get the fat well I mean there's there's a reason why snake oil salesman is a term oh yeah it's a good point man

it's been it's been used as medicinal in all kinds of cultures around the world. Oh, you know, I never – that's funny. I never put that together. Like I know the expression selling snake oil. I never thought about like actually selling snake oil. Yeah, yeah. And something like a python, I mean, I've removed 10 kilos of fat from a single python. You know, 22 pounds of fat i've got several barge ball jars of rendered python fat

in my freezer right now because i'm thinking that eventually i could become a snake oil salesman can you send me is it legal for you to send me one of those jars absolutely i just want like a little pint size jar yeah do you ever cook with it bob um i haven't you know. It's not nasty smelling by any means, but it doesn't have that nice, clean, large smell either. Yeah. Do you like eating the meat off these? Are people into the meat in their native range and then also in Florida? I think in the native range, they're probably eaten, you know, occasionally when people come across them. I don't really know what's done with the carcasses and the skin trade.

But in Florida, so the Everglades has an interesting atmosphere because all that greenery puts out huge amounts of water into the air. That turns into these towering clouds. And those clouds reach so high that they, in turn, pull airborne mercury out of the air and those upper air layers and deposit it as rain. And so the Everglades are known for having fairly high mercury levels for a lot of, say, game fish. And the safe limits for mercury, depending on where you are, anywhere between 0.5 and 1.5 parts per million.

Pythons have come out as high as 3.5 parts per million. So you definitely would want to have a python test it before you eat it, because they can have mercury loads that are insane. Can you explain to people bioaccumulation, like how that mercury builds up? Yeah, so the mercury is deposited primarily into waterways and it gets transformed into methylmercury that can be taken up by very small organisms. And then successive layers of predators then build up more and more of it in their tissues. And so by the time you get to something like an alligator or a python that's been eating everything from fish to herons that might have slightly elevated mercury, they can end up with pretty high levels themselves.

But there's no problem eating Florida gator. I mean, well, maybe there is, but we've eaten it and it's commercially available. You can go online and have it delivered in a day or two to your house. Yep. Of course, most of those are farm-raised gators. Yeah, okay. So they're fed controlled food. So they might not be as high in mercury.

Yeah, you'd think they'd probably be very low. And then when you go north of the Everglades, you don't have quite those same atmospheric conditions, and you don't have quite as much buildup to the north. That said, I would definitely have a really big gator tested before I ate it. Okay. So let's jump back into the impact that they're having on the landscape. There's a ton of them. We don't know how many. I want to talk about that, too.

Like, how many of these things are there? Yep. in terms of the impact they're having on these dozens of species of native wildlife that they feed on oh and do they like wild pigs uh they do although there's only a few records of wild pigs most of the pigs are pigs start getting common farther north. There aren't really all that many pigs in Everglades National Park itself. But more generally, there's three lines of evidence you can use for assessing impacts. One's just the list of species. And like I say, we've got 71 species. Some of those are federally endangered, like the key largo wood rat or the wood stork.

But that doesn't tell you much about impacts to populations. And so the next best step is a correlative study. And so I was involved with one a few years ago, and that involved driving roads in areas in Everglades Park with pythons, in areas where pythons had just recently reached, and in areas with no pythons. And I think we ended up with about 6,500 kilometers of driving that we did, and we were recording every snake and every native species that we saw. And the upshot of that is that in the areas with pythons in Everglades National Park, we had a 99% decrease in raccoons, 99% decrease in opossums. We had 99% decrease. Yes. We had zero marsh rabbits. We had an 87% decrease in bobcats. What? So there's a range of species that are essentially gone from Everglades National Park.

They tend to be mid-sized mammals. You say marsh rabbits. You gave it that there was zero. So I understand like 100% increase. But of these different species, what do you know about it in terms of raw numbers for people to think about? Like, is there an estimate of pre-Python bobcat population? Yeah, so this was actually neglected to mention that this was pre and post. So we looked at it two ways. We looked at it based on surveys from 1996 before

pythons were abundant in the park versus surveys from about the mid 2000s. And then we looked at it along that transect of high Python abundance to zero pythons. So as far as pre-abundance, there are lots of anecdotal reports and field notes from people in the, say, early 90s, driving levees in the Everglades and saying, saw over 100 marsh rabbits. They used to be incredibly commonly seen because when it's the wet season, all the rabbits are on the dry land, and that means tree islands and levees, so they get concentrated. I've been going to the Everglades since 2006. I have never seen a marsh rabbit in Everglades National

Park. No kidding. They're gone. They got wiped out by pythons. They got wiped out. And so that's the question. What did it? And so that led to the manipulative experiment that we did a few years later. And this was led by some colleagues at University of Florida. And I need to give a shout out to Adia Sovi, who was the grad student who did it because the amount of work she did was inhuman. I still can't believe she pulled this off. So in that study, we took 95 rabbits from north of the Python distribution, marsh rabbits trapped them then we established two populations of 15 rabbits oh i got i got a whole bunch of questions yeah yeah how are you how are you catching how are you catching the marsh rabbits um basically have a hearts okay yep

um so let's see i know a guy that'd be real interested in this area yeah where you're getting these marsh where you're getting these marsh rabbits from yeah so she she trapped 95 rabbits she've got she established two populations of 15 each in everglades national park okay she established another population of 15 outside of the python range, and that's the procedural control to see whether relocating rabbits kills them. Gotcha. And then she left the remaining 40-something in place as a regular control. Oh.

And presumably put some kind of tracking device on all these things. Every single one of them had a radio caller. Yeah. And how do you know you've established a population of 15? That's a good question. So marsh rabbits like to poop on latrines that they use over and over again, just like swamp rabbits pooping on logs. You walk through the swamp looking for a log that has poop on it,

and you know there's a swamp rabbit around. Oh, I thought, okay, okay. This is helpful. Because I thought when you're saying marsh rabbits, I thought you were talking about swamp rabbits. Yep. So, you know, swamp rabbits are the big boys. Marsh rabbits are more the size of a cottontail.

Oh, so we're not talking big, like, six-pound Leviathan cottontails. No, no. All right. That's all. So we established artificial latrines, which were basically just elevated pieces of plywood with a piece of astroturf on top. And the rabbits start using them.

And we saw that in all these locations initially we had rabbits using latrines and we had reproduction because they were small pellets that showed up too we only re translocated adult rabbits so we knew there was reproduction going on and we tracked them for a year and during that that year, almost all the rabbits died. That's expected because they're rabbits. They don't last very long. But what was interesting was that in Everglades National Park, you had these two rabbit populations. There was some predation. Most of it was pythons, and we know it was pythons because we would track the rabbit signal and it would be inside a python. That's a dead giveaway.

Yeah, that's a pretty good indicator. But then towards the end, as the water levels rose in the summertime, the rabbits get a little more concentrated and they just got hammered. So 77% of the rabbits in Everglades were known to have been eaten by pythons. And at the end of the year, there were no rabbits left in the Everglades. So even all the juveniles were gone. And those little populations had been wiped out. Whereas in the areas where we had no pythons, yeah, most of our original rabbits were dead because that's what happens to rabbits.

But those latrines were still used because you still had lots of rabbits left. And so that was, for me, kind of the nail in the coffin showing that, yes, we had lists of species, we know what they're eating, we had correlative evidence that they've suppressed a bunch of species, and now we can say, experimentallyally they can drive this meso mammal population to extinction which is pretty amazing have you thought about replicating that study with something that's longer lived like like getting some coons or something you know yeah you're in my mind i'd love to do it with raccoons. Raccoons, I don't know how much we know about translocating

raccoons. You know, rabbits tend to like to hang out with other rabbits. So if you put them in an area, they'll probably stay there. I got you. Moving raccoons, I really wonder whether they just take off. And not find each other and not start. Yeah. Yeah. On the other hand, they might be big enough to take satellite tags. So you could actually follow them without having to walk out in the marsh. And you can get a satellite tag with the mortality sensor and know when it stops moving. But yeah,

it would be the problem with that is it wouldn't stop moving. It would just move around inside a snake. Yeah. And that's a question whether a digesting python moves enough to trigger a mortality sensor i don't know gotcha there's a there's a massive deer known fate study that's going on in southern florida right now and it's been going on for three or four years but unfortunately all those collared are, almost all of them are north of the python distribution. So we won't be able to say much about whether pythons knocked out the deer

in the Everglades. Part of the reason for this study was that deer populations have been decreasing by quite a bit in Southern Florida and no one knew why, but they couldn't find enough in everglades to collar to figure out if it was pythons uh are you familiar with the theory i think you could qualify this as a conspiracy theory and i don't mean that in a negative way are you familiar with the theory that the Florida Panther, as it recovers and expands, is killing all the deer and all the game

and all the raccoons, everything else, right? And the people who are pro-panther and who don't want any kind of mortal control of panthers want to hide the fact of the panthers are killing all the game from the public so they blame all the missing game on the pythons in order to protect the panthers i think uh anytime your explanation takes that long to get to what you're trying to say you might have you ever heard what we have you ever heard what we heard about uh why wolves were reintroduced um there's a theory that there's it's a long play by the clintons that wow if they reintroduce wolves

the wolves would kill all of the game no one would have a reason to hunt anymore no one would buy any guns and that would help you take over the country wow were they breeding the wolves in the basement of a pizza shop? In D.C.? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Well, going back to your question, you know, yes, there are lots of conspiracy theories about pythons and panthers and all that stuff. I would love to hear all of them. that question can be answered very shortly by saying that the highest panther densities are well north of the pythons and well west. Up in the panther refuge, for example, there's no pythons up there. And so trying to say that the panthers are knocking down game doesn't make much sense because there's still plenty of game in the areas where there's the most Panthers. Yeah, but did you see that? This is not conspiracy

theory. Did you see those mortality studies they did on deer in Florida? Panthers are, I mean, they're not out there whistling Dixie. Yeah, well, that's that deer mortality study I was talking about. But I mean, they're not eliminating them from the landscape, but they're definitely eating them. Yep, yep. That's what they're supposed to do, right? Yeah, I would gather. I would do that as well.

I got a couple of questions for you. You're saying, you say snakes are hard to count. What does you, if you had to guess, like God's got a gun to your head, right? And you had to guess how many snakes per unit of space exists in the highest abundance areas what would you what would you guess if you if it was a life or death situation oh geez like if you get it like i know okay let me paint the picture for you i'm this omniscient being that knows all truth i'm the boss of all knowledge and i know the truth and i say to you how many are there and you have to get it right or else you have to die and you just got to take a wild stab in the dark yep this is i know as a scientist this is boiling your blood

but what would you what would you throw out there what would you throw out i think i'd bookend it by saying that I don't know if any herpetologists experienced in snake population estimate who would say that there's less than 10,000 pythons in the Everglades. And so that know, four per square kilometer. But we know that giant snakes can reach higher densities than that based on some limited studies of, you know, a similar species in Africa. And some of the, you know, preliminary work that we've done on removing snakes from levees. You know, there are individual levees from which over 100 snakes a year are being removed right now by paid python hunters. Those levees might be 10 kilometers long. So from, you know, 10,000 to a hundred thousand, I'm really comfortable with

anywhere in that range. It's that wide. Oh yeah. 10,000 to a hundred thousand. Yeah. Once you get over a hundred thousand, I know people who say, absolutely. And I say other people who say, Oh no, that's not possible.

But that's because generally those people don't understand detection probabilities and detection. Probability is the most important factor you need to understand if you want to know something about snakes. They are just phenomenally good at staying hidden from us. You know, all the time we get people saying, hey, we wiped out most of the bison. We wiped out the passenger pigeon. Just, you know, let the bubba's at them and we'll have no more pythons very soon. You know, I can see a bison from four miles away out on the prairie. They're easy to wipe out. But in contrast, I've had a 12-foot python that contains a radio transmitter in it.

And we've got six people standing in a six-foot circle around that snake. It's in six inches of water, and you cannot see it. It is invisible. And then while you're standing there talking about how amazing it is that you can't see this python, you turn the receiver on again, and it's 50 feet away. So they're just incredibly stealthy and secretive. And that colors everybody's perception of them in one way or the other. If you understand detection probability, you understand that there's far more of them out there than most people want to believe. And if you don't, you think, wow, look at all these snakes we removed.

We must be really knocking down that population. That makes you feel like you're not scratching it. You know, right now there's a lot of effort and a lot of money going towards paying people to remove pythons from the greater Everglades ecosystem, both in and out of the park. And the people who are doing that, they're, you know, they're mostly great folks. They care a lot. They're spending lots of time out in the field and they're removing a lot of pythons, you know, over 2000 last year. We had a recent study where we had several known telemetered pythons along a

levee, and then we did walking surveys. And in, I'd have to look at how many, yeah, we had about 500 kilometers of walking that we did over the course of a few months with known snakes that were available for detection. And I'll give you, I'll let you guess how many times we saw one of our telemetered pythons. Zero. Oh, damn, you're right. Man, so whisper. So that means like we calculated

the chance, it's like you've got this python named George that's out in the ecosystem in an area that humans can get to along a levee. Our chances of detecting it on any given day

are probably less than 1%. And probably more than 95% of the total area occupied by pythons is way less accessible. So it's hard for people to even get in there. So if we're taking000 pythons off of canal edges and roads, which is where the great majority come from, does that mean we're having an impact on the population? I think that's, we don't have any evidence to suggest that we're doing much by removing those snakes. However, there's a philosophical difference. You know, people say every snake we take out is one less snake that's eating native animals. And I'm not going to argue with that. You know, it's the difference between people who say that they care about the welfare of individual animals versus the people who say they care about, you know, the persistence of native animal populations.

And that, you know, that comes up in the hunting world a lot. I know what side of the spectrum I fall out on in terms of which one of those I think we should be pushing for. But I'm not going to tell those people they're wrong. That's more of a philosophical difference than a science difference. Yeah. Is it fair to say that if you're like a python hunter, you're not hurting anything? You may well be doing good. I just think that from an evidentiary standpoint, it would be nice if we could get the scientists together with those folks and really come up with a way to estimate the impacts on overall population size. And I think we're moving that way. We're going to have some pretty big telemetry studies going on, and we're doing that to understand what the snakes are doing but it

also means we know the number of known snakes out there and we'll be able to know when one of them gets picked up by a python hunter and you compare those you know known snakes removed to the total number removed maybe we can start zeroing in on a population estimate. What's a big python? And how old is it when it gets that big? Big python, I think the biggest, we've got several that are over 18 feet and 140, 150 pounds. And those are pretty rare.

You know, once you get up past about the 13 foot range, they're pretty much all females. And snakes over 14 feet represent probably less than 5% of our data set. Less than 5%? Yeah. Age-wise, we don't know because we remove every snake that's found and euthanize it. We don't have individuals that are followed over multiple years, so we get a good idea of age and survival, things like that. If you've got a 15-foot snake, I'd be surprised if it's less than 8 or 10 years old. Okay.

And then how much ground will one of these snakes cover? Surprising amounts. So back in the early days when people were just starting to do some telemetry work, they decided to put radios in some pythons, but they wanted to have it in a limited area so that they could track every snake every day. And so they took snakes from other places and brought them into an area east of Everglades National Park. And the snakes hung out there for most of the dry season, had home ranges of, you know, five to 20 acres. So not a huge huge amount but then when the wet season came and everything flooded a number of those snakes went back to their original capture locations

and sometimes to within a couple hundred yards a distance of how much over 20 miles no way way yep so they were navigating back to an area that you know they'd been driven in a long circuitous route from one spot to the other um but they navigated not quite straight line but pretty close back to capture locations and then landed within a couple hundred yards where they came from yep yep so in many cases they hundred yards where they came from. Yep. Effectively, they landed where they came from. Yeah. They somehow knew where home was and got back to it.

Wow. Years ago, I was talking to a buddy of mine. He's not a snake guy. He's a biologist, but not a snake guy. And he had had proximity to or participated in some research where they were testing the limits of python expansion and he was saying that there's sort of a line um an invisible line north of which it just becomes not suitable for them

uh what is that line like like in in our do we have them just like where we can have them and that's it or are there expansion potentials for these things it's a good question i think it's not well answered yet you know um our research group produced the very first climate matching study for pythons, and that was based on native range records. In hindsight, we may have been a little bit too credible in accepting some of those records because that produced a pretty large match to the Southeast U.S. Another group then put out a paper showing that, no, based on this modeling approach, they're limited to extreme South Florida and only the area that's currently occupied. We looked at that, found an error, corrected that error, and then their method showed all of Florida. Can I tell you what his what his thing was because i'm sure you know about it i think they were actually taking and

building these little enclosures yeah yeah and sticking them there and seeing if they could survive the winter or not do you know this was a long time ago and again this wasn't like his work you're not going to hurt his feelings right Right. That's been done at several locations. One of them was up in South Carolina. And all those snakes died. That's the one he's talking about. Yep. All those snakes died.

That was during that enormous cold snap of 2010 when we had ice even in Everglades National Park. But, yeah, those snakes died. And I would think that that area is almost certainly not suitable. The expansion is really slow. It looks like it's always been slow. We definitely have snakes farther north towards places like Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, where we didn't have records a few years ago. But still, that's only in the tens of kilometers north of the national park. So my hunch is they're not going to get too much farther north. But there was a really cool study with tissue samples from pythons that were taken starting in the early 2000s in Florida and going through that cold snap and afterwards. And they found molecular evidence of adaptation in genes that are controlling things like response to temperature.

And so the snakes appear to have gone through a cold snap. And there were a lot of snakes that died during that period. And there may have been a selection event for snakes that have a better ability to tolerate cold temperatures. The scale of that, we don't know. Does that mean that they're, you know, one degree better? Um, not really sure. Speaking of the temperature adjustment, I was reading, I think it was in one of the papers that you shared with us about how the female will increase her body temperature 11 to 14 degrees to regulate her nest. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, so there's a few species of pythons that engage in shivering thermogenesis. So, you know, when you get cold, you shiver, and that's because you are, by shivering, it's basically a mechanical way of increasing the temperature of those muscles so that they work better. And snakes that are coiled around eggs go through these sequences of shivering, and that raises their body temperature. They're coiled around the whole pile of eggs. That raises the egg body temperature

or the egg temperature as well. And so that allows them to maintain the egg body temperature or the egg temperature as well and so that allows them to maintain the egg temperature in the range that's best for development you know how uh you could control like with snap i know this is true with snapping turtles that you can control the the sex of the turtle by the soil temp and it goes in bands right it's not like hot is male cold is female but there's like a band of temperature a temperature band at which you'll get predominantly males and then there's a band of temperature higher than that which you'll get predominantly females but then there could be a next band of temperature band that would go back to making males. Do they do that?

Is that part of the regulating nest temperature or is it just the need to keep the eggs warm so they don't die during a cold snap? Yeah, that temperature dependent sex determination is typical of a lot of reptiles, but not the giant snakes. So they have straight genetic sex determination. The wrinkle with Burmese pythons and several other large pythons and anacondas and boas is that they can also be parthenogens. So there are records of several of these species producing young with no contact with a male. And so that's problematic. As an invasive species biologist, we worry about things like propagule pressure. That's the number of potential invasive organisms

that are reaching a certain area. Because the more there are, the more likely they are to find each other and breed. If you have an animal that is capable of being a parthenogen, then you could have a population started by one female. And that's a lot more worrisome to me as someone who thinks about this stuff. How is that possible? Uh, you know, I mean, parthenogenesis, um, it, you basically, you have a, a hiccup in terms of during meiosis, you know, during meiosis, which is the process of making sex cells like sperm, you're taking the two copies of DNA, splitting them apart, and each sex cell only has one copy. So sperm only has one half of your DNA. But if that process has some hiccup in it, then you can end up with both copies in a sex cell which means that

that organism can develop yeah but how does it mate with itself um it doesn't it's it's all females that do it and so it just means that the um like how does it it's producing a sperm well the female's, but so the female has got a follicle. Yeah. And so instead of producing a follicle, that's got half of the DNA during that meiotic process, all of it ends up in one half. Okay. And so that follicle now has both copies of DNA.

Oh, I got you. Is that a less fit creature because it has less genetic diversity going into it? Probably because it's a clone. And we don't know much about it because oftentimes it's been reported in captive snakes and we don't know how often it happens in wild snakes because we don't genetically sample every individual python that comes out

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The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit on x maps dot com slash meet on x maps dot com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all are there other species that that happens in um yeah i I mean, it's pretty widespread across the animal kingdom altogether, you know, but in snakes, it's known from a number of the primitive snakes, like some of the boas, some of the pythons, but it's also known from some more advanced snakes, you know, some of the colubrid snakes that most of the snakes we're familiar with in the continental US, water snakes, garter snakes, king snakes, things like that. So it's uncommon, but probably more widespread than we know. Can you tell everybody some of the stories about using Judas, like Judas from the Bible, using Judas snakes to catch snakes?

Yeah, you know, it's really interesting because... So when you have a male python and you put a radio transmitter in it and release it, during the breeding season, that male will engage in mate-searching behaviors. It'll go and try to find females. And in Burmese pythons, you have breeding aggregations of a large female and then several males that are all around it, all vying to mate with her. And those can persist for over a month sometimes. And so if you then follow your radio tag male, it might lead you to a breeding aggregation. You take all those snakes out, let your male go again, it's going to go search for another one.

And so it's potentially a method of increasing the removal rate of your pythons without putting in a whole lot more search effort, because all you got to do is check where your male is, say once a week, and see if it's found a female yet. As far as that term, it's really interesting because we had pushback recently from folks who said that the term Judas snake is antisemitic and is a term I've heard in wildlife biology for a year and for years, and I'd never thought about it, but I actually went back and started looking and historically there's a lot of support for that notion. And so just recently we had a,

we had a, a poll among a whole bunch of snake people. What terms should we use? And we gave them all these options. And so, because like, because Judas, Judas betrayed Christ,

but, but Christ, but Christ was a Jew. Yeah. But I guess it's been used as a pejorative for a while. As a traitor, yeah. Like someone who would betray a Christian. As of last month, we now have a Scout Snake project. Got it.

So anyway, it can work. How many have you ever uncovered using this strategy? Boy, I think the biggest aggregation might still be eight that I know of. So that'd be like six other males and one female? Yep. Yep. Yep. Um, in one of those, there was, there was one aggregation that was, uh, six males and one 13 foot female and all of them were in a single gopher tortoise burrow. Huh?

And they were jammed in there like a tent in a stuff sack, man. I mean, there were so many snakes. And I can't imagine that they could have pulled off a breeding event, you know? And then after pulling all these snakes out, in the very back of the burrow, there was this poor gopher tortoise who'd been stuck there for god knows how long with this you know python orgy going on right in front of let's see some kind of pervy voyeur who liked the whole thing yeah i mean that you know tortoise is probably 40 years old i guarantee you've never seen anything like that before when he goes to tell his buddies about it, they're going to be like, no way. Yeah.

Ask your questions, Johnny. These are good questions about the python hunters. Yeah, back to the python hunters. I think this can lead into what are going to be the ways to actually get rid of some of them. But the python hunters, how do they do their thing? And then can you talk about do they do their thing? And then can you talk about like what they're actually paid? Like, is this something that they could, they make a living at, or is it just a hobby? Yeah. Um, I don't know all the details of it

because I'm only, you know, on the outskirts of it. I think mostly they're getting minimum wage plus a certain amount of money per python plus a certain amount of money per foot. So they get paid for snakes, but it's also scaled by size. And most of them are going by vehicle. A lot of that is at night and they're using spotlights. Some of them have towers on the back of their trucks and they are cruising levees primarily. And, you know, we, they've actually taught us a fair amount about searching for snakes because we used to mostly drive levees in the daytime and look for snakes that are out basking. That still works sometimes um but they're finding a lot of their snakes right in the water's edge in ambush positions but the bodies are in the water and so they're a lot harder to see that way unless you've got a little elevation um but i mean if you you know you look around online and

there's there's uh there's a lot of coverage of of the python hunting that's going on. Oh, yeah, buddy. And the media, they love that story. And like I said, I mean, I only know a few of them personally, but they're all great folks, you know, and they deeply care about the Everglades ecosystem. Now, when they see one, say you see a 10-footer and only its six-inch head is sticking out of the water, do they shoot it? Do they put a lasso around it? Like, how do you get it?

It's almost all hand capture. So most of the time, if a snake sees something big and scary like us approaching, it's going to just freeze because it knows it's well camouflaged. And so probably, I don't know, 80, 90% of the time, you can walk up and just grab it behind the head real quick, pull it out of the water and figure out how to control it and get into a bag. Sometimes as you're approaching, they'll turn around and start moving off, and then you grab the tail and pull it out that way.

When you've got it by the tail, it's going to be trying to turn around on you and strike. But if you jerk the tail real hard every time it strikes, basically you'll throw it off. And then they tire out fairly quickly, or at least they calm down fairly quickly, and then you can work your way up to the head and get it in a bag. When the guys are going after the python hunt, why don't they just run up and chop its head off? There are some animals that are killed with firearms. No, chop its head off with a machete or something that's way harder than you'd think um yeah so especially for the ones that are in the

water uh but uh they're uh they're pretty dang muscular um and also the you know decapitation alone is not considered the acceptable euthanasia because you have to then destroy the brain right afterwards. So you can do that pretty easily if you just destroy the brain tissue after the head's off. So if you walk out in your yard and there's one laying there, what is the best practice to go kill it? Oh, boy. Start getting into the what should you do questions. All right, never mind. No, I mean, I think that probably the best possible thing is to do the same thing as with a rattlesnake,

which is just turn around, go back inside and call animal control or call your game and fish agency. That's, you know, that's the way that minimizes risk, Steve. Okay, let's say. But yeah, people, if you shoot a snake in the head, it's going to be dead. Okay. But any snake over about seven feet, I would not recommend that someone inexperienced try to catch it by themselves. Gotcha.

And that's because, you know, a seven-foot snake might only be 20, 25 pounds. But if that snake somehow manages to get a wrap around your neck, you're probably toast. Yeah. You'd be the first guy to get killed by a snake in Florida, by a Burmese python in Florida. Yep. So what will end up crystal ball, right? Crystal ball situation i i'm sure we can all imagine the crystal ball scenario where they kill everything off there's a greatly reduced food base you see a reduction in pythons but they never go all the way away because as they starve off you know their pop

the prey population rebounds a little bit and they just kind of hit some equilibrium that's kind of shitty for animals, but it's an equilibrium. What's a better crystal ball scenario? I think in the absence of some silver bullet intervention, you pretty much outlined it. The main thing to remember about snakes is that they're incredibly low energy organisms. So a snake can persist in the environment, and actually a lot of snakes can persist in the environment in a given area,

even if they don't have that much prey, because they only need a very small number of calories per year to keep them going as cold blooded organisms. So they're really efficient. And so that whole, you know, the hair and lynx cycles that we remember from our biology classes, you know, when the rabbits tank, the lynx tank even harder. But with a python... Yeah, because they feel it immediately. Yeah. With a python, if the prey tanks, the snakes don't go down nearly as far. So it's kind of like having this pathogen that's just hanging out in the environment

waiting for the conditions to get better. And they can respond really fast when those conditions do get better. So I think, yeah, we don't have a rosy future in terms of those mammals somehow coming back unless we get some sort of silver bullet. And so that's the next thing that people are thinking about is all these synthetic biology questions. So can we manipulate genomes in a way that drives the animals extinct? And I don't know if you previously talked about things like CRISPR

or RNA interference or things like that. We have not. On this show, but... Well, well no i don't think we have yeah like introducing introducing genetically manipulated animals into the environment in order to enter the population and have a long-term impact on the population yeah Yeah. So some people are familiar with the term gene drive. And in these tools, regardless of whether it's the CRISPR or the RNA interference, what you're trying to do is get one allele in every single organism. And it's the allele that you've manipulated. So going you know, going back to

what we talked about earlier, your parents have two copies in their DNA. You get one from each parent. In a gene drive, what we're trying to do is make sure that only one allele is passed on, and we want it to be the one that we've messed with. So in New Zealand, for example, they're working on daughterless mice so that you insert a gene in a male mouse. When it mates with a female, it knocks out the ability to produce female offspring. And so only males are produced. It's like a bar in Anchorage, man.

Yeah. Yeah, or Guam. And then all those males have that gene too. And so every female they produce with will only produce males. And so you end up swamping the population with these manipulated males, and eventually there's no more mice. That works pretty well, potentially, with something like a mouse that has really fast generation times. It's largely untried in something like a python that has extended generational times. But right

now, we're working on a research strategy that is what do we need to know in the next three years to be able to assess whether these tools will work for pythons. What about some kind of disease agent? You know, disease, I think if you look at the record of diseases introduced to Australia to control rabbits, you find that the initial knockdown is real hard, and then you're left with a resistant population. So you have a really strong selection gradient, and the remaining animals don't really have to worry about it that much.

We don't know of many diseases that would hit pythons that hard. But a twist there is that the pythons brought over a penistone parasite with them from Southeast Asia. We don't know the full life cycle of that thing, but we know that it goes probably from maybe amphibians to mammals like rats and then to pythons. And it turns out that native snakes are more competent hosts of this penistone parasites than the pythons are. And the penistone is now over 100 kilometers north of the python range. So we've got this introduced parasite that came in with an invasive snake that is now infecting native snakes and actually having a pretty strong impact on them that may spread throughout the continent. So we could end up having this python effect in arkansas even though the pythons aren't within a thousand miles oh man huh and then i know how this one always goes but i gotta ask it anyway

let's say you do like the old hawaii trip where you got a rat problem so you bring in some mongooses um what likes to eat pythons um the one that i get emails about is king cobras that that that's the solution that's yeah what you do is you get a big truck of king cobras. You sound like my father-in-law. Yeah, I mean, that's a legitimate suggestion that we get. I mean, that's not the best control tool suggestion we get. My absolute favorite is the pig goat raft. And the pig goat raft, since the winds are mostly from the west,

you make a whole bunch of rafts on the west end of the Everglades during the wet season. And you tie a goat in the front, and then you put a small pig on the back. And the wind starts blowing the raft through the Everglades. I'm tracking. I like it. And whenever it hangs up on vegetation, the raft through the Everglades. I'm tracking. I like it. And whenever it hangs up on vegetation, the goat eats the vegetation and clears the way so the raft can keep going. And then the pig is a lure for your pythons. And so as you move through, when a snake smells the

pig, it's going to crawl up and eat the pig and you've got the pig tethered and then the snake will be stuck. And yeah, what's wrong with that idea? I would just, I mean, wouldn't that be awesome? Um, I just like to take pictures of that solution. I like it. So it took the time to lay that out. Yeah. Someone really, really thought about that. Okay. What have we not asked you that we should have asked you oh man um like if you were thinking if these boys had half a brain they would ask me x well i mean i feel like you know as a invasive species guy and a snake guy, I should say something about the fact that these risks are not over. You know, we continually have new individuals of non-native snakes showing up all over the country. Burmese pythons are not the only giant snake that's established in the US. We've got the Northern African python, which is just as big, established in a small area in western Miami.

We've got boa constrictors, a central South American version of boa constrictors, actually very similar to what you would have seen in Guyana in a park in Miami. And then we've got a range of smaller snakes that are established too and so you know we keep on doing this to ourselves and we really don't have very good mechanisms for prevention and prevention is the most important part of invasive species management if you can keep things from getting established in the first place, then you're going to save a lot of money. But if you can't do that, you need early detection and rapid response. And you need to be able to say, hey, we found a couple of these. We're going to go in with all of our resources.

We're going to try to knock them out. And going back to the detection probability, that's really hard to do for snakes because the chances of finding the first one or the second one are just not that good. And so what I tend to tell people, and they're not crazy about hearing it, is that if you find one, you should go and put in a moderate effort and see if there's more. If you find two, you should really go in with all guns blazing. And if you find one, you should go and put in a moderate effort and see if there's more. If you find two, you should really go in with all guns blazing. And if you find three, you should assume you have a population. And when you compare that with a lot of other species that people are used to

responding to, it's a much lower bar for when you respond and when you don't. Yeah. We had a guy on talking about wild pigs one time, and we were talking about why they live where they live and where they could live. He was just saying that they could live virtually anywhere. They have the potential to colonize any part of the country. But the thing he brought up is it's just easy to detect them and eradicate them in certain landscapes. In certain landscapes, you don't have a prayer of finding them.

There's no reason they couldn't be out on the Great Plains, but the thing is you'd find them. Yeah, I mean, Colorado CPW just put out a notification that they had eradicated the hogs from southeast Colorado. You know, they were working their way up into the grassland down there, and they feel pretty confident they got them all. But, you know, it's kind of whackable. There's no reason to think that they won't be able to get back in. You know what I want to have you on to talk? Oh, go ahead. No, go ahead. Next time you come back in you know what i want to have you on to talk oh go ahead no go ahead next time you come on you know what i want to talk about

what's up with this uh what's up with this invasive monkey in florida oh yeah um yeah and and that it's protected what um yeah Um, yeah, that's the crazy thing. There's an invasive protected monkey in Florida. Well, it's, it's not, it's not considered a species that is a pest that you can legally, um,

you know, remove by any means as opposed to some other species. Yeah. Cause monkeys are cute. Monkeys are cute and people care about them. And it's, you know, it's the feral cat thing all over again. If you want to go down the feral cat road, we can. Yeah, I'd love to get a quick synopsis of it, please.

You mean that feral cats are bad news and they kill a billion and a half birds in this country every year, but people get touchy about shooting cats? Absolutely. And that there's a whole lot of people that try to use really bad evidence to suggest that cats aren't that bad. But the, you know, the trap neuter return policy, which has been adopted by increasing numbers of municipalities and counties and things like that, as a so-called cat control mechanism, almost no evidence that it works at all. Plenty of evidence that cats in cat colonies live nasty, short, brutish lives for the most part, that it's not a humane thing to do for the cats or the wildlife. And it's, you know, in some ways it's

just kind of a convenient way for hard decisions to be avoided. Got you. All right. So when this monkey thing blows up, you got to come back on. I'd love to. Yeah. You know,

me and Yanni have, we've at monkey. Was that down in South America? That's right. Yanni loves it. Hey, can I, can I say something about your brother real quick? Yeah, I don't care. Yeah. All right. Yanni loves it. Hey, can I, uh, can I say something about your brother real

quick? Yeah, I don't care. Yeah. All right. So I feel like I, no, I just feel like I need to shout out to, to Dan Rinella because, you know, I came to hunting late in life. You know, I didn't kill my first year until I was 30 and Dan and I overlapped at Auburn when we were in grad school. And Dan took me for my first, second, third, fourth and fifth duck hunts. Huh. And waterfowling is now like a really big part of my life. And I'm just really I'm just really grateful that I was such a noob and he took me out. And I just always consider that as super generous.

And, you know, I just reconnected with him again a couple years ago and, you know, have made a couple trips to Alaska in the last two years, going again in August, tagged along with him on his sheep hunt last August. I'm just super appreciative of what a sort of giving guy he is. It's meant a lot to me. Oh, that's great to hear. What's funny about this is that our producer, when I told her to go find a burmese python guy uh the best one out there is what i asked for she independently found you and then one day said i found a guy and it turns out i think he knows your brother which i thought was pretty funny

which i thought was funny yeah yeah you guys. You guys had Harry Green on the hunting collective podcast and Harry was my undergrad mentor in Berkeley and he's one of the snake gurus, but he also came to hunting late in life. And it's, it's really fun to sit and talk with him and talk about how our non-hunting life has informed our hunting life and made us, you know, maybe a lot more empathic with the opinions of people who don't know a lot about it and ways to engage with them. And that's, uh, that's another thing that's been, you know, an unexpected benefit of meat in the freezer, you know, that, that philosophical side of it, um, and why we do it and justifying why we do it, uh, is a fun thing to think about. That's great. Thank you very much for coming on. Keep a surprise, keep a surprise

of those monkeys. Yep. Yep. Will do. Thanks again. All right. Take care, guys. Thanks, Bob. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. On-axe hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now, the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps

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