The environment will always find equilibrium eventually. There are two problematic factors to that though. First, the obsession the average moron... excuse, American couch potato has with big bad monster beasties of any make and model as exemplified in that newspaper article, and then the depredation of native animals as things adjust.
Beat me to it, Louise! Yes, indeed, there were some very large Boids in Florida prior to the Ice Age, as fossils suggest. Now, while these were not PYTHONS, per se, but related to the modern Boa Constrictors and more likely, Anacondas, they were still very impressive big honkin' constrictor snakes. AND, I find it utterly ridiculous that people still insist that nothing will eat a Burmese Python. Those things don't hatch out as 17-footers. Anything that will eat a native snake will eat a young Burm, and that's a lot of animals in south FL! Gators eat them, and another even more dangerous and persistent invasive species, the feral hog, will certainly eat them. Hogs are especially fond of snake meat, and unlike solitary species that the Burm will prey on, those babies run in gangs, and stick up for one another. Tangling with a herd of wild hogs is like running into a wall of chain saws, and the Everglades is overrun with those critters and not ONE thing is being done about it, either. Unlike snakes, hogs actually DO alter the land itself through their incessant rooting, and again, unlike snakes, they also destroy native plants as well as preying on animals. No one mentions the hogs, though, because when you mention "hogs and pigs" people think of "Babe" and "Wilbur" from "Charlotte's Web", not bad-tempered, 300-lb. beasts with six-inch tusks for slicing and dicing, so people tend to get all upset about the notion of killing them. Mention snakes, though, and most people get a bad case of the "KILL-IT-WITH-FIRE" heebie-jeebies. Also conveniently left out of the picture is the fact that HUMANS have already irreparably damaged the Everglades, by diverting water from it to the sugar cane fields and housing developments and golf courses and resorts, and by building major highways through it, and this happened long before anyone in the US thought of keeping a Python as a pet. Another conveniently left-out fact is that there are a lot of much more insidious invasives in the Everglades that aren't even animals, but PLANTS, like Kudzu and Hydrilla, which do more damage than the animals, but they aren't exciting enough to warrant a fear-mongering news headline.
The plant that ate the South? Sounds pretty scary if you ask me
Absolutely. Unfortunately, exotic invasions under the right conditions are almost impossible to control or reverse. The question is how far are we willing to go in ensuring they don't occur in the first place.
It is really hard to qualify whether or not the burms will be as catastrophic as the house snake in Guam. Like Guam, we don't have this kind or scale of predator naturally, not even gators. I will reserve judgment for now on that front, it's impossible to predict one way or the other beyond saying that we don't know because we don't have anything similar.
The presence of numerous, very large (e.g. larger than any other native predator by a long shot) breeding adults contradicts that.
I'm not saying they need to dismiss the problem. The news is making things seem like if you live in FL that your backyard is teaming with giant snakes that are spreading like the the zombie virus in 28 Days Later. Of course these will have some sort of impact on the ecology in the glades. What my first post was getting at was that the python issue in the media's view is unrealistic. The burms and other exotics have been in the glades something like 3 decades. My only question is why NOW is it becoming a "problem" if they've been around so long? They can't possibly be taking over as fast as these news writers insist if they've been around that long.....just my .02 on it all. Regardless the news should be taken with a HUGE grain of salt.
Yeah, no kidding. Big, "bad" snakes terrorize the Everglades and gobble up the native animals of FL and it gets to the press. Meanwhile, the many, MANY adorable pet kitties people allow to roam freely to "explore their territory" kill without needing to eat don't even get a little press. Guess it's okay as long as the critter is fluffy.
You ARE aware that DNA testing has ruled out the "released pets" scenario as the reason that the Burms are in the Everglades...RIGHT??? THAT is something cooked up by the AR's, along with the entire mythos surrounding a non-existent breed of dog that the AR supporters still insist is something out of the ordinary. Kook-Aid drinker, or Kool-Aid mixer...which are you going to be?
To echo what you say, when I was a kid I used to find ring necked snakes, see cardinals and orioles, numerous black racers around my old mans house. Nowadays I barely see any of those animals. Maybe cats are to blame, who knows but something is happening to which I never see these animals anymore.
Really? Can you please provide a link to that study? I didn't realize anyone had genotyped all the assorted python lineages found in the pet trade and eliminated them as possible sources of the populations found in the Everglades.
Conspriracy theory?