Nah, this is a rumor that is circulating, she did not invent the false inference herself but rather likely picked it up in a blog somewhere or something along those lines. Most likely people who want to believe that there isn't an underbelly to their hobby have read the paper that says genetic diversity is limited and then drawn there own conclusions which are not supported by the published data or the scientific group responsible for executing the study. It's a problem with science in general- trained professionals do the work and then untrained people make the public aware by trying to "summarize" what they think it means without having a good understanding of the content. Conclusions are drawn because they sound like reasonable arguments but they are in fact not supported by the data in the study being quoted, usually because the people reporting the results do not have a grasp on the nature of the study or the scope of the potential variables involved. Ultimately it's a bunch of flawed logic being passed around like the truth with a link to the paper that was misinterpreted in the first place. The next guy reads the title, skims to the end (skipping over the models, math, figures and data, the real "content" of the literature, because he/she is not trained to interpret it and finds it too challenging to be worth tackling as a hobbyist) or maybe just reads the abstract and draws the same flawed conclusion that other unqualified people have told them is really there. Surprise! It is not.
No kind of DNA work will ever be able to tell us how those first few pythons got here, period, so that is a clear cut way to show that this is not a conspiracy but an all too common misunderstanding of valid scientific data. We know that there are several introductions through DNA, we know that one line is dominant and variability outside of that line is quite limited to date.
BUT that does not say anything about the origin of the line, those are the flawed arguments that are being used to excuse the pet trade from being a contributer to this mess. All this tells us is that the pythons are closely related to one another- could be from a single breeding facility, could be low diversity in captive bred pythons in the area or in general, could be that this line predates all others by decades and so is found at a higher frequency in the wild or could be one big fat 20 foot 250 lb preggo female somehow eluded all notice and escaped from a shipping port and crawled all the way to the Everglades where she promptly had 100 babies that have formed the bulk of the population we see today. DNA will never be able to clarify that. All it can do is tell us about the relationship of the animals to one another. It does tell us that several distinct pythons were reproducing there and it also suggests that hobbyists are not all buying every python they can so they can dump it in the glades. Most of these are probably from whatever original pairs were introduced, not a ton of separate introductions. But still no way knowing how they got there, certainly not using DNA.
So funny- people used to be so skeptical of DNA back in the day, now it is the answer to things it can't really even answer!
