A Record Breaking Python Found In Florida, Shows The Danger To Local Ecology
On August 10, 2012, the Florida Museum of Natural History had a delivery of something that has increased the worry of scientists specializing in animal ecology of the Everglades.
It seems that the delivery was a record breaking Burmese python that had been captured in the Everglades and measured out at 17-feet, 7-inches but it wasn’t the size that was the only record breaker. The snake was a female and it was found to have 87 eggs ready to be laid inside of it.
The previous record was a 16.8 foot python with 85 eggs and while the difference in size may not seem like much for scientists it further confirms their fears that the non-indigenous snake was surviving quite well in the Everglades and from the feathers found in the contents of its stomach it would seem that just about anything is fair game when the snake gets hungry.
“This thing is monstrous, it’s about a foot wide,” said Kenneth Krysko, manager of the museum’s herpetology collection. “It means these snakes are surviving a long time in the wild, there’s nothing stopping them and the native wildlife are in trouble.”
[…]
“A 17.5-foot snake could eat anything it wants,” Krysko said. “By learning what this animal has been eating and its reproductive status, it will hopefully give us insight into how to potentially manage other wild Burmese pythons in the future.
via Phys.org
Apparently newly hatched Burmese pythons are about 18 inches long at birth and have a high rate of survival.
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Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
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