00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bog bitten in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor where you stand with on X. All right, folks, before I even introduce what we're um, this question is going to reveal. This question will reveal what we're talking about. But before I introduced who we're talking about it with, I just gotta get one of these. I gotta get something out of the way. Um, Dr Bob Reid, Is it true that a Burmes that day? Is this really? They found a Burmese python on that had the remains of three different deer and its lower GI tract that was That's probably the publication I'm proudest of because I got an entire 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 forty eight kilo python, so a little over a hundred pounds, and it had a fourteen pound poop inside it. And in that poop were the hoofs of three different deer. Um, and my buddy Scott bo back we we uh, 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 cuff size to the tier that we're in the poop. So we figured out how big they were and how many had eaten and uh yeah, um, one dough and two fons all in one python poop from the everglades. Do they feel that that one python had been carrying those like to 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 it's like is that a life's collection of deer or is that last week's dear it so carroton doesn't get digested and we you know we pass hair too, um, so hair and hooves get past. But it looks like this snake was actually impacted. That it had eaten a dough that was of its own body mass, followed by two fonds that we estimate with thirty of its body mass and Basically it just got plugged with hair, and so we think this thing was probably gonna die. But based on the fawning period in Florida and when the snake was found, we think that have 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. Alright, with that cover, because I had to get that out of the way, tell everyone to tell tell everyone what you what you do. We've had other fellers from the We've had other fellers from the U s G S. On. I think you're our third U s GS guest. Alright, was that right? Honest? Yeah, I was gonna say, at least Brant Mixel U s G S does research on waterfowl. Yeah, Bran, Brant took me salmon fishing last summer. Okay, so you guys run in a pack, and I feel I feel like we had another U s G S guy on. We've had two more the no Steve's he's Wildlife Services. Who you're thinking of is our c w D expert Brian Richards, he's USGS. So go ahead, Bob, all right, Um, while 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're we dabble in other invasives. Were working on big old tegue lizards that are in southern Florida as well, and invasive water snakes from the Eastern US that are introduced into the Western US. But a big part of our work has focused on invasive pythons in the Everglades for the last decade. Can you can you tell people about the limits of what you're allowed to talk about? Um? Sure? So, like, which I guess encompasses you know 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? 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 take the science and turn it into regulation um 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. Would you be able to say something like Janice should cut that mohawk off. You know, the headphones help with it, the help help keep it down. Otherwise it would look like some punk rocker from London And like seventy two. The log cabin kind of throws it off too, that he's sitting in a little log cabin with it just makes 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 have another USGS guy, Yanni do you remember the Grizzly bear, the guy that did the population modeling for Yellowstone Grizzlies. He was USGS. Oh, there was the lead of the inter agency team, Frank. Frank, help me out, Bob, you know what I'm talking about. You're you're putting me on the spot. Now I'm blanking. I work with chat Dickinson, um who does grizzly work, but he's also the U s g S Firearms program manager. Uh. Yeah, that was a great show. People to want to go want to 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 listening. 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 like certain stories about it, where you'll see on social media a Burmese python gagging on something giant that is trying to eat that's a popular one about someone catching one that was bigger, the biggest so far biggest, this biggest thing is a popular story, and people staying in the role to holding up a big one is a popular story. And so people, I think, have this this awareness of how these giant snakes are colonizing, taking over impacting a large swath of Florida. But we're gonna dive in here to sort of what's really going on. How did it come to be, how bad is it? Is there an end in sight? Is this normal now? Um? And and get into some of that. But my first question laying this out, and this is 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? Um, it's 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 you tell us about the Native ranges. The Native range is a big swath of Asia from UM Indonesia up to southern China and then all the way over through northern India, um barely into Pakistan. So it's a really wide ranging species, lots of different habitats, and no one's really gone through to sample from that whole range to figure out UM where the Florida pythons specifically are from, although we can say that they're almost certainly from Southeast Asia based on the site's import records explain that UM well so UM all boas and pythons are on the sights to 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 UM live animals as well, and we imported tens of thousands of pythons from Southeast Asia, UH, mostly during the eighties and early nineties dead or live, live live. We brought in UM I think a hundred and fifty thousand between what was it nineteen eighty and about nineteen No, about two thousand five for what for the pet trade, So hundred and fifty thousand, yeah, yeah, these wereld So that's where it just gets more complicated. These were one of the most popular snakes during that time period, and it's partially because they are cheap as hell and they're impressive. You know, it's a really it's a gorgeous snake. And I've got to admit that when I was a sophomore in college, I bought a hashling Burn's Python and so you're part of the You're part of the problem 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. And yeah, but I mean, like of what caliber? I mean, well, I mean this was Berkeley, so you know there it's pretty uniformly high. I'm not saying it. 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 as weill had to try anything. You're desperate, you got a big party thought. Yeah. So anyway, Um, we know we brought lots of Mover, and we know that there were also lots of importers based in the Miami area, and I gotta, we gotta, we gotta back. I can't leave that hanging them. What did you take yours down and let it go on the Everglades or died of old age, or you sold it like what happened? 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 Um, I gave it to a friend of mine whose garage had just burned down and he lost his whole snake collection. So you're helping that rebuilt. Yeah. By that point she was about fourteen and a half feet, about pounds, and I had to go out in the desert and shoot jack rabbits for her um because she was just eating me out of house and home. Huh okay, So go on. So Florida, Yeah, so, 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, you know, trying to find them a nice home after they got too big for their their cages. And then there's people who say that Hurricane Andrew knocked down a bunch of these importer and breeder facilities and released snakes into the Everglades. That that was reported widely, including in the in the New Yorker. Yep, yep. And I've been looking for evidence of that for a decade and there's so far I found no one who can provide eyewitness accounts of these facilities that got down, that got knocked down, and lots of snakes are known to have escaped. Couldn't have happened, absolutely, But it's interesting because some of the folks who um 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, probably was, but potentially dozens of release occurrences. Yeah, it's possible. Um, there's a paper that a couple of friends of mine put out recently showing that there's actually, uh, potentially two different populations that were established, one that started in the southern Everglades, one that started closer to Naples that got slight differences um in d na 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? Two thousands? So um uh. There's a paper out there that models generational times and it suggests that they might have been established in the mid eighties 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 two thousand and even then there were people who were trying to say that, oh, that those are just individual releases, and that was true for most pythons until about two thousand three two four, when they started finding more. Up until that point, it was easier for folks to say, oh, that 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, Tell me why, and you can go on as long as you want. Who cares about these snakes, Like like, why is it such a big issue that they got caught loose? Well, it's not. It's not like legitimately a human safety issue. No, no, we we've actually reviewed that, and the risks to humans are extremely low. Um. We collected reports of so called python attacks from free ranging pythons over the course of a decade, and we found five instance is 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 are 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 cotton mouths. 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, I mean in twenty years there's bad. I mean, in twenty years of known wild reproduction, there's been zero human fatalities, no human fata. Is not even a human attack, um 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. Yeah, And he's got a question for you. He was we need to back up a little bit because he's got a good question for you. All right. UM, My question was if is the pet trade and then the affinity for the snake hides is big in the snake's native range as it is here in the United States. Um, So let's see, the great majority of the trade and snake skins has reticulated pythons, and that trade is in the you know, million skins per year range um globally, and Burmese pythons are in much less demand for the skin trade. Um. But it sort of just I'm gonna loop back to the human attacks things. 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 of the adult males reported being attacked by reticulated pythons, they were multiple instances of fatalities, and so that there are sort of personality differences among these giant snake species. Um, 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 atom. So go back to your question, let me know if I answered it. Okay, 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. Um. 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. Um, they can get the pythons to eat those. They're they're making giant sausages and feeding these things too pythons and getting really high production. I mean, that might be another Western hook up, but I'm not sure. Man, that sounds like a horror moving movie location in the making. Right there at the place I don't want to go see is the python factory. Oh yeah, I know, it's just like it Just it's kind of the more you think about, the less advertising it becomes. Man. Yeah. Well, the you know, the traditional way um was definitely um, not great. They would they would take a pretty big snake, stick a hose in his 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 um around here. But apparently they're now going to much more humane methods of euthanizing animals for the skin trade. So tell me why. Okay, it's not a people thing. Explain what the real problem is. 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, that's a that's a great term, man. Yeah, I mean look, I mean, come on, um, yeah, he's like here, I am a barking at you. In most part to the US, there are twenty snakes for every score at least, but how many of them do you see? In Kansas? There can be over a thousand ringneck snakes per hector. Really, yeah, and that's one species of snake. And so when you look at the total number of snakes in an ecosystem, they can exhibit massive top down effects on pray species. And in a regular ecosystem, those prey have evolved with those snakes, and so there's a trade off. You know, you don't have those pray 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, um you can have really big effects. So UM, I just got some data from Christina and Romagosa. There's a colleague at the University of Florida, and we've been sending her all of the stomach examples from the two thousand one pythons that our staff have dissected, and as of now, we're at seventy one native species that have been identified from python guts. Oh it's it's it's forty five birds, twenty four mammals, two reptiles. It's everything from rends to alligators. And do they cannabalize each other? No? Now, the only way that a python is gonna need another python is if they start at opposite ends of the same prey item and then basically they keep going. Really that happens, Yeah, it with that spaghetti noodle hold on. This is then known occurrence. It mostly happens in captivity. I mean I've had it happened with with captive snakes that I've had. They got so they got a rabbit and 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. Um, discussing, I mean, the the range of the range of species is is pretty phenomenal. I mean, you've got the things you'd expect, like rabbits and raccoons, um, 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, you know, they're really good at hiding, but snakes are able to find them easily. Um. 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 three kilometers from the coast is a mystery. Um. They can eat very large meals. So the biggest meal is a fawn from a python over near Naples, and the fawn was a hundred and of the snake's body mass. What so it is successfully ate it? Oh yeah, yeah, so that's that's like you know, me eating a two pound cheeseburger. It's like you eating Janice yep with with no hands and one sitting. Yeah. So they're there, ah there, disgusting, phenomenally efficient. You have such a freaking ENDOTHERM bias man, dude, real bad, real bad, real bad man. You wouldn't even understand. It's like real bad. Can you explain when an ENDOTHERM biases? 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 Like I'll tell you where it came from real quick. You know, in high school and you gotta dissect frogs, yep. I opened my frog up and I found a giant mouse inside my frog and it had like psychological impact. Yeah, I had a psychological impact. I've never recovered. Wow, never recovered, Bob. I think we should keep going down the diet alright, the diet route, but I think beforehand, maybe like, just can you explain how a python hunts and how it gets like, you know, eight to z of how he gets his prey scots. That's a good question because the rent one is confusing to me, like a rent is confusing. Yeah, So we think of pythons as being primarily ambush foragers, and some people think that me and stage sit somewhere, but really they're sequential ambushers. So they move around in the environment until they detect praise scent, and then they'll investigate that area until they find an area with higher concentrations of praiscent, and then they'll set up, often perpendicular to a game trail. And yeah, they may then sit there for ten to fifteen 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? Uh? 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 the strike. Though is it usually like do you guys know like where the strike is aimed on on animals or is it just anywhere to get ahold 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 it's got one good wrap around that prey it, Um, it's not going to be able to get away. Um. And then death is usually not caused by suffocation. UM. 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, the animal can be unconscious really quickly. And so um it. We've learned a lot, probably just in the last five years about some of the things on how pythons constricting, what causes death. My buddy Scott Boback took rats and then inserted little tiny balloons inside their chest. This is these are muthanized rats with a little tube to a pressure gauge. He would give those to the to a bow constrictor. They constricted and then they start to relax because it's not moving. And then Scott has this pressure gauge starts simulating a heartbeat with a little balloon that's inside it. As soon as that heartbeat starts, they clamp down again and so they can feel the heartbeat. Yeah, they can feel the heartbeat, and they squeeze until it's gone. Whoa the um. So anyway, let's let's go back to I guess all this stuff they're 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 eighteen 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 twenty four 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 and the gut the villi that increased 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 if it stored stuff, that's that's primarily going to be um conversion of fat and conversion of of uh yeah, mostly fat. I guess you know. We're done in South America and uh we're fishing with some amor Indians and they were telling me that they like to use the was it the anaconda fat? Johnnie, I don't remember this. Probably they as a as a when you're arthritic, they say that if you rubbed the anaconda's 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 them. 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. That's a good point. Man. It's been it's been used as medicinal you know, all kinds of cultures around the world. I mean, 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 and something like a python. I mean, I've removed ten kilos of fat from a single python, you know, twenty two pounds of fat. I've got several bars at 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 sized jar. Yeah. Do you ever cook with bomb um? I haven't? You know it? It's not nasty smelling by any means, but it doesn't have that nice, clean, large smell either. Uh. Do you like eating the meat off? These are people into the meat on the in their native range, and then also in Florida. I think that I think in the native range they're probably eaten, you know occasionally when people come across them. Um. I don't really know what's done with the carcasses in 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 Everyglades are known for having um fairly high mercury levels for a lot of say game fish. And you know, the the safe limits for mercury, depending on where you are, anywhere between point five and one point five parts per million um pythons have come out as high as three point five parts per million, So you definitely would want to have a python tested before you eat it because they can have mercury loads that are insane. Can you explain to people bio accumulation, like how that mercury builds up. Yeah, So the mercury is deposited um into primarily into waterways, and it gets transformed into methyl mercury that can be taken up by various 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 heron's that might have slightly elevated mercury. They can end up with pretty high levels themselves. But people, 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 farmers gaping, so they're they're fed controlled food, um, 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 um, you don't have quite those same atmospheric conditions and you don't have quite as much build up to the north um. You know that said, I would definitely have a really big gait or tested before I ate it. So let's let's 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? But let's talk first about what have you seen 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 every Glades National Park itself. But more generally, there's three lines of evidence you can use for assessing impacts. Ones just the list of species, and like I said, we've got seventy one species. Some of those are federally endangered, like the Key Largo wood rat um, where 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 UM I was involved with one a few years ago, and that involved driving roads in areas in every Glades Park with pythons, in areas where pythons had just recently reached in in areas with no pythons, And I think we ended up with about six 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 every Glades National Park, we had a decrease in raccoons, decrease in opossums, we had decrease, Yes, we had ro marsha rabbits. We had an eighties seven percent decrease in bobcats. And so there's there's a range of species that are essentially gone from every Glades National Park. They tend to be midsized mammals, marsha rabbits. Uh, yeah, what you gave it that there was zero So I understand like increase, but of these different species, what, um, what do you know about it in terms of raw numbers for people to think about is there an estimate of pre python bobcat population. Yeah, so this was actually neglected to mention that this was pre imposed. Um. So we we looked at it two ways. We looked at it based on surveys from nineteen six before pythons were abundant in the park versus surveys from about the mid two thousand's, and then we looked at it along that that trans act of high python abundance to zero pythons. So as far as pre abundance, there are lots of anecdotal reports and field field notes from people um in the say early nineties driving levees in the Everglades and saying saw over a hundred 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. Um. I've been going to the Everglades since two thousand and six. I have never seen a marsh rabbit in every Glades National Park. They're gone. Well, 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 college exit University of Florida. And I need to give a shout out to A. D. S. O Vi who was the grad student who did it, because the amount of work she did was inhuman. It was I still can't believe she pulled this off. So in that study, we took rabbits from north of the python distribution marsh rabbits, trapped them. Then we established two populations of fifteen rabbits. But I got I got a whole bunch of questions, Yeah, how are we catching them? How are you catching the marsh rabbits basically have the hearts yep, um, So let's see it would be really interested in this area. Yeah, where you're getting these marshas, Where you're getting these marsh rabbits from? Yeah, So she she trapped ninety five rabbits. She's got She established two populations of fifteen each in every Glades National Park. She established another population of fifteen outside of the python range. And that's the procedural control to see whether relocating rabbits kills them. Got you? And then she left the remaining forty something in place as a regular control and and presumably put some kind of track and device on all these things. Every single one of them had a radio collar. And how do you know you've established a population of fift that's that good question. Um. So, marsh rabbits like to poop on latrines that they use over and over again, just like you know swamp rabbits pooping on logs. You walk through the swamp looking for a log that has poop on it, and you know there's 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 swamp rabbits with the big boys, marsh rabbits are more the size of a cotton tail. Oh so we're not talking big like expound Leviathan cotton tales nor um. So, we established artificial latrines, which were basically just elevated pieces of plywood with a piece of astro turf on top, and the rabbits start using them. And we saw that in all these locations. Initially we had rabbits using the latrines and we had reproduction because they were small pellets that showed up to We only translocated adult rabbits, so we knew there was reproduction going on, and we tracked them for a year and during that year almost all the rabbits died. That's expected because they're rabbits, they don't last very long. But was what was interesting was that in every Glades 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 up ithon. That's that's a dead giveaway. Yeah, that's a 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 sev 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 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 mere mentally, they can drive this muso mammal population to extinction, which it's 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, um 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 might display they're just just take off and not find each other, not start. 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 um and you can get a satellite tag with the mortality sensor and no when it stops moving. But yeah, but 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 immortality sensor. I don't know. 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 colored deer are almost all of them are north of the Python distribution, so we won't be able to say much about whether Python's knocked out the deer in the Everglades. Part of the reason for this study was that dear 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 call or to figure out if it was pythons. Uh. Are you familiar with the theory? I think you can qualify this as a conspiracy theory. I don't mean that in a negative way. Are you familiar with the theory that at 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 anytime your explanation takes that long to get to what you're trying to say. Have you ever heard what we have you ever heard what we heard about why wolves were reintroduced? Um, there's a theory that there's a it's a long play by the Clintons that if they reintroduced 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 and d C? Yes? Yeah, okay, Um, Well, going back to your question, you know, yes, there are lots of conspiracy theories about pythons, and I would love to hear all of them. But I think I think that that question can be answered very shortly by saying that the highest panther densities are well north of the pythons and well west, you know, up in the panther refuge, for example. There's no pythons up there, And so trying to say that the pipe 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, Uh, this is not conspiracy theory. Did you see those mortality studies they did on deer. Uh in Florida. Panthers are are I mean, they're not out there whistling Dixie. Yeah, Well, that that's that, that dear mortality study I was talking about, you know, and and but I mean they're not they're not eliminating from them from the landscape, but they're definitely eating them. Yep, yep, that's that's what they're supposed to do, right, Yeah, I would gather I would do that as well. Um, So, how I got a couple of questions for you. You're saying, you say snakes are hard to count. What is 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 ab London's areas? What would you what would you guess if you if it was a life or death situation? Oh cheese, 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 gotta take a wild stab in the dark. Yeah, 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 book end it by saying that I don't know if I don't know if any herpetologists, I don't know if any any herpetologists experienced in snake population estimate, who would say that there's less than ten thousand pythons in the Everglades and so that would mean, you know, for per square kilometer, But we know that giant snakes can reach higher densities, and that based on some limited studies of you know, a similar species in Africa um and some of the preliminary work that we've done on removing snakes from levees. You know, there are individual levees from which over a hundred snakes a year are being removed right now by paid python hunters. Those levees might be ten kilometers long, So from you know, ten thousand, two hundred thousand, I'm really comfortable with anywhere in that range. It's that wide. 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 bubbas at them and we'll have no more pythons very soon. You know, I can see a bison from four miles away out in the prairie. They're easy to wipe out. But in contrast, I've had a twelve ft python that contains a radio transmitter in it, and we've got six people standing in a six ft 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 fifty ft away. Huh. 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 were 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 um from the Greater Everglades ecosystem, both in and out of the park, and um the people who are doing that, they're you know, they're mostly great folks. They care a lot there, um, spending lots of time out in the field, and the removed a lot of pythons, you know, um, over two thousand last year. We had a recent study where we had several known telmetered pythons along a levee and then we did walking surveys um and in I'd have to look at how many Yeah, we had about five 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 up. Let you guess how many times we saw one of our kilometered pythons zero. Oh damn, you're right man self whisper. So, so that means like we we calculated at the chance. It's like, you've got this python named George. It's out in the ecosystem in an area that that humans can get you along a levey our chances of detecting it on any given day are probably less than one percent, and probably more than 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 taking two thousand 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. Um? 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, um, they care about the welfare of individual animals versus the people who say they care about you know that the persistence of dative 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 which one of those I think we should be pushing for. But I'm not going to tell those people they're wrong. It's more of a philosophical difference than a science difference. Yeah, like they're not. Is it's fair to say that if you're like a python hunter, you're not hurting anything. You you may well be doing good. Um. I just think that from an evidentially standpoint, where it would be nice if we could get the scientists together with those folks and really come up with a way two estimate the impacts on overall population size. And I think we're moving that way with UM. 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 zero again in a population estimate. How what's a big python? And how old is it? When it gets that big? Um? Big python? I think the biggest We've got several that are over eighteen ft and um fifty pounds, and those are pretty rare, you know, once you get up past about the thirteen foot range, they're pretty much all females and snakes over fourteen ft feet represent probably less than five percent of our our data set. UM Yeah, age wise, UM, 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 Asian survival things like that. You know, if you've got a fifteen foot snake, I'd be surprised if it's less than eight or ten years old. And then how much ground with one of these snakes covered surprising amounts UM. So back in the early days, when people were just starting to do some telemetry work, UM, 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 every Glass National Park UM, and the snakes hung out there for most of the dry season, had home ranges of you know, five to twenty acres, so not a 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 distance of how much over twenty miles no way, yep. So they were navigating back to an area that you know, they've 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 ye, many activity they landed where they came from. They somehow knew where home was and got back to it. Wow. Years ago, I was talking to a buddy mine. He's not a snake guy. He's a biologis been, 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. What is that line like like in in are 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. Um 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 us US. 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 is currently occupied. We looked at that found him, found an error, corrected that error, and that then their method showed all of Florida. I 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, and just sticking them there and see if they could survive the winn or not. You know, this was a long time ago. And again this wasn't like his work. You're not gonna hurt his feelings. Right, Um, that's been done at several locations. Um. One of them was up in uh, South Carolina, and all this one he's talking about, Yeah, all those snakes died. That was during that enormous cold snap of when we had ice even in every Glades National Park. Um. 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 um like Lasahatchie National Wildlife Refuge where we didn't have records. A few years ago. But still that's only in the you know, tens of kilometers north of the National Park, so you know, my hunch is they're not going to get too much farther north. Um. But there was a really cool study with tissue samples from pythons that were taken um starting in the early two thousand's in Florida and going through that cold snap and afterwards, and they found molecular evidence of adaptation in gans 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 the scale of that, we don't know. Does that mean that they're you know, one degree better? Um, I'm 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 your body temperature eleven and fourteen 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 thermiogenesis. So you know, when you get cold, you shiver, and that's because you are um shivering. It's basically a mechanical way of increasing the temperature of those muscles that they work better. And snakes that are coiled around eggs go through these sequencing 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 temperature in the range that's best for development. You know how you can control like with snap. I know this is true with snap and turtles that you can control the sex of the turtle by the soil temp And it goes in bands, right, it's not like hot as male, cold as 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 it could be a next band of temperature band they would go back to making males. Do they do that? Is that part of the is that part of the regulating nest temperature or is it just the the need to keep the eggs warm so they don't die hear your cold snap? Yeah? That that temperature dependent sex determination is typical of UM A lot of reptiles, but not the giant snakes, so they have straight genetic sex determination. UM. The wrinkle with Burmese pythons and several other large pythons and antacondas 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 m hm, and so that that's problematic. You know, as an invasive species biologist, you know, we we worry about things like propagule pressure. You know that that's the number of potential invasion organisms that are reaching a certain in an 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 that's a lot more worrisome to me as someone who thinks about this stuff. How are you, like, how is that possible? Uh? You know, I mean part of genesis, um it you basically you have a hiccup in terms of during myosis. You know, during myosis, 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 you sperm only has one half of your DNA. But if that process has some hiccup in that in it, then you can end up with both bees 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 this it's producing a sperm, Well, the female is not. But so the female has got a follicle. Yeah, and so instead of producing a follicle that's got um half of the DNA during that biotic process, all of it ends up in one half, 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 we don't genetically sample every individual python that comes out, um, just because that would get cost prohibitive. Are there are other species that that happens in? Um? Yeah, I mean it's 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 uh, some of the boas, some of the pythons. But it's also known from um, some more advanced snakes. Um, you know, some of the colubrid snakes that that's uh, most of the snakes were familiar with in the in the continental US, you know, water snakes, garter snakes, king snakes, things like that. Um. So it's uncommon, but probably more widespread then we know. Ah. Can you tell everybody some of the stories about using 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 those can persist for over a month sometimes um. And so if you then follow your radio tag mail, it might lead you to a breeding aggregation. You take all those snakes out, let your mail 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 gotta do is check where your mail is, say once a week, and see if it's found a female yet. Um. As far as that term, it's really interesting because we had pushback recently from folks who said that the term Judas snake is anti Semitic, and it is a term I've heard and wildlife bothers you for a year and for years, and I've 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 pole among a whole bunch of snake people. What terms shall we use? We gave him all these options. And so because because Judas, Judas betrayed Christ, but but but Christ, but but Christ was a Jew. Yeah, but I guess it's been used um as a pejorative um like betray like someone who betray a Christian. As of as of last month, we now have a scout snake project and uh so anyway it can work. How many how many have you ever? How many have you ever uncovered using this strategy? Uh? 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 um. In one of those there was there was one aggregation that was six males and one ft female and all of them were in a single gopher tortoise burrow. Uh and they were jammed in there like a tent in a stuff sack man. I mean, there there were so many snakes and I can't imagine that they could have pulled off a breeding event, you know. Um. And then after after pulling all these snakes out in the very back of the borough, there was this poor gopher tortoise who had been stuck there for god knows how long with this you know, python orgy going on right in front unless he's some kind of pervy voyeur who liked the whole thing. Yeah. I mean, you know, Tortoise is probably forty years old. I guaranteed never seen anything like that before. When he goes to tell his buddies about it, they're gonna be like, no way. Yeah, the ask your questions Johnny about the pipe. These are good questions about the python hunters. Yeah, back to the PI python hunters, And I think this can lead into like what are going to be like 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 like what they're actually paid? Like is this something that they make a living at? 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 a 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 um. 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 levies primarily. And you know, we they've actually taught us a fair amount about searching for snakes because we used to mostly drive levies 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 on the water's edge in ambush positions. But the bodies are in the water and so there are 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, and they the media, Yeah, 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 everglaze ecosystem. Now today when they see one, say you see a ten footer and only it's six inch head is sticking out of the water. Did they shoot it? Do they put last all around it? Like, how do you get it? It's almost all handcapps. So um, when most of the time if a snake sees something big and scary like us approaching, it's gonna just freeze because it knows it's well camouflaged and so probably I don't know the time. You can walk up and just grab it behind the head real quick, pull it out of the water, and um, 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. Um. When you've got it by the tail, it's gonna be trying to turn around on you and strike. But if you jerk the tail real hard every time it strikes, basically you'll you'll throw it off. Um, 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 into bag. Why don't they when when the guys are going after the python hunted, why don't they just run up and chop his head off? Um? There are some animals that are killed by with firearms, Um, chop his head off or something us way harder than you'd think. Um. Yeah, so, especially for the ones that are in the water. But there they're pretty dang muscular. Um. And also the you know, decapitation alone is not considered you know, the acceptable youth in Asia because you have to then destroy the brain right afterwards. So, um, you can do that pretty easily if you just you know, destroy the brain tissue after the heads off. But so if you if you walk out in your yard there's one laying there, what is the best practice to go kill it? Uh? Boy, start getting into the what what should you do? Questions? Um? 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 turned around, go back inside and call call animal control or call your game inficial agency. Um. That's you know that that minimizes minimizes risk, Steve. But people, if if you if you shoot a snake in the head, it's going to be dead. But any snake over about seven ft, I would not recommend that someone inexperienced try to catch it by themselves. And that's because you know, a seven snake seven foot snake might only be pounds. But if that snake somehow manages to get a wrap around your neck, you're probably toast you'd be the first guy to get killed by a snake in Florida, by a Burmese parthon Florida. Yep. So what will what will end up? Crystal ball? Right? Crystal ball situation. 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, they're popular prey, population rebounds a little bit and they just kind of hit some equal librium. That's kind of shitty for animals, but it's an equilibrium. Um, what's a better crystal ball scenario? Um? I think in the absence of some silver bullet intervention, you you pretty much outlined it. Um. The main thing to remember about snakes is that they're incredib ofly low energy organisms. So a snake can persist in the environment and 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 that whole. You know, the the hair and links cycles that we remember from our biology classes. You know, when the rabbits tank, the links tank even harder, but with a 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 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 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 crisper or RNA interference or things like that. We have not on this show, but um, well no, I don't think we have 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, So some some people are familiar with the term gene drive, and in these in these tools, regardless of whether it's the crisper 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, 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 has passed on, and we wanted 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 in a male mouse. When it mates with the female, it knocks out the ability to produce female offspring, and so only males are produced. It's like it's like a bar and anchorage man yeah yeah, or guam um. And then all those males have that gene two, and so every female they produced with only produced 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. UM, 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 UM, you know, disease. I think if you look at the record of UM 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. UM. We don't know of many diseases that would hit pythons that hard. UM. But the a twist there is that the pythons brought over a penist dome 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, two mammals like rats, and then two pythons. And it turns out that native snakes are more competent hosts of this penistone parasites than the pythons are, and the peniston is now over a hundred 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 this python effect in you know, Arkansas, even though the pythons arement at 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 to email us about is king Cobra's. That that that's a solution, that's yeah, yeah, what you do is you get a big truck of King Cobra's. You sound like my father in law. Um, yeah, I mean that's that's 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 and whenever, 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 when a snake smells, the pig's going to crawl up and eat the pig, and you get the pig tethered, and then the snake will be stuck. And what's wrong that? I would just I mean, wouldn't that be awesome? Um? I'd just like to take pictures of that solution. I like it. So it took the time to lay that out. Yes, 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 have asked me x Well, I mean I feel like, you know, as an invasive species guy and a snake guy, UM, 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. UM. 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. UM we've got boa constrictors, a Central South American version of boat constructors, actually very similar to what you would have seen in u in Guyana um In Park in Miami. UM We've 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 gonna 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 gonna go in with all of our resources, we're gonna 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 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 it's a much lower bar for when you responded when you don't. We had a guy on talking about wild pigs one time, and we're talking about why they live, where they live, and where they could live. He was just saying that that they could live virtually anywhere, like they could 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, and certain landscapes you don't have a prayer, yep, of finding them, Like, there's no reason they couldn't be on in 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 um from southeast Colorado. You know, they were they were working their way up into the grassland down there and there. They feel pretty confident they got them all. But you know, that's it's kind of whackable. There's no reason to think that they won't be able to get back in. You do, I want to have it? Go ahead? Now, 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, 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 removed by any means, as opposed to some other species. Yeah, because 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. Um. You know if you want to go down the feral cat road, we can. But um, yeah, I'd love I'd love to get a quick synopsis of it, please. Um you mean that that that that feral cats are bad news and they kill a billion and a half birds in this country every year. But people get taught to you about shooting cats. Um. 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 trapped newter return policy, which has been adopted by increasing numbers of municipalities and counties and things like that, UM as a so called control mechanism. UM. 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. UM. And it's you know, in some ways, it's uh just kind of a convenient way for hard decisions to be avoided. Got you, alright, So when this monkey thing blows up, you gotta come back on. That's love too. Yeah. You know, me and Yanni have we've at monkey is that down in South America? That's right loves it. Hey, can I can I say something about your brother real quick? Yeah, I don't care. Yeah, all right, So I know, I just feel like I need to shout out to Dan Ronella because you know, I came to hunting late in life. You know, I didn't kill my first year till I was thirty. 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 water fowling 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 nube and he took me out, and um, I just always consider that as super generous. Um. And you know, I just reconnected with him again a couple of years ago, and you know, have made a couple of trips to Alaska in the last two years, going again in August, tagged along with him on his sheep hunt last August. And yeah, I mean, I I'm just super appreciative of what a what a sort of giving guy he is is, um, And it's made 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, 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 it was funny. Yeah, yeah, Well, 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 way is to engage with him, and that's uh, that's another thing that's been you know, an unexpected benefit of meeting the Freezer. You know that that philosophical side of it um and why we do it and justifying why we do it. It's a it's a fun thing to think about. That's great. Thank you very much for coming on keep us surprised. Keep us surprised at those monkeys. Yep, yep, we'll do Thanks again, all right, take thanks