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The numbers "really took off in 2003 and 2004, where we started to do road surveys and get the word
out," Snow said. The park has also run a trapping program with help from volunteers and begun
researching techniques, including attracting pythons using pheromones.
Consider the "Judas snakes."
In 2005, the park began implanting snakes with $250 radio transmitters, each the size of a lipstick tube
with a foot‐long wire antenna. They released the snakes and tracked them back to the first python
"nest," the existence of which confirmed the reptiles were breeding. In its first two years, the program
led to the capture of at least 25 snakes.
Dissections have turned up all manner of wildlife in the bellies of pythons, including the remains of
white‐tailed deer, alligators and even a bobcat. But that's not to say that pythons are not themselves
prey ‐ to raccoons, wild pigs, birds and, of course, bobcats and alligators, say experts and scientists.
Graziani, the python breeder, said he suspects that large animal remains found in the stomachs of
pythons may have belonged to critters already dead when the pythons came upon them.
"The fact that one of these things was found with a bobcat claw doesn't mean these things are out
killing bobcats," he said.
Some say predictions that pythons will overrun the Everglades ignore another, equally likely outcome:
the population plateaus.
"I cant imagine that it won't," said Harry Greene, an ecology professor and snake expert at Cornell
University. "At some point, every population reaches its carrying capacity and it levels off or crashes."
Of course, that point may not be reached until the Key Largo wood rat or some other endangered
species has been gobbled out of existence.
But what of the danger to humans
Pet pythons of various types have killed 12 people in the United States since 1980, according to the
Humane Society of the United States. Documented cases of wild pythons killing humans exist, although
they are rare. None has occurred in this country.
The Miami Herald has cited two cases: One in Indonesia, in which a teenager was devoured by a 31‐foot
reticulated python, and another in the mid‐1990s in which a 23‐foot python killed and tried to swallow a
rubber plantation worker in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Some Web sites show photos of humans being cut out of the stomachs of snakes, although some
experts believe the photos were faked.
In February 2008, the U.S. Geological Survey released a study warning that the python invasion of South
Florida could spread far north ‐ even across the entire Southern third of the United States, in part
because of projected global warming.
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