Pythons are at the top of the food chain

in the Everglades
By Miami Herald, adapted by Newsela staff on 12.13.16
Word Count 719

A wildlife biologist and a wildlife technician hold a Burmese python during a press conference in the Florida Everglades
about the non-native species on January 29, 2015, in Miami, Florida. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

MIAMI, Florida Pythons eat a lot. That's no surprise. But in a new study, scientists who
examined poop from a Burmese python in the Florida Everglades discovered that the
ravenous snakes may be eating even more than experts expected. Some seem to be
having an all-you-can-eat buffet.

The scientists found three deer inside one snake.

Pythons started to appear in the Florida marshes in the 1980s. They are an invasive
species, a type of animal that is not native to a certain area. Invasive species can cause
great damage to the ecosystem of their new habitat. They often reproduce too quickly and
disrupt the natural food chain.

This is the rst time researchers have documented such a massive feast by a python in the
Everglades. However, the study's lead author Scott Boback thinks the three-deer meal
could be an indication of how efciently the snakes have adapted to the marshes. Boback
is a herpetologist, a scientist who studies reptiles and amphibians.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. 1

Pythons Are Taking Over The Everglades

"What I think is going on is the pythons are completely monopolizing the biomass in the
Everglades," Boback said. "They're taking all that stuff that's out there and just making it
more pythons."

Snake-catcher Bobby Hill is a famous python-control agent for the South Florida Water
Management District. Hill caught the 14-foot female python with a bulging belly in
Everglades National Park in June 2013. Two days later, researchers performed a routine
autopsy of the python. They found a "massive amount of fecal matter" in its intestines that
included 12 deer hooves.

The contents, sent to the Smithsonian and eventually to Boback, turned out to be a new
record for python consumption: one adult deer and two fawns, young deer. Collectively, the
deer weighed more than 160 pounds when eaten.

At that rate, the invaders could pose a more urgent threat to the marshes than previously
feared, Boback said. The marsh habitat is already suffering due to overpopulation of
snakes.

Deer Population Has Dropped Dramatically

"We found one python at one location with three deer," he said. "There could be hundreds
and thousands of pythons out there eating deer and doing the same thing."

Despite years of tracking snakes through the dense marshes, scientists still aren't sure
how many pythons are living in the Everglades. Much of the evidence is circumstantial.
Since pythons appeared in the park, where hunting is forbidden, the population of white-
tailed deer has dropped 94 percent. The number of small mammals has also decreased,
suggesting pythons have moved up the food chain to become the park's top predator.

But captured snakes are almost always found along roads, meaning they're on the move
and haven't recently eaten, Boback said.

"When a python eats a large meal, it just chills out," he said. "They're not going to cross the
road."

That suggests that the evidence researchers are collecting from captured snakes may be
skewed. They are not regularly catching snakes that have just eaten, and so may not yet
have a full understanding of how the pythons live and eat.

The ndings could also have implications for deer populations where pythons are found in
other areas, including the Big Cypress National Preserve, also in Florida.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. 2

The More They Eat The Better They Reproduce

Well-fed snakes are also better reproducers, which researchers know because they look at
the fat in females to measure their reproductive ability. The snake examined in the study
had a large amount of fat, and a large amount of baby snakes in the making.

With snakes of all sizes now inhabiting the Everglades, nearly every marsh animal is at risk,
from lizards and birds up the food chain to alligators, which have also been found in snake
bellies. The snake examined in the study likely ate within 87 days of its capture, Boback
said. But it also could have eaten in a much shorter time. And at 14 feet, the snake was not
even close to record-sized snakes reaching more than 18 feet, which likely eat even more.

"What does that mean for the rest of the population out there? They could be doing the
same thing and likely are," he said. "We've seen pythons eating deer but the problem is we
have only found a couple and now we have one of them that ate three."

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. 3