But sci-fi meets sci-fact in the Everglades. Despite a stint on the endangered species list and a whole lot of bad press, the American Alligator has been deposed as the king of the Everglades food chain.
Last week, the Miami Herald reported on Mike Kimmel, a trapper who, for the third time in his career, found himself saving a gator from the grips of the new king, a Burmese Python. While neither was the biggest of its species, the 10-foot snake was constricting the four-foot gator in a pinnacle example of reptile-on-reptile violence.
The rise of the pythons in south Florida is not a new story. When it dawns upon exotic pet owners that a two-or-three-foot baby snake inevitably becomes a 16-foot adolescent snake, they lose interest, and, rather than face the daunting task of flushing a 16-foot snake down the toilet, they liberate it in the Everglades.
Wildlife biologists estimate that the released pythons and their spawn now number in the tens of thousands, or maybe the hundreds of thousands, nobody knows. And pythons, not the gators, now rule.
Screenplay writers take note: Invasive wildlife stories now abound. Asian carp are in several Midwest river systems, out-eating native fish while displaying a Three Stooges-like behavior. The sound of boat engines in the water makes them crazy, with fish up to 20 pounds breaching out of the water and occasionally hitting a fisherman or reporter upside the head. A frenetic, costly effort is underway to keep the fish out of the Great Lakes.
Lionfish are exotically beautiful creatures with poisonous spines. More dignified than a breaching Asian carp, the lionfish are simply devouring their way from their native Asia to the Caribbean and up the U.S. Atlantic coast.
Armadillos, while hardly a threat to anything, have set a steady course from Mexico to what some biologists think will eventually include Washington DC as a northernmost extent of their range.
Why aren't they asked to help pay for the Wall?
