To Target Pythons, Florida Researchers Are GPS-Tracking Possums and Waiting Until They Get Eaten

As Burmese pythons proceed to eat their manner via the South Florida meals net, wildlife biologists and researchers have provide you with all types of the way to trace down the large snakes and sluggish their unfold. They’ve used drones, thermal cameras, robotic bunnies, and even male “scout snakes” implanted with GPS gadgets that may make them breeding females. (These scouts have confirmed to be particularly effective in and across the Everglades.)

Now, biologists are engaged on a brand new monitoring device: one which has a pouch for younger, a unadorned tail, and a propensity for enjoying useless. 

The strategy of possum-tracking is being developed on the Crocodile Lake Nationwide Wildlife Refuge close to Key Largo, in line with the South Florida Sun Sentinel. The thought took root in 2022, when Michael Cove, a biologist with the North Carolina Museum of Pure Sciences, was finding out the actions of raccoons and possums within the refuge. 

Cove and the refuge supervisor, Jeremy Dixon, saved getting mortality alerts from the GPS-collared mammals. And once they’d exit into the refuge to get better the collars, they’d typically discover them contained in the bellies of huge pythons. After discovering and euthanizing a couple of giant snakes, they’d an thought: Why not use GPS-collared critters as sacrificial python bait?

“We’re not placing these animals on the market and in hurt’s manner,” Dixon advised the Sentinel. “Hurt’s manner is there. We’re simply documenting what is going on.” 

This concept turned extra possible because the GPS collars obtained cheaper, dropping from roughly $1,500 a collar to round $190 apiece. Cove and Dixon have been in a position to safe grant funding from the South Florida Water Administration District, which has its personal python elimination program. Additionally they introduced in A.J. Sanjar, a graduate researcher from Southern Illinois College, as a 3rd member of the analysis group.

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As they experimented with the concept, they rapidly realized that possums have been a lot simpler to work with than raccoons. They’re additionally extra plentiful on the refuge, the place they’ll go deep into backwater swamps. Among the collared possums have been eaten by snakes inside two weeks of being launched, and the group has eliminated a minimum of 18 Burmese pythons thus far. All of these pythons have been over 8 toes lengthy, and the biggest was round 13 toes, in line with Dixon.

The group now has 32 GPS-collared possums out within the refuge, and so they plan to have a minimum of 40 animals collared by the height of summer time. Dixon defined that if funding wasn’t a problem, they’d have a whole lot of collared possums within the area.