Hybrid (biology)

Hybrid Giant Pythons found in Florida │Full Documentary

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• published: 08 Sep 2014
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Loridian Jason Leon discovered what looked like the 3-foot body of a snake lying on the side of the road in Miami-Dade County one night in May this year. Without thinking, he grabbed the snake by the head. The snake attacked his leg, and he killed it with a knife. He was lucky to be alive. The snake he killed was a Burmese python that had grown to 18 feet, 8 inches and weighed 128 pounds, said an article of May 21 on msnNOW. It was the largest specimen found in the state of Florida, which is "currently being overrun" by the Burmese python. The state sponsors competitions to bring the python population under control. CNN ran an article on this year's 2013 Python Challenge when hunters killed 68 pythons for rewards as high as $1,500. That's a drop in the bucket compared to state estimates of a population of 100,000. Apparently the ambush predators "aren't easy to find." More alarming, they "have no natural predators." Pythons have been recorded in the Everglades as early as 1979, "most likely abandoned by pet owners when the snakes got too big to handle." CNN staff say this irresponsibility has not gone unfelt. "Rabbits and foxes have disappeared, while raccoon, opossum and bobcat populations have dropped as much as 99 percent." Smithsonian Magazine's Arcynta Childs published an article in April 2011 about Carla Dove, head of the National Museum of Natural History's Feather Identification Lab. Dove identified the remains of rare birds like limpkins and wood storks in python droppings. There's nothing smaller than them that they can't eat. A documentary for the History Channel, "Hybrid Giant Pythons found in Florida," records that grim fact. In July 2009, a snake owner in Sumter County, Florida allowed his Albino Burmese to get loose. It escaped from its enclosure and made a bee-line for his girlfriend's 2 year old daughter. The boyfriend stabbed it, and got the baby girl free, but not before the Burmese had easily strangled her to death. The documentary reports that hunters regularly catch pythons within 200 meters of Miami-Dade residential areas. One expert asserts that "they come right in." There is now confirmation of pythons as far north as Tampa, and speculation that they could comfortably "colonize" as far north as Washington, D.C. "Pythons can survive at temperatures as low as 40 degrees [Fahrenheit]" say experts on the show. In October 1991 Bob Freer, founder of Everglades Outpost, a wildlife sanctuary in Homestead, Fla., got called to remove a snake from a Florida City backyard. He said it "had a head the size of my two hands together." The double-digit foot length snake was very aggressive, and Freer noted "Maybe I should have waited for more help." It took multiple professional animal-control specialists to wrestle control over the powerful animal. How the snake managed to avoid detection living in an urban area for as long as it took to grow to that size was a mystery to Freer. During the course of the documentary, hunters capture a baby Burmese python right outside of a residential area in Miami-Dade. They reflect that it's common for pythons to lay as many as 24 to 28 eggs at a time. Up to 60 is "not unheard of." Based on the sheer scale of breeding that is likely going on in the Everglades, there is worry by scientists that the Everglades will produce some "super snake" hybrid between a pit viper and a giant constrictor. Joe Wasilewski, a biology expert consulted by the show, dismisses such concerns as a flight of fancy. Pit vipers and constrictors come from two completely different genetic families in the serpentes order. Not only would they not mate, they would liably eat one another. Pit vipers do not need constriction or the mass and musculature required for it, and the converse is true of constrictors for venom -- a search on Wikipedia will show that pythonidae and boidae are descended from a common, venomous ancestor they have outgrown. Not only is such a "super snake" genetically spurious, it is biologically irrelevant.