Kansas Crimson

Feral wrote: ↑Wed Mar 15, 2023 10:41 am

MICHHAWK wrote: ↑Wed Mar 15, 2023 10:07 am florida in the wintertime. if you need to escape the cold. why would you go anywhere else.

Pythons, Invasive and Hungry, Are Making Their Way North in Florida

Tue, March 14, 2023 MIAMI — So much for all the efforts to slow the proliferation of Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades over the last two decades, including with paid contractors, trained volunteers and an annual hunt that has drawn participants from as far as Latvia: The giant snakes have been making their way north, reaching West Palm Beach and Fort Myers and threatening ever-larger stretches of the ecosystem.

...Pythons, like invasive iguanas, have been known to emerge from the occasional South Florida toilet bowl; the review notes that while Burmese pythons have mostly been spotted in and around Everglades National Park and other swamplands, many have also been found in Naples and the western outskirts of Miami.

Once a year, the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission holds a python hunt open to the public, challenging people to find and remove as many snakes as they can... Last year’s winner took home $10,000 for hunting down 28 pythons.

Dustin Crum, who has been hunting pythons for a decade, took home $1,500 for capturing the longest snake in the competition, an 11-footer. He won in the same category in 2021 after catching a 15-footer.

“We started out doing this stuff as a hobby and just couldn’t believe we could catch giant constrictors like that in the wild,” said Crum, 42, who now hunts pythons full time. The state pays hunters $50 per foot for the first 4 feet of snake and $25 for each subsequent foot, he said, as well as an hourly rate. Outside of the state-sponsored competition for the public, Crum does use guns to kill the snakes.

...Sometimes, scientists ask to get the pythons alive so that they can be tracked. Hunters like Crum deposit them in designated drop boxes during night hunts and email researchers to come get them in the morning.

...In late 2021, a team from the Conservancy of Southwest Florida found likely the largest Burmese python ever recorded in the state: a 215-pound female with 122 eggs inside her...

Detecting pythons, which like to hide in marshes and thrive in remote habitats, is so challenging that experts do not know how many exist in Florida, though they estimate that there are at least tens of thousands. More than 18,000 have been removed since 2000, including 2,500 in 2022, according to the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission...

TDub wrote: ↑Sat Mar 18, 2023 10:18 am reminds me of what used to happen at our pond in Kansas....except instead of seaweed it was some green flowering algae/water weed. I used to have to climb in there with a rake and a pitchfork and go as deep as I could stand and drag it all back and up onto the bank. Usually took 2 weeks to clear. Climbing in those nasty weeds with its tangling tendrils. Snakes swimming by....they loved those damn weeds. Yuck.

ousdahl wrote: ↑Sat Mar 18, 2023 10:04 am is this the Florida thread?

Feral wrote: ↑Sat Mar 18, 2023 10:59 am

TDub wrote: ↑Sat Mar 18, 2023 10:18 am reminds me of what used to happen at our pond in Kansas....except instead of seaweed it was some green flowering algae/water weed. I used to have to climb in there with a rake and a pitchfork and go as deep as I could stand and drag it all back and up onto the bank. Usually took 2 weeks to clear. Climbing in those nasty weeds with its tangling tendrils. Snakes swimming by....they loved those damn weeds. Yuck.

no thank you

ousdahl wrote: ↑Mon Mar 20, 2023 12:17 pm meh, nothing new.

western capitalism…blah, blah, blah…