SCIENTISTS USE GPS ON POSSUMS AND RACCOONS AS PYTHON BAIT
South Florida researchers are working on a new way to track and capture invasive Burmese pythons by using native mammals, wearing GPS collars.
The Tampa Bay Times reports that a group of researchers has been watching raccoons and possums on the edges of Crocodile National Wildlife Refuge, located about 40 miles south of Miami.
The animals that the researchers have been observing all have GPS collars, allowing the team to track their locations.
After about five months, the researchers had a breakthrough when one possum collar suddenly stopped moving for a few hours and then began once again to move.
The lack of movement triggered what researchers called a mortality signal, but when it started moving again, the researchers had a hunch that the possum may have been eaten by a snake, according to Michael Cove, the curator of mammals at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
Cove is working on the project with members of the US Fish and Wildlife Service and Southern Illinois University.
The thought was that a python had eaten the possum and then remained in the area as it digested its meal, before moving on. But now, the snake had the possum’s GPS tracker inside of it.
Though it took a month for the researchers to locate the tracker as the snake moved in and out of the area’s maze of hiding places, they finally found a four-meter-long, 30-kilo female python, full of eggs. Such a snake has the potential of laying 100 eggs, so, capturing this one and removing it from the ecosystem prevented hundreds of future snakes from continuing the invasion of the foreign snakes in the Florida swamp.
After euthanizing the snake, researchers were able to open the snake up and retrieve the collar so that it could be placed on another bait possum at a later date.
Researchers found that the collars outfitted on these animals gives them a new way to track the invading Burmese pythons, which came from Southeast Asia and were illegally introduced into the Everglades swamp in the 1990s.
Burmese pythons are not native to the Sunshine State, and their presence in the Everglades ecosystem and southern Florida negatively affects the native species.
Since 2000, more than 17,000 wild Burmese pythons have been removed from Florida.
In October, Florida held the 2022 Florida Python Challenge to capture and remove the snakes from the ecosystem. The winner of the Challenge was a 19-year-old man who caught 28 of the 231 snakes removed during the 10-day period of the hunt, earning himself USD$10,000.
While researchers say that this GPS method of hunting pythons will not eradicate the serpents from Florida, they do claim it is the closest thing to a proven method for attracting the female, egg-laying snakes, which are bigger than the male snakes and have bigger appetites. The female pythons love bigger prey animals like raccoons and large male possums.
The difficulty is producing a collar that will remain inside the python and not pass out of its digestive system. One idea being worked on is a tracker with sharp, outside points that will snag in the snake’s digestive tract.
Currently, the GPS collars cost USD$1,500 each, with a lifespan of two years. In the future, researchers hope to use a cheaper type of collar at a cost of USD$200 each.
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