Florida getting squeezed

Column

Somebody recently noticed that all those little critters that used to be all over the place in South Florida have disappeared.

No, not the politicians. I mean real critters such as possums and raccoons and even larger ones like foxes and deer.

Florida always has been a place where humans existed side by scale with creatures the rest of the country might find "different.'' I don't just mean your common gators, bears, panthers and man-eating sharks, as well as your equally nasty mosquitoes and no-seeums; but weird critters such as poisonous Bufo toads and more recently a sheep-sized rodent called a Capybara.

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There is even a legendary creature said to roam the Everglades known as the "Skunk Ape.'' My newspaper once sent me as part of an expedition of experts -- actually a columnist, an artist and a sportswriter -- into the swamps in search of the creature that is said to be a Bigfoot-like beast with an odor problem. Unfortunately the only strange critters we turned up were in the Holiday Inn lounge in Fort Lauderdale.

Now all those animals have gone from the Everglades, including the Skunk Ape. Nobody has seen a Skunk Ape in years. They have been replaced; or, more to the point, they apparently have been eaten by giant Burmese pythons. That's right. A study just published by the National Academy of Sciences found that sightings of "medium-sized mammals'' are down by as much as 99 percent in the Everglades.

"The effects of declining mammal populations on the overall Everglades ecosystem which extends well beyond the national park boundaries are likely to be profound,'' said one of the authors of the study.

I guess so! That part about the "well beyond the national park boundaries'' happens to be us. I can handle the occasional raccoon that slinks by or even a mosquito or two before heading indoors. But the idea of a python oozing around by the grill is unsettling.

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Burmese pythons can grow to be 25 feet long and weigh more than 200 pounds. That's not quite the same as the black snake living beneath your back porch. They have been known to swallow animals as large as alligators that they first have dispatched by squeezing them to death.

Nobody knows how many Burmese pythons are living in the Everglades but the Academy of Sciences says the number is in the "tens of thousands.'' Scientists fear the pythons are disrupting the food chain in the Everglades and don't know what the consequences might be.

Well, wait a minute. What happens when the deer and the foxes are gone and the pythons decide to make us part of the food chain? One of the concerns is that these guys can swim and might be snaking their way in our direction.

One solution is you apparently can turn the tables and eat Burmese python, although I would recommend you wait until it's in the reptile counter at Publix. I looked on the Internet and there are recipes for python, which they say doesn't taste as much like chicken as it does like snake. It also probably doesn't fit in those plastic bags they use.

sotto@tampatrib.com

(813) 259-7808