Keeping a lid on exotic reptiles gone wild
Fla. cracks down as invasion tips ecological balance
BUSHNELL, Fla. - RobRoy MacInnes is the man to see if you want to buy a crocodile. Or a scorpion, a rattlesnake, a boa constrictor. Got a hankering for a cobra? Just pony up $600 and you can have one of the more lethal species.
"It is a very effective threat display," MacInnes, 49, said as a Pakistan black cobra, 6 feet long, hissing, hood spread, writhed in its enclosure and repeatedly struck at the thin glass separating the creature from a visitor. "A snake like that, coming at you, you'd leave him alone."
Or simply die of fright.
MacInnes is co-owner of Glades Herp Farms, an empire of claws, spines, scales, fangs, and darting tongues. The reptile trade, he's happy to report, is booming. The pet industry estimates that about 4.8 million households now contain at least one pet reptile, a number that has nearly doubled in a decade. Reptiles are increasingly popular in a crowded, urbanized nation. They don't need a yard. You don't have to take a lizard for a walk.
But biologists see the trade in nonnative creatures as a factor in the rising number of invasive species, such as the Burmese python, which is breeding up a storm in the Everglades, and the Nile monitor lizard, a toothy carnivore that can reach 7 feet in length and has found a happy home along the canals of Cape Coral.
Under a new state law, a customer must obtain a $100 annual permit to buy a monitor lizard or some of the largest snakes - four species of pythons and the green anaconda. The animal must also be implanted with a microchip. That tag could help officials identify the animal if it turns up later in the wild.
MacInnes contends that the government overestimates the threat posed by invasive reptiles. He says he is being blocked by the US Fish and Wildlife Service from importing some commercially attractive animals, such as Fiji Islands iguanas and radiated tortoises from Madagascar.
Even the term "invasive species" is unfair, he said. "They're 'introduced.' I think that 'invasive' is passing judgment."
Of the pythons, he said: "To me, it's a wonderful introduction. I think it's the best thing to happen to the Everglades in the last 200 years."
Biologists, however, say that invasive species, unchecked by natural predators, are major threats to biodiversity. Life on Earth has always moved around, but never so fast. Organisms evolve in niche environments. What happens when the natural barriers are removed? When anything can go anywhere?
Complications ensue.
Skip Snow, a wildlife biologist for Everglades National Park, has helped drag hundreds of Burmese pythons out of the weeds, off roadways, and even from under the hood of a tourist's car. He calls MacInnes's argument "ridiculous." The snakes, he says, are imperiling five endangered species in the Florida Keys, including the Key Largo woodrat, one specimen of which, tagged with a radio transmitter, was tracked all the way to the belly of a python.
The pythons are often seen lying across a road. Usually motorists describe them as resembling a log, as big around as a telephone pole.
At his office in the park, Snow keeps a duffel bag handy. Inside: a python hide rolled up like a rug. He clearly enjoys unfurling it on the conference table because, at 15 1/2 feet long, it spans the length of the table and drapes into a chair at the far end.
No one knows how the snakes went native, but there is speculation that Hurricane Andrew, which obliterated thousands of homes, played a factor in a wholesale python jailbreak in 1992. Many invasive species undergo a lag before proliferating. What is certain is that, by 2002, pythons were seen in multiple locations in remote regions of the Everglades.
Then one morning in early 2003 a group of tourists on the park's Anhinga Trail, a reliable location for viewing wildlife, were startled to see an alligator with a python in its mouth. The snake was coiled around the gator. More than 24 hours later, the python wriggled free and disappeared.
Even more dramatic was what happened in the Everglades in 2005: A python swallowed an alligator and exploded.
This February, the US Geological Survey reported that pythons in Asia inhabit climates that are similar to those in about a third of the continental United States. A USGS map showed the potential python habitat stretching from California to Delaware, but the map was not a prediction. 