In Key Largo, Fla., scientists are looking to protect endangered native rodents and slow the invasion of massive Burmese pythons
An opossum nicknamed Prairie Dog met a gruesome fate last fall in Key Largo, Fla., when it was squeezed to death and then swallowed whole by a massive, 12-foot-long Burmese python. But you could say it got revenge, thanks to an unusual accessory: a tracking collar that led scientists to its killer.
For Cove, the project stems from efforts to protect two species of rodent found only on Key Largo: the Key Largo woodrat and the Key Largo cotton mouse . Younger, smaller pythons eat both critters, which are considered endangered. And the rodents are intriguing beyond that endangered status: Key Largo woodrats build huge nests from dirt and sticks that can house generations of the animals.
The hours-long snake extraction was the culmination of weeks spent tracking the signal put out by Prairie Dog’s collar after an alert that the animal had stopped moving. The lengthy tracking process was necessary in part because pythons can hide in the Swiss-cheese-like local bedrock. “It takes a lot of patience; they’re incredibly difficult to find,” Redinger says of the snakes.
The first credible report of a Burmese python on Key Largo was made in the mid-2000s, but exactly how many of the snakes have made their home on the island in the past couple of decades isn’t clear. “Population size estimates are some of the most important missing pieces as far as successful suppression of the Burmese python invasion,” said Jacquelyn Guzy, a population ecologist at the U.S.
Kelly Crandall, a master’s student in forestry at Southern Illinois University, who is gathering the mammalian data as part of her master’s degree project, was particularly interested in studying toxoplasmosis, a disease she knew raccoons and opossums might be picking up from the island’s feral cat population.
But Prairie Dog isn’t the only collared mammal that has faced a python. In January an alert from a raccoon’s collar eventually led team members to a second large snake they were able to remove. In February a second opossum collar put out an alert, although project personnel tracked it and a few stray hairs down in a pile of snake poop, not a snake. Scientists think the python that snagged the opossum must have been about 16 feet long.
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