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However it happened, the notion that pythons may be gobbling up lots and lots of white-tailed deer is troubling. “It drives me crazy to think how a single snake was able to hide,” says Boback, “so that not just one deer but three deer walked within a meter of it - and then how it was able to strike from a low position. It’s thought that pythons use their olfactory senses to figure out where mammals tend to travel, and then lie in wait for one to pass. “It’s possible that the deer were all snoozing. “This has been keeping me up at night,” he says. I asked Boback if he knew how the python had managed to catch and eat three deer.
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Now, for the first time, a python has been found eating multiple deer in a short time period. And that 2012 study suggested that white-tailed deer populations have fallen 94 percent in Everglades National Park since pythons became established. There have been isolated reports of pythons consuming deer before. This latest discovery adds to that picture. The purple region represents the area of Everglades National Park (ENP) where pythons were found in the 1990s and where reproduction was first reported. Red triangles indicate locations of pythons found between 20. “All these studies are putting together a story that we just can’t ignore anymore,” says Boback. Lo and behold, the rabbit populations crashed in the python regions - with three-quarters of them eaten by the snakes. The researchers took 100 marsh rabbits (which have seen a precipitous decline), tagged them with radio collars, and released some of the rabbits into two sites where pythons were known to exist and the rest into a region where there were no snakes. But in 2015, a team led by Bob McCleery of the University of Florida conducted a follow-up experiment. Hunting, for instance, has long been banned in the Everglades park. These observed declines were strongly correlated with the Burmese python’s known habitat, and the researchers couldn’t find any other plausible explanations for the mammals’ disappearance. In a 2012 study, scientists showed that sightings of raccoons, opossums, bobcats, rabbits, foxes, and other mammals in the region have declined more than 80 percent since the mid-1990s.
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Something disturbing is definitely happening in Everglades National Park, South Florida’s most famous natural wonder. Captured by Bobby Hill of the South Florida Water Management District, who has captured more than 400 pythons in Everglades National Park. “When you put that all together, you’ve got to say, okay, something serious is going on here.” There’s growing evidence that Burmese pythons are devastating the Everglades The 14-foot python that ate three deer. But the incident comes alongside growing evidence that the Burmese pythons are ravaging native wildlife in South Florida’s Everglades. “If this was just one snake that ate three deer in isolation, that’d be one thing” says Scott Boback, a biologist at Dickinson College and lead author of the study. The snake appears to have gobbled them up, an adult and two fawns, in just 90 days. In a new paper in Bioinvasions Records, a team of researchers describe slitting open the intestine of a dead 14-foot python and finding the remains of three different white-tailed deer. Now scientists have discovered that Burmese pythons - which can reach 18 feet in length and swallow a bobcat whole - are even more ravenous than they realized. There are now as many as 300,000 of these invasive creatures slithering through the state, and they’ve been known to eat alligators, bobcats, rabbits, and birds. The Burmese python is a massive snake native to Southeast Asia that arrived in South Florida in the 1980s, possibly released into the wild by careless pet owners. Normally, what a snake eats for breakfast isn’t worth a headline.