In January 2010, one of South Florida’s most severe cold spells killed many Burmese pythons—but many survived. Michael E. Dorcas examines how behavior, refuge use, and inherited variation could allow a single extreme event to alter the evolutionary trajectory of an invasive population.
In 2009, ten Burmese pythons from Everglades National Park were placed in a semi-natural enclosure in South Carolina. Their responses to an unusually severe winter revealed surprising cold tolerance—and the critical importance of refuge use and behavior.
Two Gila monsters encountered on consecutive days in Arizona’s Santa Rita Mountains later helped inspire Michael E. Dorcas’s drawing Breaking Through. Their natural history—and the discovery of exendin-4 in Gila monster venom—also connects these remarkable lizards to the development of GLP-1 medicine.
Roads are obvious dangers for turtles, but railroad tracks can also become barriers and traps, especially for box turtles moving at ground level.
Moving a box turtle to a “better” place may seem helpful, but relocation can disrupt home-range behavior, increase movement, and expose turtles to greater risk.
Sea turtle TEDs and terrapin BRDs are different devices for different fisheries, but they share the same conservation principle: modify fishing gear so the fishery can continue while reducing predictable turtle mortality.
Diamondback terrapins have a slow life-history strategy: high nest and hatchling mortality, delayed maturity, and long adult lifespans. That means crab-pot mortality of subadults and adults can have serious consequences for population stability.
People often ask what should be done with Burmese pythons after they are captured. But the harder problem is not using dead pythons — it is finding enough live ones to meaningfully reduce the population.
Not every nonnative species becomes invasive. Understanding the difference among introduced, established, and invasive species is essential for interpreting biological invasions, including Burmese pythons in Florida.
Burmese pythons once seemed like unlikely large-scale invaders, but their size, diet, reproduction, maternal care, low energy needs, and low detectability help explain why they became such a formidable ecological problem in Florida.