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.
Large Burmese pythons are physically capable of killing a person, but no human death has been attributed to a wild python in Florida. The real question is how to think clearly about low-probability but real risks.
Burmese pythons do not only affect the animals they eat. By reducing mammalian predators such as raccoons and opossums, they may indirectly alter turtle nest predation in South Florida.
The 2012 PNAS study documented severe declines in several mammal species in Everglades National Park during the same period that invasive Burmese pythons became established and widespread.
Burmese pythons are difficult to manage partly because they are so difficult to detect. A snake can be present, nearby, and still effectively invisible.
No reliable estimate exists for the number of Burmese pythons in Florida, largely because the snakes are cryptic, unevenly distributed, and extremely difficult to detect.