Python invasion

摘要

Florida's ecologists can be forgiven one pet hate: Burmese pythons discarded by their owners have eaten many Everglades mammals practically to extinction."This is the first documentation of impacts on animal populations, and they are dramatic, with 99 per cent declines in some cases," says Michael Dorcas of Davidson College in North Carolina.Dorcas and his colleagues scoured 57,000 kilometres of roads in the Everglades between 2003 and 2011, recording all the animals they saw, dead or alive. For comparison, they had data from Everglades park staff recording roadkills between 1993 and 1999. Burmese pythons were recognised as an established species in the region in 2000.