A handful of college students recently caught a record-breaking 19-foot Burmese python in Florida. That’s longer than the width of an NFL goal post.
This sea otter, which has a blue tag on its foreleg, has been attacking and terrorizing surfers along the coastline in Santa Cruz, Calif. Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times/TNS
Jake Waleri, an amateur hunter himself, said he wanted to show his friends “the true Florida experience,” and so he decided to take them into Big Cypress National Preserve in the middle of the night to hunt the giant snakes. If I’m up at 2 a.m. in Florida, I better be at the Fontainebleau Hotel’s LIV club with a drink in my hand, but that’s just me.
The recently snared behemoth supplants the previous record of 18 feet, 9 inches, which was set in 2020 by professional trappers. It’s also a cautionary preview for the 10th annual Florida Python Challenge, the “python removal contest” that starts next month.
Since 2000 these slithering reptiles have decimated wildlife in the Everglades, and now because of climate change, they are migrating north. They’ve popped out of toilets. One trapped female was 200 pounds and with 60 eggs. Another had 111 eggs. Did I mention they are apex predators?
“I damn near had a heart attack after messing, wrestling around with that thing,” said Ryan Ausburn, one of the trappers who caught that 2020 python about 50 miles outside of Miami.
Florida’s slithering struggles are an issue for that state’s residents. However, add in the sea otter that harasses surfers in Santa Cruz and steals their boards; the orcas with a thing for sinking yachts in European waters, and the dingoes in Australia that hunted down a jogger the way they hunt wallabies. It starts to feel as if the animal kingdom is over us. Not that I can blame them.
There’s a 620,000-square-mile island of trash – roughly the size of Alaska – currently floating in the Pacific. That’s on humans. As are the Burmese pythons that are destroying Florida’s ecosystem. It seems we have misconstrued being on top of the food chain with being detached from the rest of the food chain. But we are not immune from the impact of our actions, whether it’s littering or releasing non-native species into the Everglades.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has placed a string of buoys in the Rio Grande in an effort to prevent asylum-seekers and migrants from entering the country. Besides the possibility of drownings and breaking international treaties, the floating wall may also be redirecting the flow of the river and affecting fish and other species that need to move upstream or downstream.
The most unnerving aspect of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” which came out in 1963, was that the violent attacks were never explained. Sixty years later, I think we get it. We’re not good stewards of the planet. Arctic sea ice is disappearing in front of us – taking life such as polar bears with it – and we still have elected officials questioning climate change.
Worse yet, it seems we can’t help but make things worse. An analysis of a mineral-rich area in the Pacific has unearthed 5,000 sea animals that science had no idea existed. So while the goal of weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels is admirable, what price is too high to pay? If making modern batteries requires us to strip-mine the ocean for ingredients, shouldn’t science assess in advance what toll that might take on an ecosystem we just found out about? Or we could just keep winging it and hope the orcas don’t notice.
A year ago, an elephant in India made international news when it interrupted the funeral of a woman it had already trampled to death. One theory is that she had been with poachers, and the elephant wanted vengeance. Who knows if that’s true or not. What is true is we don’t know animals as well as we would like to think.
The whales are unionizing in the East, pythons are migrating north and out West, a sea otter is terrorizing surfers. I don’t know about y’all, but if the monkeys start talking, I’m going off the grid. I’ve seen that movie, and it does not turn out well – for us.
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