“It’s the invasive species capital of the world,” as Gorden-Vega puts it. Florida also has African snails, Oriental fruit flies, and Cuban tree frogs. Even on my way here I sat next to a married couple in the airport who casually mentioned that they used to own a Burm-and let it go-back in the ’90s. Growing up, I knew plenty of folks who had them. People who have never lived in Florida might be surprised by how common python ownership is there. Most likely, individual pet owners released their snakes into the glades when they got too big, and those pets multiplied into tens or even hundreds of thousands of animals in the ensuing years. Although a popular theory states that Hurricane Andrew destroyed a large breeding facility in 1992, releasing tons of snakes into the wild, no one seems to know the name of it or where it was. There’s still a lot we don’t know about how pythons got to South Florida. One of the many long, straight roads that python hunters follow to find their quarry.
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