Slithering, scaly snakes are populating the state by the thousands and swallowing alligators as they go.
Frank Mazzotti, UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences associate professor, has published a new report highlighting facts about Burmese pythons and explaining how and why these pets-gone-wild need to be captured.
The pythons in Florida consume prey as large as white-tailed deer and American alligators, but Mazzotti's study reveals large captive pythons also sometimes kill their owners.
Considering that the pythons can grow to be 23 feet long and close to 200 pounds, they can sometimes be too large to handle.
"People deliberately release them because they get too large to handle as pets," Mazzotti said.
Once in the wild, the pythons find one another and reproduce, leading their presence to increase steadily over the last few years.
The snakes can swim and travel at incredible speeds and have spread from the Everglades as far north as Manatee County, Mazzotti's report states.
Of the 99,000-plus Burmese pythons imported into the United States since 1996, a few hundred have been captured or found dead in the Everglades, according to the report.
Gainesville is not ruled out as a potential destination for the serpents, he said.
"I don't think there is any place in Florida that these snakes couldn't survive," Mazzotti said.
