A UF wildlife ecology and conservation professor has confirmed the cause of a declining rabbit population in Gainesville’s sister swamp, the Florida Everglades National Park.
Robert McCleery’s findings, published March 17 in the biological research journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, attributed the population decline of marsh rabbits — a prevalent species in the area — to Burmese pythons.
“There was a paper that showed an approximately 99 percent decline in marsh rabbits in Everglades National Park,” said McCleery, who led the study. “They used to be the most common animal seen in the park.”
McCleery and his team set out to affirm the existing hypothesis that the Burmese python was the offender to blame.
McCleery said 95 marsh rabbits were captured and released into one of two areas: one free of pythons and one full of them.
Each rabbit had a radio tag attached to it, and researchers would track them every two days, McCleery said. Once a sensor monitoring vital signs of the rabbits went on, indicating that one of them had died, they would track down the rabbit.
McCleery said if a tracker was found inside a python, the team assumed the python killed the rabbit.
“The hope is that this study raises awareness and allows us to start studying different ways that we can move pythons,” McCleery said.
Kamran Ali, a 19-year-old UF environmental science sophomore, said he believes that controlling the population of pythons is necessary to maintain a balanced ecosystem.
It is important to prevent the annihilation of marsh rabbits because each species contributes to the overall life cycle, Ali said.
“There should be measures taken to prevent a species from completely dominating another,” Ali said.
[A version of this story ran on page 1 on 3/24/2015 under the headline “Everglades rabbits didn’t hop away; pythons ate them”]
