One Man's Pet, Another's Invasive Species

The pythons are often seen lying across a road. Usually motorists describe them as resembling a log, as big around as a telephone pole.

At his office in the park, Snow keeps a duffel bag handy. Inside: a python hide, rolled up like a rug. He clearly enjoys unfurling it on the conference table because, at 15 1/2 feet long, it spans the length of the table and drapes into a chair at the far end.

No one knows how the snakes went native, but there's speculation that Hurricane Andrew, which obliterated thousands of homes, played a factor in a wholesale python jailbreak in 1992. Many invasive species undergo a lag before proliferating. What's certain is that, by 2002, pythons were seen in multiple locations in remote regions of the Everglades.

Then one morning in early 2003 a bunch of tourists on the park's Anhinga Trail, a reliable location for viewing wildlife, were startled to see an alligator with a python in its mouth. The snake was coiled around the gator. More than 24 hours later, the python wriggled free and disappeared into the marsh.

Even more dramatic was what happened in the Everglades in 2005: A python swallowed an alligator and -- there's not a delicate way to put it -- exploded. The photograph ran around the world; it wasn't pretty, but you had to look.

This February, the U.S. Geological Survey reported that pythons in Asia inhabit climates that are similar to those in about a third of the continental United States. A USGS map showed potential python habitat stretching from California to Delaware and including much of the South. You could conceivably have pythons snacking their way right up the Potomac.

The map wasn't a prediction of where the snakes will actually spread, however. Media coverage of it was overly sensational, argues the map's co-author, Robert Reed.

"When was the last snake story that didn't get sensationalized?" he asked.

"Ecophobia is playing a role," said Jamie K. Reaser, a science and policy adviser to the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council. "Mammals are warm and fuzzy. Birds tend to have quite a following. But animals such as lizards and snakes tend, at least in this culture, to be less well respected or supported."

A Herper in His Element

Lizards and snakes get plenty of love at Glades Herp Farms.

"I'm a reptile nut -- herper -- whatever you want to call it," MacInnes said. "I think that reptiles are inherently fascinating and wonderfully beautiful animals."

As a kid he collected snakes in the Everglades as they warmed themselves on the pavement of the road known as the Tamiami Trail. He spent much of his adult life running a retail pet shop in Fort Myers. Eventually he got tired of the looky-loos coming in, turning up their noses and saying "I hate reptiles!"