-This is a 12-foot-long Burmese python
caught by a Port St. Lucie
police sergeant in the middle of a neighborhood.
-Encounters with wayward snakes, once pets in someone's home,
are a regular feature on the news in reptile-loving
Florida today.
-Oh, my God. That's on our street?
-Yes. Yes, it was.
-More than 2 million constrictor snakes, pythons,
boas, and anacondas have been imported into the U.S.
Non-venomous but still fearsome, they kill their prey
by strangling it, then eating it whole.
Despite all that, the Burmese python,
bred in a rainbow of colors,
caught on with rock stars and regular folks.
-It used to kind of be the biker, long-haired,
tattooed, you know,
rebellious guy.Now it can be a lawyer, a doctor.
Really, the person next door could be keeping reptiles.
-And often, the person next
door doesn't understand what they've gotten into.
-They buy them, you know,
12, 14 inches long, but then three or four years
later they realize, you know, it's a 7, 8-foot snake,
and they can't take care of it anymore.
-You going in tail first?
-Snakes roaming neighborhoods are one thing, but how did
they end up 80 miles from Miami
in a remote region of Everglades National Park?
It all began
in the pre-Instagram 1980s when park visitors
filled out cards to report sightings of snakes that
were bigger than anything they'd seen before.
-One time, I got a call from Royal Palm Hammock,
and it was about an 11-footer, a female,
didn't have a mark on her, and when I opened her up,
she was just full of fat -- no parasites, no nothing.
This was somebody's pet, clearly.
-A pet most likely dumped out of the trunk of someone's car.
-The problem isn't just pets. Hurricane Andrew destroyed snake
hatcheries in the Miami area sending hundreds of baby snakes
into the Everglades.
-By 2000, Meshaka had published a study warning that Burmese
pythons were reproducing in the southern end of the park.
-At the park, it was not met with the sense of urgency
that I felt it warranted. It is, in a way,
a ticking time bomb. Will it be relatively localized?
Will it explode? Which, lo and behold, it did.
-In the four years after Meshaka's warning, python
captures around the park went from 2 a year to 70.
-Got him?
-Yep.
-Park officials were caught behind the curve.
-We couldn't go to the Home Depot and
buy a can of snake-be-gone and just figure out what
the right dosage was to kill it. We didn't have those tools.
Those tools weren't there.
-At the state level,
Florida Fish and Wildlife officials hesitated to ban
the sale of pythons, a move that would hurt
the state's then $100 million reptile industry,
hoping the snakes might die off on their own.
-We keep saying, "Well, let's just make sure
we get this right," you know? "We don't want to ruffle
any feathers. Let's make sure we really know
that this is gonna be a problem before we go and
really impact somebody's livelihood."
Were we taking it seriously? I would -- in my personal, no.
-What forced the issue onto everyone's radar
were clashes between pythons and the park's top predator,
the alligator.
-After a 30-hour exhaustive battle, a draw.
What you're looking at is a 13-foot python
that ate an entire 6-foot alligator before bursting.
-That was sort of the very first, very public display
of these two rather large reptiles, and it's
kind of a turning point for both management
as well as the media, I think, to pay attention.
-And pay attention they did.
-An alien species is invading the swampland of America.
-As python captures soared at 367 in one year,
so did media speculation
about how big and scary the problem was.
-Snakes are eating Florida.
-150,000...
-183,000...
-Over 200,000...
-...on the loose, traveling faster than you might think.
-A clear and present danger to people.
-What would come out would be, "Big snake. Be afraid."
-Adding to the sense of panic, a tragedy in 2009.
♪♪
-The autopsy report revealed the snake had, in fact,
strangled 2-year-old Shaianna Hare and may
have tried to eat her.
-There have been 10 Americans
strangled by constrictors since 1990, all victims in
homes where snakes were kept as pets. Pythons have
never attacked a tourist in the Everglades, but that
didn't stop park visitors from being spooked.
-I was afraid that there would
be snakes everywhere -- pythons and everything.
-The real danger, park biologists argue,
was not to humans but to wildlife.
With few natural predators to keep them in check,
pythons were eating their way through the ecosystem,
devastating populations of native birds and mammals,
including a 76-pound deer.
-We know very little about them
in their native habitat, so it makes it that much harder
when they become an invasive species.
-She's not happy.
-With their $10 billion effort to restore the Everglades
under threat...
-Oh, watch out!
-...federal and state agencies
began spending $1 million a year on python control...
-Find it, Bea! Find it, find it, find it!
-...enlisting a python-sniffing dog,
implanting transmitters in so-called Judas snakes
to lead scientists to mating areas...
-Aah!
-...and setting traps.
But the efforts barely made
a dent. The snakes set new records for length, this
one over 17 feet, and for eggs -- 79 in one female.
-Ready? One, two, three, smile!
-With Florida still allowing the sale of pythons as pets,
the federal government in 2008 began considering a ban
on imports of Burmese pythons and eight other giant snakes.
The reptile industry argued it would kill jobs
in their $2 billion national industry.
-It will destroy
American businesses, and it will damage hundreds
of thousands of people economically.
-There's no Second Amendment that says I can keep a python,
but if you take the Burmese python away,
the next thing you know, you're taking a leopard
gecko away, and then maybe your dog or cat. You know,
where does it stop?
-The action that we're taking today is a milestone
for us in the protection of the Everglades.
-In the end, after years of debate,
as pythons expanded their range, the government went ahead
and banned imports of eight giant snakes.
One newspaper expressed skepticism, saying,
"It's closing the reptile cage
after the snakes have already slithered out."
But pythons are not the only escaped or released pets
that have become a public menace.
-Scientists are tracking
an exotic invader -- a small fish that has become
one of the biggest bullies in the Atlantic Ocean.
-Venomous lionfish,
imported from Asia for aquariums,
are preying on native fish from Florida to Rhode Island.
-We have this non-native species living here,
and it really likes utility poles.
-Exotic birds from South America
are causing headaches for power companies,
and Florida's latest pet gone wild?
-It's a cold-blooded killer,
eating its way through the Everglades.
-A four-foot lizard with a nasty bite,
the Argentine tegu.
-There is nothing similar to this lizard in Florida,
so when they get to a place like this,
it's kind of like walking into an untouched banquet table.
-Tegus are eating the eggs of native birds and reptiles.
Scientists are trying to contain it through trapping.
-Nothing.
-But the lizard is reproducing in two counties and spreading.
-To the west of us, where tegus are heading towards
rapidly, is one of the largest nesting areas for the
threatened American crocodile. A species that we brought back
from the brink of extinction now may be threatened again
by an invasive species.
-In Florida, where there are now more non-native lizards
than native ones, officials say stopping the tegu
is a top priority. And yet tegus are still
for sale as pets, virtually guaranteeing
more releases or escapes into the wild.
-I think, overall,
the problem that we're having is that we as human beings
do not react until we've demonstrated there's a
real problem. When you get to the point where you know
you have trouble, then it's too late to fix it.
-What do you guys think your chances are of finding a python?
-Good. Oh, real good, yeah.
-After a public hunt in the Everglades in 2013
bagged a disappointing 68 snakes, officials
switched gears, hiring a posse of trained python
hunters to track them down and remove them,
paying minimum wage and a bounty of up to $25 a foot.
-Take a look at this monster in the swamp -- a gigantic
python more than 17 feet long.
-They just get longer and longer.
-But so far, nothing has stopped the python population
from swelling to an estimated 100,000, and the National
Park Service now admits the big snakes are here to stay.
-We don't know what to bring to the battle, right?
We really don't yet have all that figured out.
-Battling invasive animals,
including those that arrived by way of the pet trade,
costs taxpayers an estimated $50 billion a year.
-We really should have a proactive approach,
and we still don't.
Nobody's screening all the non-native wildlife
that's being imported into United States
to say which one's gonna be the next bad actor.
I mean, that right there just floors me.
-Maybe the way to put it is that the lesson learned
is that no one's learned their lesson.
How's that for an awful lesson learned?