Animals and plants introduced from non-native environments
cost the U.S.an estimated $120-billion a year,
including the Burmese python—
a top predator that’s been wiping out other forms of life in the Everglades.
But one local agency is fighting back, by unleashing an even more deadly force:
Floridians.
— This is going to be our secret weapon today.
This time of year, the pythons are deep in there.
This morning, it’s hot.
We may get lucky, but where they are is gonna be in their little nested areas.
That’s what this is going to enable us to do, is to party crash.
— Let’s go party crash! — Let’s go party crash.
— I’m feeling lucky.
— Since 2008, Tom Rahill and his group, called the Swamp Apes,
have captured approximately 400 pythons.
Though Rahill is a prolific hunter,
he also has a day job working with computers.
To hunt pythons, he uses a camera probe, a knife, and his hands.
— The Everglades is a World Heritage Site.
It's an international biosphere.
To get to that point very clearly shows that it has a uniqueness on to the world.
The Everglades are a very flat geologic area that,
effectively, have a river running over it.
That river is really the health of the Everglades.
— The South Florida Water Management District is tasked with
protecting the health of the Everglades, and managing the python problem.
— They were first found in the 1980s in the Everglades,
but really became a problem after Hurricane Andrew,
when several pet facilities were destroyed and,
also, people were buying these these snakes and keeping them in their houses
and, eventually, they become too big to maintain.
You know, a six-foot snake is one thing,
but when you have a 15-foot snake that needs to eat regularly,
it becomes too much, too burdensome.
So people found a place to release them,
and that ecosystem in the Everglades is uniquely similar
to their native habitat in the southeast Asian range.
— Since 2000, the Everglades National Parks has seen a massive decrease
in raccoon, possum, bobcat, and rabbit populations.
Pythons have been consuming up to 25 species of birds,
including the endangered wood stork.
The python population in Florida is somewhere in the thousands,
with the highest numbers in the Everglades.
They’ve replaced the indigenous predators at the top of the food chain,
tipping the natural balance of the ecosystem.
— Back in March of 2017,
the Water Management District governing board charged us with creating an incentive program
to, essentially, pay for 25 highly trained people
to go out and remove as many pythons as possible.
And that's what we have here today.
— The pythons have made a significant impact,
a negative impact, on the health of the ecosystem.
It throws off the entire ecosystem.
— After hours of searching, Rahill and his team spotted signs of a python.
— What is that, down in there? See that?
— Oh—it’s a big shed, man.
— It’s the skin of a python that’s grown out of its old skin.
So, it comes from the head, and then the tail is the last thing to go.
So, the position of the tail— the snake was going that way.
Come here!
Yeah, that’s something moving.
Alright, everybody ready?
Easy, easy, easy, easy!
Right underneath me!
— Got him!
I’ve got his head.
— Good?
— Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Stretch him out.
Alright, let’s start moving him up.
Ready?
— He’s an animal!
— Group hug!
I love the smell of humans in the morning!
She’s starting to hiss.
Beautiful animal, but you’ve gotta go.
We love these Everglades, and…
it’s just a shame, it’s gotta go.
— The next day, the Swamp Apes team delivered the python
to the South Florida Water Management District for measurement and an autopsy.
The program pays hunters for pythons by the foot.
— 15?
Right now, they’re just taking the snake,
they’re getting an accurate weight off of it.
It’s a lot easier to do it with a fork lift.
112?
112 pounds.
That’s a massive snake.
So, we’ve got eggs.
If we can catch a big pregnant female like this,
that’s how many other pythons you’re gonna remove out of the ecosystem.
Every one of these represents a whole population of wading birds and small mammals
that we’re actually saving by doing this project.
61 eggs.
So we got 62 pythons out of the environment.
— But that’s 62 snakes against a python population of thousands,
that continues to breed in the grassy Everglades.