"Mickey Mouse and I grew up together." - Ruthie Tompson, Disney animation checker and scene planner and one of the first women to become a member of the International Photographers Union in 1952.
"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears… To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies." -Octavia E. Butler
Biologists Discover 215-Pound Burmese Python in Florida
The invasive species was the largest python ever found in the state.
Researchers recently discovered a female Burmese python that weighed 215 pounds and was nearly 18 feet long. It was the largest python ever found in Florida.1
Wildlife biologists at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida captured the snake in the western Everglades. They tracked her using a “scout” snake, which is a male with a GPS transmitter attached. The trackers help researchers observe how pythons move, as well as their breeding behaviors and the habitats they frequent. Biologists can follow these scouts to large females so they can remove them and their eggs from the wild.1
“The removal of female pythons plays a critical role in disrupting the breeding cycle of these apex predators that are wreaking havoc on the Everglades ecosystem and taking food sources from other native species,” Ian Bartoszek, wildlife biologist and environmental science project manager for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, said in a statement. “This is the wildlife issue of our time for southern Florida.”1
During the necropsy, biologists found the python was carrying a record 122 developing eggs. The discovery set a new bar for the most eggs a female python could possibly make during one breeding cycle.1
The python also had pieces of hooves belonging to an adult white-tailed deer, suggesting that was the snake’s last dinner.
Would you like a Florida python for your birthday? I'm sure some Floriduh man is selling them.
"Mickey Mouse and I grew up together." - Ruthie Tompson, Disney animation checker and scene planner and one of the first women to become a member of the International Photographers Union in 1952.
I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him. - Abraham Lincoln