Why aren’t there Burmese python cases south of Florida into South America, assuming the further south you go the better the climate for these constrictors! Would they not be considered as an invasive species and cause havoc to the local wildlife like lets say in Costa Rica
In: Biology
They are considered invasive and there is no restriction on killing them . Florida even has bounty programs set up to capture them.
https://www.sfwmd.gov/our-work/python-program
They became a problem here because of people buying them as pets, not realizing how big they get, and then releasing them. Costa Rica doesn’t really import many Burmese pythons as pets.
They exist invasively in Florida because it’s their climate, but they can’t spread on their own down to e.g. Costa Rica because there’s a lot of climate they can’t survive in between here and there.
And lastly if you were to release Burmese pythons in Costa Rica, they have their own large snakes like boa constrictor and a larger variety of predators. I don’t think they would compete as well as they do in Florida.
It’s a problem in Florida mainly because they were very popular as pets for several years.
They either escaped, or were released as they got older and became too large for the owner to care for. This didn’t happen in Costa Rica so it’s not a problem there.
If ball or burmese pythons suddenly become popular as pets in Costa Rica, they’d probably have the same problem.
not every country has a standard for legally labeling things as “invasive species”.
and there might be other snakes similar to the burmese that already exist naturally so its not a new threat (potentially). The Boa constrictor is native to costa rica already, per your example.
The pythons in Florida came from a breeding facility that was destroyed in Hurricane Andrew. It released around 900 snakes into one area where they were able to reproduce.
The problem with Burmese pythons in southern Florida is largely that they have nothing to control their population. Nothing eats them and nothing has had time to really develop defenses against them.
Further south, there are more animals like the Burmese python, so existing natural population control methods are in place. There is competition from others in the niche – big constrictors are already in those jungles and swamps. Jaguars are known to eat medium sized constrictors, and lots of things eat the eggs. Prey have adaptations to avoid being eaten.
But more to the point, the pythons would still need to get to these Central and South American regions somehow. The invasive population of pythons in Florida came from a boom in having them as pets and then people just dumping them in the swamps when they got too big. That’s not really happening in other areas.
Further, there isn’t really an easily navigable path from South Florida to, say, Guatemala or Venezuela for these snakes. Going north from the Everglades puts them into less habitable regions, and going any other direction is mostly open ocean – which they are not adapted to travel across, even if they are good swimmers.
Costa Rica has large native snakes, so they also have predators that eat the snakes. Florida doesn’t, so there are no natural controls on the python population.
Snakes don’t have boats. They’re invasive in Florida because people released too many pets, and also a zoo or breeding facility had many escape. They were able to survive in the Florida climate but they are not native. Maybe if they hitched a ride on a boat to Costa Rica they could flourish there too, but I dont think that’s happened yet. If they traveled over land across the southern United States, through all of Mexico and most of Central America that would be quite a feat and maybe impossible with Mexicos mountains and deserts.
It’s not like we have done a perfect uniform mixing of animals over the earth’s surface. There is still a lot of happenstance on where things get dropped if it’s not something like a rat that is going to sneak around in grain shipments to everywhere humans go.
Because nobody in Costa Rica is buying a Python as a pet and then releasing it into the wild when it get to big for them to care for.
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