re: Why are there so many Burmese pythons now in the south?

Didn’t say any snakes were bad.

They just don’t belong in North America. If they did, they would be indigenous and not feral.

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Isn’t illegal in places like LA or Florida to have them as pets?

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Yeah like that's ever stopped people from acquiring them.

Problem is with pythons, people tend to get rid of them as they get bigger and bigger, and far too many of them wind up just being released in the wild.

Throw in the pet stores that carried them that were destroyed in hurricanes and there's the start of the epidemic population explosion in the souths favorable climate.

Every damn day and twice on Sunday

Y’all need to follow @jayprehistoricpets on insta.

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I think boa eggs actually hatch inside the mother and offspring come out live where pythons actually lay a pile of eggs that hatch.

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Correct. Vipers give live birth as well

The last time I went to my families place in central Florida I went to walk out on the dock and juuuuust about stepped on about a 8 foot python. That fricking thing hissed at me before I ever even saw it and I’m not gonna lie, when I did finally see it, a little pee came out

Yeah. I don’t normally kill snakes like that, but I wanted to enjoy my time out there fishing and hanging out. I wouldn’t have been able to do that knowing there was a god damned basilisk hanging around.

They are a serious problem. Recent studies indicate they have laid waste to 90% of ‘Glades’ indigenous mammals. The hunts have not even scratched the surface of their exploding population numbers. No natural predators to slow them down, and they are expanding their territory north from the Everglades. Large gators and large pythons are a wash. Large pythons take out smaller gators. Large gators take smaller pythons down.

And all this is not to mention the Nile Monitor lizards naturalizing in S. FL and decimating the bird population. They eat bird eggs and gator eggs. Idiots let them go wild too.