Here's a piece about the Everglades pythons from my new book, Fearsome Creatures of Florida, an illustrated collection of imaginary Florida creatures. You can check out the book at my website, Fearsomecreatures.com, which opens with a cool bit of animation of The Mangrove Man. The book also includes a piece about the Florida Skunk Ape, El Chupacabra, and many others.
The Glades Python
It made the national news: 13-foot Burmese
python tries to eat 6-foot alligator, explodes. Pictures at
eleven. A huge, belly-up python split like a roll-paper
tube when an undead gator kicked its way out.
Other than a change in the mosaic pattern—the
python’s belly like a dot-matrix print-out, the gator’s a
primitive set of rectangular tiles—the one looks like a
natural extension of the other.
It’s a coiled mystery, a reptilian time machine.
A glimpse—surprising to some—of the Darwinian
struggles alive and well in the Florida glades.
How could it happen here, today, just beyond
the condos and golf courses and practically in our own
back yards?
I’ll tell you.
It begins like this: A boy craves a pet and
dreams big. No garter snake for him. Nor a boa, since
half his fifth grade class already owns one. No, if he
really wants to earn his classmates’ respect, he must
have a snake that can grow to 20 feet, one that can suck
down pet Easter bunnies as quick as a trip to the flea
market.
A Burmese python fits the bill.
His parents indulge him. They answer a
classified and bring him a fork-tongued pal named
Phineas, who stares through the glass like someone just
stole his food.
For a time, the boy basks in the notoriety of his
storybook pet. New friends line up out the door to
watch the Saturday afternoon feedings, when a live rat
tunnels head-first to its death. But when the snake
reaches eight feet, the boy’s parents begin to wonder if
they shouldn’t have just bought him a shrunken head—
a thing just as frightening but with the advantage of
being dead. This snake is alive, and it’s growing.
How easily now it could strangle the boy’s
younger sister.
And soon, the boy himself. Already, the boy
has felt his ribs creak like old wood when Phineas
squeezes him playfully around the middle, and his
karate lessons offer no defense. The snake has
graduated from merely exotic, a label that implies a
strange thing tamed, a caged bit of otherness. Now the
aura of danger has become danger itself.
When the thing measures ten feet, Dad and two
friends load the cage into the bed of a pickup and drive
it into the Everglades, where it would seem to pose no
threat to anyone, or to anyone’s dogs and cats.
But in the wet, rich glades, the thing thrives. It
is no longer a dangerous pet and no longer an exotic
stranger. It is right at home.
It feasts on otters, rats, turtles, and endangered
wood storks. It finds others of its kind—former pets—
and it breeds. Slithering quickly up the food chain, it
soon comes face to face with the American Alligator.
Who will swallow whom?
When both reach a certain size, it’s a simple
matter of surprise and strategy. As the pictures showed,
even an apparent victory can end in mutual defeat. Yet
the python nearly succeeded.
And there are plenty more, adapting so well you
have to wonder if this is where they belonged all these
millions of years, a kind of ophidian Promised Land.
Bruce Lee said, “When two fighters of equal
strength, speed, and skill are matched, he who is master
of the feint will win.” Who can doubt that the python,
the adaptable newcomer, will be first to master the
feint.
And once the alligators have been suffocated
and swallowed whole, where will the 20-foot python go
to satisfy its insatiable hunger for big, slow-moving
sun-worshippers?
It will follow the line of pick-ups back from the
Everglades. It will sinuate through the ficus hedges
between neat rows of backyard pools.
And there, with the patience of a creature whose
evolutionary rewards come once every million years, it
will wait.
© 2009 John Henry Fleming