Massive invasive python is freed into the Palm Beach County wilderness. Here’s why.
Tanya Toutant, left, and Donna Kalil pose with a large female Burmese python that they both captured and released for a telemetry study conducted by the University of Florida. (Bill Kearney/South Florida Sun Sentinel)
By Bill Kearney | South Florida Sun Sentinel
UPDATED: December 27, 2024 at 4:01 PM EST
Donna Kalil, one of Florida’s most famed snake hunters, usually hates seeing invasive pythons get away, but on a postcard-pretty morning a few days before Christmas, she teamed up with researchers from the University of Florida to release one of the larger snakes she’d ever caught.
The snake was a muscular, 14-foot, 140-pound beast, and according to the biologists transporting her.
Kalil knows the snake, once free, will go on to kill native wildlife again. But it’s for a good cause — a python-tracking program that hopes to unlock some of the mysteries behind this incredibly successful but destructive apex predator.
Knowledge gained from the study, a collaboration between the University of Florida, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the U.S. Geological Survey, will help python hunters and land managers to combat this incredibly successful invasive predator as they ravage Florida’s ecosystems.
When UF researcher biologists Eric Suarez, Aaron Chimelis and Alex Grimsley lower the snake out of her crate, she’s hissing and most definitely still in a foul mood.
Kalil, 62, takes the head and the others help with the heavy body. They gently lay her upon the long grass, exactly where Kalil and python-hunting partner Tanya Toutant had caught her two weeks ago, while she was basking on the sunny side of a levee in the wilderness west of Boca Raton.
The highly destructive snakes, which hail from Southeast Asia and were brought here via the exotic pet trade of the 1970s and ’80s, are notoriously hard to spot, but Toutant said this one was easy. “You see a big tube with a sheen to it and think, ‘That’s not supposed to be there,’” she said.
Since 2022, the UF team has been implanting invasive pythons caught in protected grasslands of western Broward and Palm Beach counties with VHF devices and tracking their movements and habits.
The goal, Suarez says, is to better understand the snakes’ behavior, movement patterns and habitat use in the swampy grasslands that makes up much of the larger Everglades system.
 Tanya Toutant examines a 14-foot, 140-pound python before releasing it into an area west of Boca Raton. (Bill Kearney/South Florida Sun Sentinel)Suarez said UF is currently tracking 14 snakes, each fitted with two VHF tags, which last about 2 years.
They recapture snakes before batteries die.
Sometimes the snakes die — they suspect some were eaten.
When that happens, professional python hunters with the South Florida Water Management District, such as Kalil, who normally humanely euthanize captured snakes, instead provide them to UF researchers.
Kalil has been hunting professionally with SFWMD since 2017, when the program started. Before that, she volunteers to hunt snakes in Everglades National Park. The python she’s releasing today was the 1,034th invasive Burmese pythons she has caught in her career.
Suarez says this snake could go on to eat anything from alligators to raccoons, possums, otters and even deer. “A lot of these species didn’t evolve with a large predator like this,” says Suarez, who grew up just south of here, in Hialeah. “So they’re pretty naive to them being around.”
That naivety has proved deadly to Florida’s native wildlife. Road surveys in Everglades National Park show a decrease in mammal sightings of 98% in areas where pythons dominate. Water levels may have played a role in such studies, but surveys in other areas show similar mammal drop offs.
Finding breeding ballsIn addition to offering a treasure trove of data, the released snakes actually give researchers the chance to find and remove even more snakes.
If a snake holds up on a tree island or levee during breeding season, which is occurring right now, it could be taking part in a breeding aggregation, where several males gather around a large female.
Suarez and others will take an airboat to the location and catch as many males as they can.
“Last year, we came across three breeding aggressions. Out of the 12 snakes observed, we removed eight,” says Suarez. “That’s a pretty good removal rate, about 67%.”
Later in spring, if a tagged female builds a nest, researchers will collect an average of 33 eggs, though sometimes many more.
 Tanya Toutant, wearing an orange shirt, and Donna Kalil, in a pink shirt, help University of Florida researchers Aaron Chimelis, Alex Grimsley and Eric Suarez check for VHF radio tags before releasing a 14-foot, 140-pound invasive Burmese python into an area west of Boca Raton. (Bill Kearney/South Florida Sun Sentinel)Discoveries thus farThe trackers have led to some surprising findings about the snakes.
— One of the most startling was about how far they travel. Last year, a male snake traveled a 40-mile loop in six months, sojourning on a levee just west of Miramar, all the way to the border of Big Cypress Wildlife Management Area and back to the same general area west of Miramar. Suarez and his fellow biologists were amazed by the findings.
— Some breeding aggregations occur on floating mats of vegetation — no dry land needed.
— Some nests are built atop older ones. The UF team hopes to determine if females return to the same nesting sight each year by testing the DNA of the shells left behind in each layer to see if it’s from the same mother snake.
— More animals prey on python eggs than previously thought. Trackers researchers to flock of vultures raiding a python nest and devouring the eggs.
Researchers are also compiling data on growth rates and survivorship, all of which is lacking at this point, said Suarez.
In the future, the UF team hopes to use GPS trackers, which would give them closer to real-time data on location. VHF trackers only tell them where the snakes are when they search for them, which is four times per week, twice via levees, and twice via airboats.
They’re also excited to deploy their new drone, which could fly in a grid to detect the VHS signals and cover much larger areas faster — crucial when you consider the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area is more than 600,000 acres of habitat.
An angry pythonSuarez says that most snakes slither off when you let them go, but the big female that Kalil and Toutant are releasing today is not one of them. When Kalil releases her grip and jumps back, the snake immediately hisses and coils into a fighting stance. After a few minutes, it’s clear that she has no intention of moving.
She’s fairly exposed on the levee, though, and Kalil and Toutant are concerned that another hunter could come along and find her. They spend the next 20 minutes trying to coax her into the dense underbrush, but she’s still in a fighting mood.
Kalil gets closer, as if trying to shoo the python down the levee. The snake strikes and somehow the 62-year-old Kalil, who still moves like a teenager, dodges it.
Eventually they convince her to move into the underbrush.
 Donna Kalil, left, and Tanya Toutant pose in front of their specialized python hunting truck on a levee in the wilderness area west of Weston. (Bill Kearney/South Florida Sun Sentinel)
“I feel fantastic about doing this,” says Kalil. “That girl down there is going to eat some other animals, but hopefully, she’ll bring us other pythons, and all the data that they’re gonna receive — hopefully it’ll make it easier for us to find them, and we’ll be able to get some of her boyfriends out of the Glades, and keep them from eating stuff.”
Bill Kearney covers the environment, the outdoors and tropical weather. He can be reached at bkearney@sunsentinel.com. Follow him on Instagram @billkearney or on X @billkearney6.
Originally Published: December 26, 2024 at 9:21 AM EST |
