If you’re one of the snake-phobic campers who gets the jitters who every time you step outside the van when you’re parked in a national park or the bush, spare a thought for your American counterparts.
Monster-sized Burmese pythons have become such an issue in Florida’s Everglades National Park that a team of specialist dogs are being trained to sniff them out.
The spread of the non-native species is generally attributed to irresponsible pet owners dumping their snakes, as well as 1992s Hurricane Andrew, which destroyed a nearby exotic snake warehouse. Now the snakes have adapted to the Everglades, and park officials say there’s no way of eradicating them.
Environmentalists fear the pythons are upsetting the ecological balance of South Florida. Dogs once trained to fight terrorism are now being taught to track the snakes.
The ‘EcoDogs’, project is the result of a three-year-old collaboration at Alabama’s Auburn University between the science departments and the school’s Canine Detection Research Institute.
“People can only see that the snake is there if they can see the snake,” said Christina Romagosa, a biologist at Auburn. “The dogs can smell the snake even if it’s not visually apparent to us.”
Todd Steury, an Auburn conservation biologist and co-founder of the project, said training a new dog to detect a scent takes six to 10 weeks. Training for each additional scent, he said, takes about 10 minutes.
Two black Labrador retrievers from EcoDogs, Ivy and Jake, went to Florida to show how they could help battle the python problem in the 2,358-square-mile park. The EcoDogs found pythons at the park 75% to 92% of the time.
Ivy and Jake helped researchers trap 19 of the snakes, including one that was pregnant with 19 eggs, according to an EcoDog report.
