WE'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE A WORLD GHETTO!- The reason for Earth Caretaking! All because of human stupidity & GREED!- How Pet Snakes Set off an Unlikely Chain of Events That Could Make You Sick

By LIVIA ALBECK-RIPKA
OCT. 7, 2017
Opossums, raccoons and deer all but disappeared from Everglades National Park in Florida after the Burmese python invaded. When they vanished, mosquitos turned to feeding on rats that can carry encephalitis. That could put humans at risk.

Sometime in the 1980s, it became cool to own a pet reptile in Florida. Cooler still was owning one from far away, like from Madagascar, Egypt or Burma. The more exotic, the better. Thousands of cold-blooded creatures moved through Miami’s international airport to their new glass-box homes.

The Burmese python — which can be draped around a neck — was especially popular. A baby python is just 10 inches in length. Much to the surprise of some of their owners, those babies could grow up to 20 times that size.

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Maybe it was those overwhelmed owners who let their snakes loose. Maybe it was Hurricane Andrew, which destroyed a reptile breeding facility in 1992 and might have sent its specimens into the wild. One way or another, by the early 2000s, Everglades National Park was teeming with giant non-native pythons, which strangled, and then gobbled whole, almost anything in sight.https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/07/climate/everglades-pythons-mosquitoes.html?emc=edit_mbae_20171009&nl=&nlid=81777642&te=1&_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/07/climate/everglades-pythons-mosquitoes.html?emc=edit_mbae_20171009&nl=&nlid=81777642&te=1&_r=0