Battle to eradicate invasive pythons in Florida achieves milestone
30 comments
·June 16, 2025pavelstoev
southernplaces7
I thank you friend for that good laugh.. Hats off to you and your wife. May her idea never see the light of VC funding though.
nkrisc
Why would they explode?
nine_k
Tannerire, when crushed, initiates a small explosion, which triggers the C4. When a python swallows a rabbit, it then crushes the rabbit's body with its powerful muscles, to help the digestion. This is when the explosion would happen.
This is my best understanding. I have no idea where inside a rabbit there would be room enough for the C4 and tannerite, and how to put it inside enough rabbits.
RobRivera
Oh oh oh, alternative title, Monty Pythons Exploding Circus!
sampton
It's crazy we are hunting tuna to extinction yet here is perfectly good python meat going to landfill. Florida needs to build a marketing campaign to make wild python a delicacy.
rocketpastsix
Pythons in SW Florida are found to have dangerously high levels of mercury[0] so it may not be as perfectly good as hoped for.
sfilmeyer
>dangerously high levels of mercury
All the better for a tuna substitute!
More seriously, from your article
>4.86 mg/kg in liver tissue from a snake that was 4.7 m long but overall averaged 0.12 ± 0.19 mg/kg in tail tip
Tuna looks like it's about 0.39 mg/kg, so the liver tissue is suuuuper high but the tail tip is just normal high mercury.
aspenmayer
As pythons are probably bioaccumulators of mercury due to their position in the food chain, would it be fair to say that the pythons are canaries? Perhaps that is another reason to shoot the messenger.
wnevets
Isn't that also true for tuna?
metaphor
Consider water spinach[1]---a.k.a. swamp weed in Florida, but also known as kangkung amongst Asian households---to which the USDA apparently classifies as a "noxious weed". It can be prepared for consumption in many ways, but I especially love it in a Filipino sour soup dish called sinigang[2].
If you want to buy this "noxious weed" in Florida (or anywhere in CONUS, for that matter), you'll need to skip Walmart and make a trip to your local Asian produce store, where it can be found profitably sold for pennies on the dollar. Why? At face value, the ethnic majority simply don't consume this green, and in any case, its natural supply far outstrips market demand, making it far less attractive for most sellers to justify retaining inventory.
Now consider pythons that have invaded the Florida Everglades. Suppose the market for this were to flip in a similar way that beef oxtail has: a cut of "trash" meat historically shunned by the ethnic majority (but favored by certain ethnic minorities and the poor for its low cost and exceptional flavor) which has seen a major market repricing upward driven by the popularity of certain ethnic dishes. Or how short ribs (kalbi) and skin-on pork belly (samgyupsal) have seen significant upward repricing and market availability as KBBQ restaurants grow in popularity throughout the country (fire suppression equipment and commercial fire code compliance being primary enablers around my locality).
In the case of beef/pork cuts, the market simply recognizes value and prices are set consistent with supply/demand...it's just optimizing margins on an existing large scale process.
But would such a scenario really work out when the source of meat is an invasive species that Florida is looking to wholesale exterminate? I mean if the market wins, the state has a problem; and if the state wins, it's difficult to imagine how the market naturally materializes. Gator tail in the South is the closest proxy equivalent I can think of, but for all intents and purposes, it's a novelty dish which has hardly gained market traction at scale.
I don't know...random food for discussion, so to speak.
aspenmayer
Maybe look at market for other foraged products like ginseng and truffles to see what might happen? Those are supposedly difficult to farm, but I don’t see why pythons would be.
nine_k
Before the advent of sushi, tuna was a low-value catch, mostly used for cat food and such. I don't see why python meat cannot be used similarly.
hinkley
Feed it to pigs and eat the pigs?
TZubiri
That doesn't get rid of the pigs and is exactly how mercury accumuation works, it would even exacerbate the process.
anadem
That headline sounds encouraging, but the actual info is anything but.
nickledave
I approve of this story as a Florida boy and as a Pythonista
genter
> What's startling is those 1,400 snakes didn't come from a statewide culling. They came from a 200-square-mile area in southwestern Florida
Or, 0.3% of Florida.
One more example of why this planet is fucked.
southernplaces7
Fucked? You do know that nature has been moving animals around in all sorts of invasive ways for much longer than we've been here to contribute. It's nothing new or globally catastrophic. The pythons are a contextual problem to some species, but otherwise, meh. The world and its ecosystems are quite a bit more robust than some people give them credit for, at least enough that lots of pythons in a new place don't lead to "the planet is fucked".
o11c
The problem is that nature abhors monocultures. And when the monoculture collapses, there's no guarantee that actually-useful species usefully survive.
conception
When people say “the planet is fucked” what they mean is “the stable systems we rely on for civilization on this planet are fucked”. The planet is a giant ball of nickle and iron with some dust and mites on it. It of course will be fine.
This story is dear to my heart. Let me tell you why - this is the tale of how my wife of 15 years, bless her heart, an occasional unstable genius, proposed a startlingly effective method for eradicating these invasive pythons.
She slammed her coffee cup down one morning with the conviction of an Old Testament prophet and declared: “Exploding rabbits.”
“Excuse me?” I said, wiping marmalade off my chin.
“Exploding. Rabbits. Stuff ‘em with quarter pound of C4, or maybe just enough tannerite to surprise the neighbors but not call down the FAA, and set them loose in the Everglades. Pythons love rabbits. Boom. Problem solved. You’re welcome, America.”
Now I’ve heard my share of madcap schemes. Once she tried to compost credit card offers. But this time she looked me square in the eye with the righteous glow of a woman who had just solved two ecological crises and accidentally founded a billion-dollar startup in the process.
“We’ll call it Hare Trigger™,” she added, deadpan. “It’s got product-market fit and explosive growth potential.”
She even sketched out a logo involving a jackrabbit with aviator goggles and a plunger.
I asked if this might attract some sort of federal attention.
“Good,” she said. “That’s called buzz. Besides, the pythons started it.”
And just like that, I found myself wondering how far true it is that behind every successful man stands an even more genius woman. Waiting for Elon to offer Series A.