Think you can rest easy in your temperate perch while tropical places like Florida deal with a burmese python invasion of Everglades proportions? Think again. A press release from the USGS details a new report on the potential range of those invasive snakes (Python molurus bivittatus), and it includes the entire southern third of the USA. When researchers ran the model again, taking potential global warming changes into effect, the projected python range got even bigger, stretching up as far as New Jersey and southern New York on the east coast. While these predictions are only taking climate-based models into consideration, a full risk assessment for the burmese python and several other non-native snakes is expected by 2009.
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Wow. In addition to mountain lions, alligators, the native venomous snakes and insects, some nasty poisonous plants, Texas has feral hogs, feral dogs, free-living emus, Africanized honeybees, West Nile- and encephalitis-carrying mosquitoes, dengue fever, and now potential pythons. Field botany conditions just get more and more interesting.
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