14-foot python was caught with 3 deer in its stomach... It's symptomatic of the tragic devastation of the Everglades

Normally, what a snake eats for breakfast isn’t worth a headline. But this is no normal snake. And this was no normal meal.
The Burmese python is a massive snake native to Southeast Asia that arrived in South Florida in the 1980s and sold as pets, possibly released into the wild by careless pet owners. There are now as many as 300,000 of these invasive creatures slithering through the state, and they’ve been known to eat alligators, bobcats, rabbits, and birds.
Now scientists have discovered that Burmese pythons — which can reach 18 feet in length and swallow a bobcat whole — are even more ravenous than they realized. In a new paper in Bioinvasions Records, a team of researchers describe slitting open the intestine of a dead 14-foot python and finding the remains of three different white-tailed deer. The snake appears to have gobbled them up, an adult and two fawns, in just 90 days.
The implications are disturbing says Scott Boback, a biologist at Dickinson College and lead author of the study. The incident comes alongside growing evidence that the Burmese pythons are ravaging all native wildlife in South Florida’s Everglades... from the smallest and now to the largest.  “When you consider the evidence, you’ve got to say, okay, something serious is going on here.”

There’s growing evidence that Burmese pythons are devastating the Everglades

Something disturbing definitely is happening in Everglades National Park, South Florida’s most famous natural wonder. In a 2012 study, scientists showed that sightings of raccoons, opossums, bobcats, rabbits, foxes, and other mammals in the region have declined more than 80 percent since the mid-1990s.
These observed declines were strongly correlated with the Burmese python’s known habitat, and the researchers couldn’t find any other plausible explanations for the mammals’ disappearance. Hunting, for instance, has long been banned in the Everglades park.
Of course, correlation isn’t causation. But in 2015, a team led by Bob McCleery of the University of Florida conducted a follow-up experiment. The researchers took 100 marsh rabbits (which have seen a precipitous decline), tagged them with radio collars, and released some of the rabbits into two sites where pythons were known to exist and the rest into a region where there were no snakes. Lo and behold, the rabbit populations crashed in the python regions — with three-quarters of them eaten by the snakes.
“All these studies are putting together a story that we just can’t ignore anymore,” says Boback.

Red triangles indicate locations of pythons found between 2008 and 2009. The purple region represents the area of Everglades National Park where pythons were found in the 1990s and where reproduction was first reported.

This latest discovery adds to that picture. There have been isolated reports of pythons consuming deer before. And that 2012 study suggested that white-tailed deer populations have fallen 94 percent in Everglades National Park since pythons became established. Now, for the first time, a python has been found eating multiple deer in a short time period.

How had the python managed to catch and eat three deer? “This has been keeping me up at night,” he said. “It’s possible that the deer were all snoozing. But it also could have been an ambush.”
It’s thought that pythons use their olfactory senses to figure out where mammals tend to travel, and then lie in wait for one to pass. “It drives me crazy to think how a single snake was able to hide,” says Boback, “so that not just one deer but three deer walked within a meter of it — and then how it was able to strike from a low position ... or grab a leg. ... It’s fascinating to figure out.”
However it happened, the notion that pythons may be gobbling up lots and lots of white-tailed deer is troubling. For one, deer are a major revenue source in South Florida, thanks to the sale of hunting licenses. There are also ecological implications — the elimination of deer could rearrange the region’s ecosystem in unpredictable ways.
But what’s even more worrisome, says Boback, is that it suggests there’s little limit to what pythons can devour. “They’re eating pretty much every vertebrate in the Everglades,” he says. “They’re basically taking all that diverse biomass and replacing it with python biomass. And we’ve seen this kind of story before.”
 He may have been referring to the introduction of rabbits to Australia where they had no natural predators and the result was an absolute plague of rabbits in the millions, eating all of the natural fauna and causing the decline of other native species.
It only takes a small change to start a chain reaction which negatively affects a delicately balanced ecology.  The Everglades are being devastated by this change.
Consider this on a global scale. The changing climate upsets the balanced ecologies of plant and animal species all over the world. Those species are disappearing at an astronomical rate. We have to do more. How do we make people listen? Will they listen to Trump or to the scientific evidence before their own eyes?