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.
metaphor 38 minutes ago [-]
For decades, Guam has had an invasive brown tree snake problem that completely decimated its native bird population and then some. Your wife's proposed solution reminded me of something the military actually tried: parachute thousands of dead mice "pumped full of painkillers" across the island...no joke[1].
I suppose the key difference in liability here is: see a dead mouse on Guam, hope your pet doesn't eat it...see one of your wife's rabbits (live or dead) in Florida, immediately cordon off and notify local UXO disposal team.
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 5 hours ago [-]
Why would they explode?
nine_k 4 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
Oh oh oh, alternative title, Monty Pythons Exploding Circus!
sampton 6 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
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.
>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.
vintermann 10 minutes ago [-]
Eating predator livers is a bad idea in any case.
wnevets 5 hours ago [-]
Isn't that also true for tuna?
aspenmayer 3 hours ago [-]
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.
metaphor 5 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
metaphor 2 hours ago [-]
Not sure I follow. Are you suggesting farming pythons as a prospective solution?
Assuming this is the case (that would likely mitigate the mercury bioaccumulation hazard), it may be doable, but that would only make business development sense if an addressable market actually exists.
I say "may" because it's unclear what a notional python farmer would feed such a carnivore that's both cost-effective at scale and isn't a disease vector itself. Corn is the answer for chicken, pigs, and (unfortunately) cows. In Japan, farmed unagi are fed a highly nutritious semi-solid paste that's relatively expensive...but demand for unagi in Japan alone is absurdly high and priced accordingly, with cultural significance providing additional market support.
I imagine the incentive to create a market for python meat would be primarily driven as a way to combat its invasive status in Florida...to which consuming farmed python does nothing to address this underlying root environmental issue.
aspenmayer 1 hours ago [-]
I agree that farming wouldn’t address the environmental issue. I was mentioning farming because you mentioned supply chains. Snakes are picky about what they eat, but they eat mice, and there are already live mice supply chains, so that is probably the cheapest way to feed them: just outsource it. I think that snakes are already farmed in other Gulf states where alligators are farmed, so I don’t think there’s room for much innovation here. It was just food for thought for you and others.
I don’t think that marketing the snake as a delicacy would do anything but increase the demand for the snakes. When incentives have been advertised and paid for invasive species in the past, breeders immediately started cashing in, so there are limits to how much nudging you can do, and how you can do it, or you will have rewarded bad behavior and perhaps created negative externalities that did not exist before.
I was trying to explore the idea of farming them and what would happen if consuming them became popular, which is likely farming them unless prohibited, which would probably be cheaper than catching them. If the wild ones are higher in mercury, then farmed ones might be worth less even though they are healthier, due to potential subsidies to promote eradicating them and charges due to it being a wild caught novelty menu item. This could create perverse incentives leading people to adulterate farmed pythons to pass them off as wild ones. I think the entire idea is fraught and isn’t as simple as a comment thread might make it seem, not that I think you are minimizing the issue. I just don’t know if any individual comment can do the issue justice, so it’s hard to explore the issue in bite size pieces.
metaphor 1 hours ago [-]
Great points and in full agreement. Thanks for broadening my perspective!
nine_k 4 hours ago [-]
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.
seb1204 2 hours ago [-]
Salmon as well as I recall. It was a Norwegian advertising campaign that made is desirable.
vintermann 6 minutes ago [-]
I don't know its prestige as food, but its prestige as catch has been high for a long time. A hundred years before Norway had a salmon farming industry, it had a salmon fishing tourism industry, consisting of various British lords.
hinkley 6 hours ago [-]
Feed it to pigs and eat the pigs?
TZubiri 5 hours ago [-]
That doesn't get rid of the pigs and is exactly how mercury accumuation works, it would even exacerbate the process.
TylerE 5 hours ago [-]
There is very little meat on a snake.
chasd00 4 hours ago [-]
Also lots and lots of bones. I’ve had rattlesnake before, it’s not bad (taste like chicken) but man so many bones.
TylerE 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, exactly. A snake is mostly bones and digestive tract. Almost no fat (they’re ambush predators and only eat every few weeks typically).
metaphor 5 hours ago [-]
Not just any snake...these are Burmese pythons[1].
Yes, there’s still not much meat on them, and it’s not meats want to eat. Carnivore meat tends to be extremely gamey.
metaphor 4 hours ago [-]
The 9 footer in the video should weight around ~25 lbs, good for around 4-5 lbs of consumable meat...not a bad harvest considering level of effort to butcher relative to, say, deer.
Acknowledged on the potential excessive human consumption hazard and gaminess, but I'd like to think it's still possible for one man's trash to be another's prospective opportunity.
anadem 5 hours ago [-]
That headline sounds encouraging, but the actual info is anything but.
riffraff 1 hours ago [-]
Well, they do say it's taking longer for the tracked males to find mates, so that is encouraging. Although it also says the range has expanded so who knows.
I approve of this story as a Florida boy and as a Pythonista
genter 6 hours ago [-]
> 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 6 hours ago [-]
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".
conception 4 hours ago [-]
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.
o11c 4 hours ago [-]
The problem is that nature abhors monocultures. And when the monoculture collapses, there's no guarantee that actually-useful species usefully survive.
riffraff 1 hours ago [-]
But nature doesn't care about usefulness, that's a human concept. The planet will always be fine, it's humankind which is screwing itself.
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.
I suppose the key difference in liability here is: see a dead mouse on Guam, hope your pet doesn't eat it...see one of your wife's rabbits (live or dead) in Florida, immediately cordon off and notify local UXO disposal team.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/two-thousand-mice-dropp...
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.
[0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31256202/
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipomoea_aquatica
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinigang
Assuming this is the case (that would likely mitigate the mercury bioaccumulation hazard), it may be doable, but that would only make business development sense if an addressable market actually exists.
I say "may" because it's unclear what a notional python farmer would feed such a carnivore that's both cost-effective at scale and isn't a disease vector itself. Corn is the answer for chicken, pigs, and (unfortunately) cows. In Japan, farmed unagi are fed a highly nutritious semi-solid paste that's relatively expensive...but demand for unagi in Japan alone is absurdly high and priced accordingly, with cultural significance providing additional market support.
I imagine the incentive to create a market for python meat would be primarily driven as a way to combat its invasive status in Florida...to which consuming farmed python does nothing to address this underlying root environmental issue.
I don’t think that marketing the snake as a delicacy would do anything but increase the demand for the snakes. When incentives have been advertised and paid for invasive species in the past, breeders immediately started cashing in, so there are limits to how much nudging you can do, and how you can do it, or you will have rewarded bad behavior and perhaps created negative externalities that did not exist before.
I was trying to explore the idea of farming them and what would happen if consuming them became popular, which is likely farming them unless prohibited, which would probably be cheaper than catching them. If the wild ones are higher in mercury, then farmed ones might be worth less even though they are healthier, due to potential subsidies to promote eradicating them and charges due to it being a wild caught novelty menu item. This could create perverse incentives leading people to adulterate farmed pythons to pass them off as wild ones. I think the entire idea is fraught and isn’t as simple as a comment thread might make it seem, not that I think you are minimizing the issue. I just don’t know if any individual comment can do the issue justice, so it’s hard to explore the issue in bite size pieces.
[1] https://youtu.be/0wXeRStcG6A?t=173
Acknowledged on the potential excessive human consumption hazard and gaminess, but I'd like to think it's still possible for one man's trash to be another's prospective opportunity.
Or, 0.3% of Florida.
One more example of why this planet is fucked.