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Palms West Monthly • July 2019 • Page 1
Palms West
Monthly
WELLINGTON • ROYAL PALM BEACH • WEST PALM BEACH • LOXAHATCHEE GROVES • THE ACREAGE Volume 9, Number 7
Who wants to take me home? Zeus is a playful 4-year-old who’s waiting for a family to open up their home and hearts. PAGE 14
PalmsWestMonthly.com
FREE • July 2019
KDW Classic draws 233 boats, more than 1,000 anglers The 17th annual Palm Beach County KDW Classic was held in early June out of Riviera Beach Marina, and there were plenty of fish tales to tell.
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Shakespeare Festival to perform ‘Romeo and Juliet’
One of William Shakespeare’s best-known, most-produced and most-often quoted tragedies takes the stage when the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival presents Shakespeare by the Sea in July.
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From left, biological science technician Austin Fitzgerald with the U.S. Geological Survey, biologist Matthew McCollister with the National Park Service and biologist Jillian Josimovich with the U.S. Geological Survey wrangle a Burmese python
SNAKES IN THE GRASS
As pythons eat their way across the state, there is strong evidence Florida’s bird, native snake and iconic alligator populations are also suffering – but there is hope. By ED KILLER The Associated Press
Discover downtown West Palm Beach’s very own ale trail Walk five miles, savor five beers while getting to know some of the most popular local breweries downtown.
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New texting while driving law goes into effect July 1
Beginning July 1, texting while driving is a primary offense in Florida, which means law enforcement can stop drivers solely for texting behind the wheel of a moving vehicle.
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Photo by Leah Voss/ AP
named Charlie 5 at Big Cypress National Preserve. A group of state, federal and private partners have teamed up for several years to conduct research on the invasive species and have ultimately removed hundreds of pythons between them.
FORT PIERCE — Charlie 5 had no plans to move that hot June morning. The 9-footlong Burmese python was comfortably nestled in a muddy hollow, well-hidden in a thicket of sawgrass and alligator flag in Big Cypress National Preserve. His tracking device gave him away. He didn’t like it, but he had visitors. “There he is,” said Austin Fitzgerald, a biological science technician with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), bending down within 18 inches of the steamy muck. “I can just barely see his head.” Using two snake hooks, Fitzgerald and Jillian Josimovich, a biologist with the USGS invasive species science branch, persuaded the reluctant snake to come out of hiding. It’s hard to read a snake’s body language, but Charlie 5 – writhing to free himself – clearly wished he had never met Fitzgerald and Josimovich.
INVASIVE SPECIES
The uninvited denizens of South Florida’s wildlands, woodlands, marshlands and swamplands have left an indelible – and possibly irreversible – mark on the ecosystem. First identified in Everglades National Park in 2000, the Southeast Asian apex predator quickly put a stranglehold on Florida’s wildlife. To a python, Florida’s rich biodiversity of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians is a veritable smorgasbord of delicacies. According to the USGS, a 2012 study in Everglades National Park revealed pythons
have contributed to these population declines: 99.3 percent fewer raccoons; 98.9 percent fewer opossums; 87.5 percent fewer bobcats. Foxes and marsh and cottontail rabbits have “effectively disappeared,” the study says. As pythons eat their way across the Sunshine State’s landscape, there is strong evidence that Florida’s bird, native snake and iconic alligator populations are also suffering. What predators the python doesn’t eat are losing the competition for food, including bobcats and panthers. The hunters are simply too large and too efficient. They are at home in warm, wet, watery climates and can swim, burrow and climb trees. About the only thing they can’t do is fly. Researchers even believe pythons have swum across the open saltwater of Florida Bay from the Everglades to islands in the Florida Keys.
RADIO TELEMETRY
A fundamental problem in keeping up with the python’s assault on Florida is the snake’s ability to remain out of sight, said Matthew McCollister, a resource manager with the National Park Service based at Big Cypress National Preserve in Ochopee. “The tools that exist today are not sufficient” to locate pythons, he said. “We have got to invest in developing and improving tools.” The key is finding and removing breeding females, he said. A clever approach underway in Southwest Florida since 2013 has been helping scientists keep tabs on snakes. The
Conservancy of Southwest Florida has been working with various groups – the USGS, National Park Service, James Madison University, zoos in Naples and Miami and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission – to develop and assess new ways to curb pythons’ proliferation. When males are discovered crossing a road or slithering along a canal dike, they are caught and taken to a Zoo Miami lab where veterinarian Frank Ridgely, donating his time and facilities, surgically inserts a radio transmitter. The pythons are released back into the wild to act as spies, hence their nickname “Judas snakes.” During the Decemberthrough-April breeding season, the males lead researchers to the females. “The radio transmitter allows you to follow it wherever it goes,” Josimovich said. “It emits a pulsating beep. We can go to our animal and potentially remove several other individuals” found in breeding populations called “breeding balls.”
BREEDING BALLS
Breeding balls sometimes have five or six males in close proximity preparing to mate with a single female. Charlie 5, for example, led the team to two breeding balls and two female removals in 2019. McCollister hopes he does even better next season. In the last two seasons, the Judas snake method has enabled Big Cypress staff to remove 17 pythons – out of an estimated tens of thousands living there. One was the largest ever captured there: a 17-foot 6-inch female weighing 141 pounds and bearing 73 developing eggs. McCollister confirmed that Kilo 5 was the male snake which located her. In the last six years, the Conservancy and its partners have cleared more than 500 pythons from a 55-square-mile area in PYTHONS / PAGE 8