Dogs Track Burmese Phthons In Everglades

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Dogs help track down Everglade's giant pythons

photo in original

INVADER: Dog handler Jason Dewitt, researcher Christina Romagosa, doctoral student Melissa Miller and dog trainer Bart Rogers with sniffer dogs Ivy and Jake, with a large pregnant Burmese python. Picture: Ches Smith

Burmese pythons can grow to 20ft

February 2012: The scenario sounds like a low-budget movie from the 1970s: humongous snakes are on the loose, eating everything in sight. But this is real - a problem that an American university and its canines are helping to combat.

Auburn researchers used detection dogs in the Everglades National Park to find Burmese pythons during a recent study on ways to manage and eradicate these non-native, invasive snakes, which are eating native wildlife, mostly mammals and birds.

'The ultimate use for detection dogs is to suppress the expanding python population and to eliminate them in small areas, such as on an island. Our main concern is their impact on other wildlife,' said Christina Romagosa of Auburn's School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences.

'Interraction with humans is also a problem. The snakes, like alligators, can get in swimming pools, eat small dogs and cats, and could injure a human.'

Auburn worked last year with the Everglades Cooperative Invasive Species Management Area, or ECISMA, to test how well dogs could pinpoint the snakes' locations so wildlife agencies could remove the snakes.

The problem started years ago, and was probably a result of irresponsible python owners.

Tens of thousands of Burmese pythons now living in Florida

The first Burmese python was spotted in Florida in 1979 and the number is now estimated in the tens of thousands. In January this year, the US Fish and Wildlife Service made it illegal to import Burmese pythons or transport them across state lines.

'Irresponsible people released these snakes because they became too large and difficult to care for,' she said. 'Now they have reproduced many times over. Hurricane Andrew in 1992 probably didn't help when a warehouse containing pythons was destroyed.'

The Army Corps of Engineers contacted Auburn's EcoDogs program in 2010 about the possibility of using dogs to help find the pythons, which led to the pilot study.

EcoDogs is a collaborative project between the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences and the College of Veterinary Medicine's Animal Health and Performance Programme, where the dogs are trained and maintained.

Dogs are used as part of a rapid response team

Jake and Ivy, both black Labrador retrievers, helped the researchers capture 19 pythons, most between six and eight feet in length, including a pregnant one with 19 viable eggs. Burmese pythons in their native range in South East Asia have been known to reach up to 20 feet and weigh almost 200lb. The National Park Service has counted 1,825 Burmese pythons that have been caught in and around Everglades National Park since 2000.

'We found the use of detection dogs to be a valuable addition to the current tools used to manage and control pythons,' said Romagosa. 'Dog search teams can cover more distance and can have higher accuracy rates in particular scenarios than human searchers. We suggest that dogs be used as a complement to current search and trapping methods.'

The Auburn study found that dogs and their sense of smell were two-and-a-half times faster than people visually searching, but people did have the advantage in extreme humidity. Searches by detection dogs are ideal in the cooler months, Romagosa says, when dogs can work longer periods of time without overheating.

Can track pythons that were in an area hours earlier

'Dogs can also be used throughout the year as part of a rapid response team going to a python sighting, which can be helpful in an urban as well as natural environment,' she said.

The dogs are trained to 'alert', or sit down, when they got within five meters of a python.

'When the dogs alerted to a python's presence in the field, we would put them in the truck so they would not come in contact with it,' trainer Bart Rogers said. 'The dogs could even track pythons that had been present in the area hours earlier. They did not pay attention to 'gators and other snakes, which would also avoid the dogs.'

Interestingly, the Labrador retrievers, which love to get wet, had to be trained not to go into the water.

'They love the water but in the training we reward them for staying out of it,' added Rogers. 'We could train them to find pythons in water, but we are limited in that we couldn't easily capture pythons if they are under water.'

The snakes found by the dogs have been sent to Skip Snow, a National Park Service biologist at the Everglades National Park. Some snakes were euthanized, some were tagged with radio telemetry devices for further study and tracking, and some were donated to the Nature Conservancy for use in training personnel how to catch snakes.