I lived in Orlando for eight years. I find Florida an ecologically fascinating place. It's the only corner of the continental US that has an honest-to-God jungle climate, which makes it an unusual island in North America that is amenable to non-native species from many parts of South America, Africa, and Asia.

On top of that, Florida has a weird cultural history around exoticism. Florida used to be be a little slice of overseas tropical paradise that car-bound American vacationers could still get to. The kind of people who settled in Florida often came for that, or played it up. You had people owning all sorts of unusual exotic pets and fish. And, then, inevitably, they get discarded when the owners realize that, oops, that cute little baby python is now big enough to eat the family dog.

Drive around in south Florida, and you may run into swamp eels, snakehead, walking catfish, pacu, grass carp bigger than toddlers, hordes of lionfish blanketing reefs, Cuban treefrogs, cane toads, caiman, basilisks, chameleons, iguanas, geckos, nile monitors (up to five feet long), boas (ten feet), Burmese pythons (the largest was 17 feet!), ibises, parrots, macaws, cockatoos, parakeets, toucans, macaques, monkeys, and capybaras.

So now, strangely, Florida has actually become the exotic enclave the locals tried to emulate with their non-native pets. It increasingly feels like another world.