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Comment by mminer237 | Hacker News Reader

This might be a bit gruesome, but why not shoot the snakes the on site? That seems way easier and faster than physically wrestling dangerous snakes sometimes bigger than yourself, throwing them in your truck, and shooting them in your garage. Is it just the solemnity? The chance of missing and it escaping and the difficulty of wrestling with a gun?

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I think a gene drive will be cheaper than all of this manual labor.

Release a male python that can only sire male pythons, and population collapse is inevitable.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6083257/

I don't think that can work. Reptiles don't have X and Y chromosomes.

Neither do Aedes aegypti mosquitos which was probably the first application of the gene drive. It works in species with homomorphic sex chromosomes just fine.

Reptiles commonly have their sex determined by the ambient temperature around their egg. Nobody cares whether a sex chromosome is named "X" or "Z".

Pythons might.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...

It's far less effective because you have to hit an extremely small target to actually kill a python. Far easier and more reliable to just get up close and personal with it and either bludgeon, impale, or decapitate it after you get it pinned down.

They get paid per verified kill:

https://www.sfwmd.gov/our-work/python-program

No idea how it actually works but shooting them where they are has to be tough to verify.

It has to be easier to get a dead python into your truck than a live one, right?

Yeah, that makes total sense, but we are talking about Florida.

You assume you are able to kill a python in one shot. If you don’t get the “kill” shot, your prey runs off into the woods and now you spend time tracking its blood and steps.

Then you ignore the noise factor which can scare off other pythons in the area.

I have never tried to shoot a snake but I imagine their high aspect ratio makes getting a critical hit on them challenging, compared to just "yoinking" them.

Garret Galvin @fishingarrett has made a name for himself yoinking all sorts of critters in the wild but in particular seems to be targeting invasive pythons in the Everglades. He's very entertaining if you like nature stuff, he's like Steve Irwin's spiritual successor.

“Hey look, it’s a tokay gecko. Yoink! Can you tell me where to find that twenty footer?”

Once you bag a snake, they're pretty easy to move around. Getting them into a sack isn't as hard as you might imagine either. Obviously, it's going to be more difficult for a larger snake, but it's way easier than getting, say, a cat into a cat carrier.

I know nothing about snake hunting other than the 3 youtube videos I just watched (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5JB_bzQwtZ8), but this professional sure makes getting them into the sack is about as hard and dangerous as I would imagine. Seems like you're one slip up from getting a chunk of your body removed (like that dude in the youtube video's arm).

Wrestling snakes is good for likes/subscribes. A .22 handgun is probably what is used when not filming.

Most of the pythons they are bagging are much smaller than that, and YouTubers have an incentive to make bagging a snake look more thrilling than it usually is.

I don't know, I just get the cat to climb into the carrier on it's own.

You have to make the carrier a mundane part of the cat's life. Leave it out randomly so the cat isn't associating it with unpleasantness, put snacks in it. Then it won't be an object that brings fear and anger.

How big is the head? Machete FTW.

You can't shoot them. You must kill them by the guidelines from FWC. You're not allowed to run around with guns and shoot at the animals.

Particularly with snakes… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

Wikipedia says the snakes lay between 12-36 eggs, are capable of asexual reproduction when without a mate, and can reach over 2m in length within a year. Seems like a bunch of characteristics which would make farming them a straightforward affair. Less certain about the diet of feeding a clutch of snakes, but really seems like a business opportunity for the entrepreneur.

I though the same but what's the pay for killing them and what's the cost of feeding them so they get that big?

I wonder why this has not been abused like with the cobra effect.

It's not hard to transport an esky of snake heads.

I imagine you'd end up with lots of leaded bullets in the water, over time. Naturally lead + water = bad.

Note: I know about this because there's a gun range near where I live by the lake, and the lake is now permanently off limits for swimming due to lead pollution.

California law prevents hunting with lead bullets for this same reason. There's alternatives on the market for bullets made out of other non toxic or non polluting metals. I imagine they could do something similar there.

I grew up in a shooting and hunting family. Whenever we were driving around town my dad would point out a wheel weight on the ground at a stop light/sign and my brother and I would jump out of the Land Cruiser and collect it. This was the 80s of course so we were drinking out of hose bibs, riding our bikes on high-traffic streets without helmets, and playing live Frogger to collect wheel weights. It was a game to my brother and I because wheel weights came in various shapes and sizes so it was fun to see if we could land a whopper. We would also stop by Tire stores and scour the parking lot for them. At some point we would melt the lead down into bars using a crucible. These would be later cast into bullets. My brother and I were also (in hindsight) child slave laborers that were tasked with reloading cartridges and shotgun shells for target shooting and trap/skeet. In our house this was considered a chore. This was our childhood. None of us ever used gloves or masks during any step in this process.

In a recent conversation over breakfast I brought up lead poisoning and my dad was adamant (in his conspiratorial way) about how all of that lead exposure via handling lead and inhaling lead fumes didn't result in any significant health problems for us. I'm assuming he meant that we all weren't dead yet. He's 80 and a wreck. He's had all sorts of health issues include recent cancer remission. I'm 55 and I've had nerve issues since my teenage years which manifests itself as a noticeable tremor in my right hand that has got worse over time. I developed adult onset asthma in my late teens. I have a host of other health conditions as well. Who knows how much of that is tied back to lead exposure.

It's nationally illegal (yes i'm being american centric) to hunt waterfowl with lead and has been since the 90s at least. You use Steel or Bizmuth usually. But that's with shot with is 80+ bb's per shell vs one. If folks are firing a 22 at these it's not going to be a ton of lead in one spot. Also this is florida, people are definitely using the swamp as a backstop for their gun ranges.

You want the snake under control in a well-lit environment and you don't want to miss and cause the snake pain or worse--use an instrument that can injure a bystander.

Physically wrestling pythons is not really dangerous if you know what you're doing.

My guess is the noise factor even if you consider a suppressor. Sure, you kill 1 python snake. But scare off a half dozen in the near area.

Who knows, maybe the gun fire attracts other predators in the glades (alligators?).

Incorrect. Snakes have very minimal hearing. A bit in the lower frequencies, but we’re mostly talking about vibrations picked up from the ground… they don’t have external ear canals.

shooting things in the everglades is tough. it's swamp land. i think there's a decent amount of lead in bullets

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