Battle to eradicate invasive pythons in Florida achieves milestone
phys.org
phys.org
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.
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.
Obviously.
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...
Now explosive bunnies... Dunno, but I did enjoy playing the card game with kittens.
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.
So nothing like.
Shame about the miner incident.
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.
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.
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.
Really... striking? bizzare? ...turn of phrase. It makes sense I guess, just really caught my attention.
Or, 0.3% of Florida.
One more example of why this planet is fucked.
The supposed equilibrium and "balance" of nature that many environmentalists harp about are fabricated human myth with little bearing on reality.
Also, curiously, we could theoretically owe our entire modern existence as living things, to a particularly giant example of nature randomly facilitating the invasive expansion of one type of life at the cost of many others.
That's right, i'm talking about the Great Oxidation Event
Ain't no civilization done this.