On a warm and clear Wednesday morning in the Everglades, researchers Melissa Miller and Brandon Welty dug through grass and dirt in search of a ten-foot snake they had seen just a week before.
Members of the University of Florida's Croc Docs Wildlife Research Lab have come out to search, tag and bag, something they do about four times a week — though rarely are they accompanied by a sitting congresswoman. On this day Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D- Weston), whose district includes parts of the Everglades, has joined to learn about their work.
It's all in an effort to help reduce the rampant population of invasive Burmese pythons that have overtaken South Florida’s Everglades.
The invasive Burmese python are native to Southeastern Asia but now inhabit the Greater Everglades’ ecosystem. They are comfortable in a vast range of habitats and can eat a variety of mammals, birds and reptiles including many of Florida’s native creatures that make the Everglades unique. This is why researchers at UF Croc Docs are using telemetry trackers to not only track pythons, but understand their habits.
READ MORE: It takes a python to find a python: How researchers bagged the heaviest snake in Florida history
The trackers work using VHF, very high frequency signals. Researchers use a VHF receiver to listen to a ping from trackers they have already placed on a snake. The closer you get to the python, the louder the ping.
On this specific excursion, the UF IFAS Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center researchers were looking for a snake they had already tagged with a VHF tracker so they could add a GPS tracker as well. The GPS makes it easier to know where the snakes are in general, but the VHF works to gather what researchers described as “micro-habitat data.”
To catch a python
The airboats took off from the Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area at around 9 a.m. Around 10:30 a.m, Miller and Welty were able to get a strong signal from one of their 25 “scout” snakes. The scout snakes are the pythons the researchers tag and let back into the Everglades so they can find other snakes. Miller said that some male snakes can lead them to an important snake they’d want to remove.
“When we're tracking our male snakes, they can lead us to a really large reproductive female, which is great for getting out of the environment because it's a snake that could have up to, like, one hundred eggs,” Miller said.
Miller is the primary investigator and has been part of the project with the UF Croc Docs since 2022. Their work is funded by the South Florida Water Management District and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, but the funding lasts for about another two years. She hopes it will last longer.
Congresswoman Schultz joined the researchers on Wednesday morning to see exactly what goes into the research that would help further restoration efforts in the Everglades.
When Miller and Welty couldn’t get a visual on their first scout snake, they took the Congresswoman to another snake they had passed. Around 30 minutes later, Miller and Welty emerged from the tall grass with two snakes. One was a large female snake that they estimated weighed between 80 and 100 pounds. The other was a skinnier male snake that had been hanging around the female. Neither were the scout snakes they were tracking. They call the snakes they find around their scouts “associate” snakes.
Wasserman Schultz said she had been out in the Everglades several times since she started representing Florida in 2000. She has been out with the Miccosukee Tribe and has held baby gators, but she had never held a Burmese python.
"Except for, like, a petting zoo," she said. She very calmly took the head of the male python as Miller held its body for a photo.
After seeing the effort it took to find the snakes, Wasserman Schultz said it helped her get an idea of why funding for these kinds of programs are important.
“Besides the degradation of the Everglades, we're spending hundreds, we're spending billions of dollars on this restoration,” Wasserman Schultz said. “If an invasive species ends up upending all the work we did or much of the work we did to rebalance the flora and fauna, then that's a problem for us down the road.”
Suarez said much of the work that goes into research is not just in the field — it’s behind the scenes when they track their work and ask for funding.
“With the Croc Docs, that’s one of the issues we deal with on a daily basis is that we don’t really get recurring funding. Some of our grants are multi-year grants,” Suarez said. “There’s so much that goes on the back end of things.”
Miller told Wasserman Schultz she’ll soon start writing up applications for funding, to go towards lab space, housing for researchers and equipment — and the congresswoman said she'd try to help.
"The first thing I really thought was 'Wow, we need to commit some more resources to this," Wasserman Schultz said after seeing the researchers search for the pythons.
“We’re doing good stuff but if we could actually expand to the scale we need to do it, that would be amazing,” Miller said.
'For our native wildlife'
The researchers went back to their trucks and prepared the snakes to be taken to a lab. Although they didn't find the specific snake they had set out for, it was a successful outing. The two snakes they caught that day would most likely be used in other research projects like a UF vet school project that is looking at the amount of “forever-chemicals” like PFAS are in their system. After they are used to better understand the role they play in the environment, they would be euthanized.
Miller, Welty and Suarez said they got into this work because they love the environment and snakes as well.
“It’s hard in this case,” Miller said of having to euthanize the snakes. “The pythons aren’t supposed to be here... But you just have to think of the native wildlife and our native snakes and the greater good you’re doing for our native wildlife.”
