Paging St. Patrick . . .

Timothy McNulty | November 6, 2009

Florida congressman Tom Rooney, nephew of Dan, really doesn't like pythons. His office gave the photo above to Politico, which writes this:

Today, Rooney is telling everyone who will listen (mainly those attending the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security hearing) about how these pythons are destructive killers and need to be stopped from entering our country.

"There are estimates of over 100,000 Burmese Pythons currently living in the Everglades. These vicious predators can grow six to eight feet in a single year, and prey on the wading birds, and other wildlife we are working so diligently to save. They thrive on our sub-tropic climate and abundant food resources," he said in a statement today.

The problem is a very real and very big -- here's part of the abstract from a New Yorker story on it earlier this year:

More recently, a thriving exotic-wildlife trade sent a ragged parade of escapees into the wild: parakeets, peafowl, swamp eels, and squirrel monkeys. Florida now has more exotic lizard species than there are natives in the entire Southeast. Writer interviews Skip Snow, a wildlife biologist at Everglades National Park, and its chief hunter of Burmese pythons. Snow isn't sure how the Pythons got to the Everglades. He, for one, doesn't buy the "frisbee" theory that Hurricane Andrew carried them there. Burmese pythons began to appear in the park in 1995. One January morning in 2003, a group of tourists came across a full-grown alligator and an adult python fighting. Within months, Snow was finding pythons of all sizes. He and his colleagues have found more than nine hundred so far. The Everglades, at capacity, could hold as many as a hundred and forty thousand.