anthony_damiani's Favorites

Looks different than the green treefrogs I see around here. More pudgy/compact and lacking the super obvious white stripe around the sides (though seems to have a faint yellow one maybe?). Squirrel frog perhaps?

Spotted coachwhip with young gopher tortoise in its mouth. Took one more step and coachwhip took off, dropping gopher tortoise. Cleaned up tortoise and let it go at a little distance after consulting with professional rehabber.

This is the fourth in a series of Burmese python predation events taking place in this tunnel, this one at 12/01/22 at 04:21, the second of this day, she had eaten a KLCM earlier this day. There is a gif in this observation, so it is best viewed on a desktop since they don't load on the app. This is part of a series of observations of the same snake consuming or attempting to consume Key Largo cotton in the Florida Keys. There is also a gif summarizing most of the sequence at the end.

First fully documented instance of a Burmese python striking at, subduing, and consuming an animal in its invasive range. All on camera! This python struck 5 times at Key Largo cotton mice within an old network of pipes, two of strikes were successful. During one evening, the snake successfully consumed one mouse, and attempted to eat a second shortly after. These cotton mice are less than 1% of this python's biomass. Which shows that even large snakes are eating very small prey items when present.

The Key Largo cotton mouse is a federally endangered subspecies of cotton mouse found only in Key Largo, so this series of events is particularly concerning for the future of these animals. Key Largo woodrats, another federally protected rodent, were also found in this tunnel. They have a much lower fecundity than KLCM and are a frequent item found in the gut content of pythons pulled from Key Largo.

All of this information and more can be found in "Telescoping prey selection in invasive Burmese pythons spells trouble for endangered rodents" -https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1hZm58MrlBCxKm

This is also my first publication so I'm quite proud of it.

The story as I remember it on this one. Someone sent me a text saying they found this snake and had it in a bucket but wanted me to ID it. They "tossed a lizard in with it". I got there later and looked in the bucket under something they had and it was eating the ground skink. Kind of freaked me out when I saw it for two reasons, they had a protected species in a bucket which is a no no and the fact that it was eating a skink. Any website you go to at this point only listed crowned snakes as their food source. Since this pic you see more than just snakes listed. I caught a lot of hell for this pic I took and encouraged the home owner to release it back where he found it after it finished eating

Sunning on road 10 feet from and parallel to a Rough Green snake of near-equal size (about 15 inches), as seen in the same photo. Was unable to easily separate the Ribbon from the Green for a solo photo, hence the "two-fer." Saw an approximately 3.5-foot Eastern Racer about 5 minutes later but it was faster than my camera hand 😉. Note: Corrected from Eastern to Peninsula. Thanks to the iNat'ers who pointed this out 🙏

To this date, the second largest Burmese python caught in the Florida Keys. The animal was located in a novel way, it had eaten a Virginia opossum outfitted with a satellite telemetry collar. After a set period of inactivity, the collar would send off signal indicating that the animal was dead. Well this happened, and then the collar would move a few hundred feet, then go back on mortality signal, then move again and so on. After a week of this, we decided to go see what was up with the animal, so we tracked it to the hardwood-mangrove edge underground, odd for a opossum. We set up a grid of camera traps and baited them with cat food and no opossum showed up. A few days later, we tried digging at the point where the signal was strongest, thinking that maybe the collar slipped and after an hour we saw scales! We were able to extract the python that day after quite a fight pulling her from her burrow.
(1) Myself and other CLNWR employees holding the python
(2) First image of the python in the underground cavity
(3) Python being measured
(4) Python's enormous head
(5) Location of the collar (RIP Prairie Dog) in the python's GIT
(6) X-Ray of the collar within the python
Point submitted to EDDMapS and under review.
TL: 383.54cm
SVL: not taken
Mass: 28122.7kg
Sex: Female