BPs in Florida?

[RebelYell83]

lethal removel will always be the most cost effective,until a non lethal removal animal is homes or places,it costs money to feed and care for it,on the other hand,machette only costs 10 bucks one time,and can handle many thousands of removals,however,,i believe the person posted meaning burmese,not ball,removing ball pythons wouldnt prove to any benefit

[Lucas339]

ive lived in florida all my life and have worked in the biology field for coming up on 4 years now. removal of ANY non native spieces in FL is a must! if they are balls, burms, niles, even the mascovy ducks, they should all be removed!

just because you cannot prove that they are having an impact now, they may have one later. it is not worth the risk.

[gmcclurelssu]

lethal removel will always be the most cost effective,until a non lethal removal animal is homes or places,it costs money to feed and care for it,on the other hand,machette only costs 10 bucks one time,and can handle many thousands of removals,however,,i believe the person posted meaning burmese,not ball,removing ball pythons wouldnt prove to any benefit

for animals that are easy to find and capture, yes, lethal control is quite simple. However, with sea lampreys in the great lakes it is simply too costly to spray enough chemicals to eliminate them, or to capture them to be killed in another way. Until an effective method is found for capturing a significant number or burms, it is hard to argue that any method is the best.

[gmcclurelssu]

ive lived in florida all my life and have worked in the biology field for coming up on 4 years now. removal of ANY non native spieces in FL is a must! if they are balls, burms, niles, even the mascovy ducks, they should all be removed!

just because you cannot prove that they are having an impact now, they may have one later. it is not worth the risk.

i share much the same feeling for the invasive species here in michigan. however, in our area many of these animals have worked their way so far into the ecosystem that some natives may be becoming reliant on them.

[Lucas339]

i share much the same feeling for the invasive species here in michigan. however, in our area many of these animals have worked their way so far into the ecosystem that some natives may be becoming reliant on them.

that is unnatural and should never be supported!

[gmcclurelssu]

who said i was supporting it? I don't like the fact that Round gobys are starting to become regular prey for small mouth bass, or that the salmonids in the big lakes are critically linked to the alewife. However, just because i don't like it doesn't mean that reckless eradication of every single one of these species is a viable option. If it wasn't for the introduction of pacific salmon into the lakes, one could argue that the current rebound in native lake trout could have never happened.

These issues are not black and white, and the management community would be fools to treat them as such. Nothing in these ecosystems is completely natural, and as such diverse action is required if we want to maintain these systems. and yes, sometimes that requires complete destruction of an invasive species, but often it does not. I believe decision making should be made on a case-by-case basis, and if you believe that all of the cases you cited in florida deserve culling of the populations, then so be it. I don't have the first hand knowledge to dispute you. But, in my experience only select cases require these types of actions.

[Lucas339]

non-native life should not be supported as part of a current ecosystem. that ecosystem was there before the introduced spieces was there. removing the invasve/non-native will have an impact at the begining but the ecosystem will bounce back.

again, things start small and then tend to blow up and cause huge problems. take the green mussel as an example. it was found in tampa bay to start. not too big of a deal right? you can now find them everywhere in the bay and they have now started to move south and many fear they will soon be on the east coast of FL. they casue millions of dollars of damage to the extent that electric companies have included the cost of removing them from their intake pipes in peoples bills.

now we have lion fish. there has been few reports to show that they have a negative impact. their numbers are climbing rapidly and they have no predators. should we leave them? absolutely not! i don't care how pretty they are, they should be killed on sight if they are in atlantic waters. it is only a matter of time until they replace some other native speices due to out competing them for food.

the list of non-native species here in FL continues to rise. and i get real tired of the arguments for leaving them here. they are not part of the previous ecosystem and should be removed regaurdless if they help support native life and reguardless if they are pretty.

[gmcclurelssu]

Thats all fair, and in a perfect world that would make sense. My point in the great lakes is that with species like the alewife, elimination could lead to a total collapse in parts of the foodchain. Sure, given enough time its possible that the lakes could recover to resemble what they were before we messed things up, but at what cost in the meantime? In michigan, if the food chain brakes down and and the salmon fishery goes away, so goes all of the funding for other DNR projects. Also, even if we had the will to carry out eradication on that level, what is the initial financial cost to do so? We don't even have the resources to effectively combat sea lamprey, how can we possibly fix all of the other problems? I'm not saying we shouldn't always be searching for ways to help the ecosystem, but we must do so in ways that we can realistically help and not just wast money.

[Lucas339]

you said you are an undergrad. have you taken ecology yet? not trying to be rude just asking.

you are missing a huge ecology problem with you example. if the bass truely are eating the goby (non-native) then the native speice that they normally eat has a reduction in predator pressure. this is going to casue an increas in this animal. this increase in this animal will, in turn, decrease the number of prey. and if the native fish and the non-native goby share the same prey item, this reduce the prey's numbers even faster, eventually colasping that part of the ecosystem. now they may start eating something else or they may die out which would then casue the bass to either search for a new prey item or die out. if a new or another prey item is selected, then the new prey items number will decrease rapidly due to the loss of the two other prey items. eventually, this ecosystem will crash especially if it is closed or partly closed.

this goby example shows that a top-down ecosystem and quickly turn to a bottom-up and crash. it may not happen today, towmorrow, or 5 years from now, but it can happen and will likely happen if nothing is done. i know you feel strong about his subject but there are many more things going on in an ecosystem other than just 2 or 3 fish. they are all connected and if the balance is shifed, bad things can happen. there is no such thing as a perfect world and no such thing as an ecosystem with only a 2 step chain. you have much, much to learn.

[Qetu]

ive heard alot about burms but not balls. i doubt she meant ball python. but id like to go to florida and kick some of their butts. i dont hear them complaining about freaking alligators!