man will never own the everglades! there is currently great acts going on right now to improve the everglades and surround areas. there will be great changes to try and restore the everglades the best we can with what we know. i know of several projects that are aimed at native animal renurishment and improvements in water flow. all human impact is minimalized in the area and building will never take place. the FL government just bought half of a huge sugar farm which will be returned to its natural state.
i voted burm. all of you miss an important ecological point with this animal. who cares if they eat each other!! thats not the problem. the problem is you have two very large predators in a small area. both gators and burms will go after similar prey items. this will put a strain on an already bleek ecosystem thus leading to one of two things to happen. here is a graph for thathttp://www.scholarpedia.org/wiki/ima...nsteadt_pp.jpg)
its not rocket science!! if you increase predators, you decreas prey!
either the predators will have to move which will be somewhat harder for a specialist predator (the gator; it needs water to live in) compared to a generalist predator. the humidity through out florida could easily substain the burm. temps....well it really doesn't get that cold but i assume that some northern range would be established during winters.
the other possiblity is extinction. as you increase the number of new species, you decrease the niches that species can live. this can be due to loss of prey or loss of habitat. here is a simple curve to show just that (http://ipmworld.umn.edu/chapters/ecology/Slide7.GIF).
now all of this is fine and dandy in a bubble! what if we have a drought next year? this year is a wet year. we are having a great wet season and everything is looking up. but wet years are usually followed by droughts! (http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarmin...s/image001.jpg). dry years are hard on aquatic animals!
there are several factors that can play out for this. it is not cut and dry as many of you believe. its a very complicated system and we usually don't know exactly what happened until its too late.
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