Tag: environment

As the community of Parkland continues to urbanize, it can be easy to forget how close the wild, thriving world of nature is — until those plants or animals end up dominating your backyard.

Because of our close proximity to the Everglades, Parkland’s wildlife system is interconnected with the “river of grass” and all of its ecological complexity. In recent years, residents and scientists have noticed and studied the lingering effects that non-native plants and animals have on the delicate balance of the food chain here in South Florida.

When a non-native plant or animal is introduced to an ecosystem, it often does not have any natural predators in the area. This may lead the species to become invasive, meaning it will cause ecological harm due to its rapid ability to reproduce. The Burmese python is one of the most notorious interlopers to our area, although not by its own choosing.

History.com reports that pythons, native to Southeast Asia, were first brought to the United States as exotic pets. “When the exotic pet trade boomed in the 1980s, Miami became host to thousands of such snakes,” the website reports.

“Because pythons can grow to such unmanageable sizes, it was inevitable that some irresponsible owners would release the snakes into the wild. But most experts believe the pythons established a reproducing population in the Everglades sometime after Hurricane Andrew—a category 5 storm that devastated the state in August 1992.

“It was during that storm that a python breeding facility was destroyed, releasing countless snakes into the nearby swamps.” History.com asserts.

The consequences of these human mistakes are alarmingly clear. As pythons continue to exist near the top of the food chain, the populations of small, warm- blooded animals have become noticeably absent. This disruption to the balance of animal populations is worrying because it can have disastrous effects on even more species if the pythons are left to wreak havoc.

What’s more, researchers recently discovered that Burmese pythons are responsible for spreading a parasite known as “tongue worm” to other native Floridian species of snakes.

The Palm Beach Post reports that “While pythons have developed defense mechanisms to keep the parasite in check, Florida snakes are naïve to the intruders’ methods with a biology unequipped to defend against them.”

As time has revealed that invasive species are capable of causing chaos which trickles down into many different aspects of the ecosystem, the call to eradicate and monitor the introduction of non- native species grows stronger across the media. However, what most residents aren’t aware of is the fact that non-native animals have also been used in a number of beneficial ways here in South Florida.

One non-native species that was introduced, ironically, to biologically combat another dangerous invasive species is the thrip bug. Thrip bugs, which are native to Brazil, can be used as a biological control to feed on the Brazilian pepper tree, which has invaded over 700 thousand acres of Florida and crowds out native hammocks, pinelands, and mangrove forests.

According to CBS Miami, officials specifically chose thrip bugs for this task because they were proven to not be of harm to Florida’s natural ecosystem, and are successful at weakening the invasive tree species.