Implanting trackers in small mammals helps researchers find, remove huge, hungry snakes

Researchers in North Carolina are working on a way to track and stop huge, invasive Burmese pythons.

While the snakes are not currently a problem in North Carolina, they have devastated the small mammal population in south Florida over years after most, scientists believe, were pets that escaped or were released into the wild.

Michael Cove, research curator at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, works throughout the southeast, and has seen those pythons grow to 18 feet or more.

"They've consumed many, most of the mammals in the Florida Everglades where they were released back in the '80s and 90s," he said.

Cove is trying to prevent a similar devastation elsewhere.

"There's actually not much stopping them from just slithering, marching all the way north," he said.

The biggest challenge is simply finding their hiding places and stopping their spread, so Cove uses trackers implanted in animals easier to find – rats and raccoons – that are a favorite python snack.

Cove says the strategy has already helped them to capture and remove pythons from the environment.

He showed WRAL News an example of a raccoon that led to the capture of a 7-foot Burmese python.

"This seems like it has promise as one of the many tools that we can use to find pythons," Cove said.