Wild critters in Florida have many subtle ways of fighting the predations of man. And now that Florida has declared open season on invasive pythons, it's a good bet that the snakes are going to have the last word, even if it's spoken with forked tongue.
Python meat is a delicacy that can sell to connoisseurs for up to $50 a pound. And it turns out our homegrown snakes are anything but edible. The St. Pete Times reports today that tissue samples from two dozen Burmese pythons taken from the Everglades are showing "extraordinarily high levels of mercury," according to National Parks Service officials. The pythons have three times more mercury than native alligators. And unfortunately, the high mercury levels aren't putting a damper on their reproduction.
And in other news:
Juice staffers found a bright-green baby iguana, cute as a little long-tailed buttton, on one of our lemon trees this weekend, But the sight wasn't exactly cause for celebration. It meant that the adult iguana that appeared in our toilet bowl a couple of years ago and that we idiotically pulled out and set free in a nearby alley is not only living in our yard now but has found a mate. Knowing that a single iguana can lay waste to an entire garden before you can say, "but that was my favorite rare orchid!", the Juice spent several fruitless hours on the internets yesterday searching for advice about how to kill iguanas humanely, and this is what we learned:
Do not bludgeon them.
Do not freeze them.
Do not drown them.
Do not suffocate them.
Do not pour bleach upon them.
Do not decapitate them.
Do not call animal control -- they already have their hands full.
Do not catch them and keep them as pets.
Do not attempt to sell them.
Do not release them alive elsewhere.
Do not eat them; they have salmonella.
So our question to you, dear readers, is WTF do we do with these frigging iguanas? The only allowable form of murder appears to be via pellet or BB gun. But the Juice does not own a BB gun.
A baby iguana ended up in our freezer, wedged between the frozen blueberries and the Miller's gin bottle. If anybody sends us a better solution, we'll happily thaw her out and put her to death more humanely.
