Sun, 29 Feb 2004

Forget the Gators: Exotic Pets Run Wild in Florida

It amazes me that we still let these things in ... I would've thought we'd have learned our lesson long ago.

I made my first trip to Florida in 1976. I'd been to jungle areas before, and deserts, and mountains, and I grew up on the Great Plains, but, well, Florida was (and is) decidedly different from any of the other places I've been.

We stopped at the first rest area across the state line for a bathroom break - it was about 9 pm, and dusk. As I was walking across from the car to the building, a cockroach the side of a baseball landed on my chest. I completely freaked out - I later become all too familiar with these "palmetto bugs". Native to the southeast, they'd probably been living in Florida since the Coal Age.

My alien encounter came later that evening, as we approached my brother-in-laws house in Vero Beach. I heard something very odd. It sounded like we were driving through puddles. It wasn't raining, but the road did look, well, almost "slimy" in places. I finally stopped to investigate, and was confronted with thousands of tadpole size creatures, very fish like, pulling themselves across the road on their front fins. It was about the oddest, and creepiest thing I'd ever seen. Why did the fish cross the road?

I later learned that these were Thai walking catfish hatchlings. They'd been released by their former owners into the wild, and were doing quite well.

That was almost 30 years ago, and we're still loosing our unwanted pets into the ecosystem. I don't think we ever learn anything.

The southern end of Florida, the most tropical state outside Hawaii, is teeming with exotic beasts.

(link) [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

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