Numlock Sunday: Rebecca Renner on the python that ate the Everglades

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Rebecca Renner who wrote “The Misunderstood Python Hunters Saving the Everglades” for Outside Online. Here's what I wrote about it:

Florida at this point technically belongs to Burmese pythons. It’s just theirs now, I’m sorry: since they were first spotted in 1979, the U.S. Geological Survey now estimates that in South Florida alone, there could be between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of Burmese pythons. They’ve decimated the ecosystem, eliminating biodiversity and adapting to the swamps of Florida incredibly successfully. They’ve dislodged the alligator as the apex predator of the Everglades — they totally eat gators. One study in 2015 monitored a population of marsh rabbits released into the Everglades and found within a year 77 per…