Battleground Everglades

()

NARRATOR

Florida's legendary Everglades are now crawling with unwanted, destructive invaders, threatening the very survival of native plants and animals. Join author Charles J. Kropke as he explores the war on invasive species on Battleground Everglades.

SPONSORSHIP NARRATOR

Major funding for this program is provided by Eleanor Goldstein. Interactive Learning & Technology, LLC. Additional funding provided by... ()

NARRATOR

They slither and devour natural wildlife, root up soil, spreading disease, overwhelm and destroy native habitats. Countless non-native plants, animals, reptiles, and insects are wreaking havoc on the rare landscapes of the Everglades, changing this precious resource forever. () The battle against invasive exotic plants and animals has gone on in the state of Florida for decades. This place, the Arthur R. Marshall, Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, may be ground zero. Despite spending millions of dollars each year, eradication of invasive exotics is a problem. And still, more come to our subtropical wilderness. Florida's welcoming climate has created the largest invasive species crisis in the continental United States. Once here, intruding species can thrive, unchallenged by the natural predators of their home environment. (Snorts) But the Sunshine State is fighting back, introducing

another kind of predator

human hunters. Look at you!

MAN 1

Woah! Ho-oh, my God. That's gotta be atleast... (Man laughing) I don't know, 17 feet?

NARRATOR

Actually, this snake was just under 15 feet; a Burmese python hiding deep in the Everglades. The capture was part of Florida's stepped-up efforts to aggressively reduce the snake population Florida's python hunter program has authorized a total of 25 seasoned hunters to capture and kill the pythons forever removing them from the ecosystem. The Sunshine State has more non-native reptile and amphibian species than anywhere else in the world. More than 80% arrived here as part of the pet industry. But the deadliest invader has been the Burmese python. First seen in the Everglades in 1980s, the population has exploded, decimating native mammals. One study reported that roadside sightings of raccoons, rabbits, foxes, and other local wildlife have dropped by more than 90% in the last few decades.

MAN 1

Wow! (Laughing)

NARRATOR

Wildlife experts blame the huge pythons for destroying populations of small animals and wading birds who for centuries have called the Everglades home. The snakes are not venomous, but they do bite. They kill their prey by constriction. Wrapping their bodies around their victims and squeezing the life out of them. The state's lieutenant governor assisted with this capture. Snakes have a very unique pattern... But he couldn't have done it without Tom Rahill and his group of military vets and first responders called the Swamp Apes.

TOM

I started the Swamp Apes Organization to help veterans deal with various challenges they may have returning from their service to the country. We welcome all veterans. And many of our veterans had joined us or are just here strictly for the adventure. But the common bond with the veterans is that they wanna help the wilderness.

NARRATOR

On this buggy south Florida summer evening Tom and his team are on the hunt for pythons, searching burrows and armadillo nests, looking for any evidence of the big snakes. He's joined by Rams, a combat vet who served two tours of duty in Iraq. Rams' largest catch to date was a feisty 7-footer. He says his time with the Swamp Apes has helped him cope better with the emotional wounds of war.

RAMS

When you first get out of the military, it's a little hard to communicate as you did before you went in. So when Tom and the others take us out there and kinda give you an extra push to communicate with people um, as you used to before, it helps a lot. So knowing what you do, would you encourage other veterans to join the Swamp Apes? Absolutely. I have brought out numerous other veterans before. For the most part, a lot of them do enjoy being out here helping out. You have to be part of a team to come out here and hunt pythons. 'Cause we're looking after each other. We're looking after everybody's back when you're out here. And it gives you a sense of purpose, 'cause of what we're doing as well.

MAN 2

Okay, what have we got here, Tom?

TOM

Hey, man, I think we got a-- a potential python nest.

NARRATOR

Tom and Rams are joined by Omar Gomez. Omar, a former paramedic diagnosed with PTSD, says he's found focus and meaning here in the Everglades. And the program helped me a lot, you know to kinda get back into it, and function back out in society, and at home, and everywhere else. And I just thump it. And I can hear the hollowness and I can follow-- Omar's biggest catch was a pregnant 13 footer carrying 67 eggs inside her.

OMAR

That's one snake with minus, you know 67 possible other snakes. I mean that's just-- you get up, you think to yourself, "I'm gonna change the Everglades today, by removing one python." And you can literally say that, with that big 13-footer you know pulled out you know, that's a big change. Right here, you know.

NARRATOR

Omar's passion for the Everglades elicits different reactions from family and friends. Some think you're crazy, some think it's the best thing that has ever been-- you know, put out there for me. Uh, I can say as far as my wife is concerned, she's a big supporter of this. She's seen all the changes in me. Uh, same thing as my folks you know, back in home. You know, they have seen a lot of changes, positive changes. And if anything is good for someone, I think you can to say to yourself, "This is probably something that's gonna be affective." This is something that maybe someone else can be using in their family to help them out, you know, through some hard times. The hunters get paid for the snakes, $8 dollars and 10 cents an hour, plus $50 dollars for the first 4 feet and $25 per foot after that. That can add up, but Tom says the Swamp Apes don't do it for the money.

TOM

They have this sense of duty to country. They have this altruistic philanthropic attitude. They're giving up their lives. They did that in the military service and now they have a chance again to do that and to be celebrated for giving. And in this case, they're helping the environment.

RAMS

Yeah. Yeah, I don't see anything.

NARRATOR

The python nest turned out to be an empty hole. So the Swamp Apes gather their gear and prepare to hit the road.

TOM

Where this road T-bones, we're gonna be on a long

north-south running Levy-- CHARLES

Okay, yeah. About 23 miles from the Everglades Holiday Park all the way down to where the Valujet Memorial is.

CHARLES

I see.

NARRATOR

Daylight has now turned into night and they journey deep into the Everglades. Since it's summertime, late night is usually the best time to find the pythons, because of the somewhat cooler temperatures. Tom and his team know what they're looking for. Already the Swamp Apes have removed hundreds of pythons from the Everglades. But that's not nearly enough. Estimates put the number of snake invaders somewhere between tens of thousands to nearly a quarter million.

CHARLES

So Tom, you've been doing this for several years now. What have you seen from the veterans here in the field and you know, what do you hear from them after the experience?

TOM

Some of the difficulties that they've had from their return to civilian life are minimized after coming out and participating in our program for a long time. Nightmares in particular, they no longer have nightmares of their war service and their trauma. They have dreams of pythons.

NARRATOR

They didn't find one on this night. But the Swamp Apes don't give up.

RAMS

Alright, everybody ready?

The stakes are too high. RAMS

Yeah.

NARRATOR

The invaders too lethal to the native wildlife.

RAMS

Easy, easy, easy, easy. Here we go, it's right underneath me.

TOM

Got him?

RAMS

Yeah.

TOM

Alright, good job.

RAMS

Oh God almighty, come here, baby. (Grunting) (Indiscernible speech) What?

TOM

You wanna take this?

I got this. TOM

Slide it back, okay?

RAMS

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just stretch him out.

NARRATOR

This snake was a pregnant 15-footer carrying 61 eggs. With each capture, the Swamp Apes fulfill their mission of helping preserve the delicate balance of the ecosystem and heal the trauma that haunts some us military veterans. While south Florida's invasive pythons have captured national media attention, a far more common sight is this, feral hogs. The feral hog population in Florida is currently estimated at more than 500,000. Only Texas has more of these dangerous and disruptive animals. We only have 24 square miles left. Sam Dorfman is with the Grassy Waters Preserve in West Palm Beach, Florida and he knows full well the destruction feral hogs can cause in their search for food. They come through. And as they're rooting around, they disturb the soil. And when they do that, they take that very fragile few inches of soil they turn it over. When that sun hits it, dries it up. The wind, causes erosion also creates an opportunity

for invasive plants to get in there. CHARLES

Yeah.

NARRATOR

They also expose the roots of native trees which makes the trees extremely vulnerable in the next big storm. Feral hogs date back to 1539 when Hernando de Soto landed on the west coast of Florida with 13 sow hogs from Cuba. Within one year, they had reportedly increased to 300. You've made your trap and you put corn in it, right? Yes, sir. Certified wildlife biologist Brian Shoch tracks and captures feral hogs for many government agencies..in areas where the hogs are creating problems. He says the feral hogs can cause up to $800-million in damage every year. And they have the potential to severely affect agriculture throughout the United States.

BRIAN

They actually, in the state of Florida are known to harbor at least 46 different parasitic and infectious diseases. Not to mention they are a vector for numerous foreign animal diseases that could be devastating to the agricultural community. It could not only devastate Florida's agricultural economy but have a tremendous impact on our national agricultural economy as well.

NARRATOR

Feral hogs reproduce at a remarkable rate, anywhere from 18 to 22 offspring a season. They are big and aggressive enough to forage through a particular food source, leaving little leftover for native wildlife. The saw palmetto berries are a good example. So they'll come in here and all these different plants, they will route through this area and kind of chew these up. And again this is you know, the saw palmetto are utilized heavily by native wildlife, by white-tailed deer, by turkeys, by black bears, by raccoons, and well, possums. So again, when you have a very prolific large mammalian species that is focused on resource, it can outcompete our native wild life. Tracking and capturing the hogs can help to remove them from the wild, but that won't help in places like the Grassy Waters Preserve. Sam Dorfman estimates there are several hundred hogs present here at any one time. Government and sport hunters will target them in the wild, but hunters are not allowed to track prey in the preserve. Native alligators however have no such restrictions. So we hope during the wet season that these populations of hogs are more isolated. They can't do vast amounts of damage. And that the alligators are gonna do their job, as an apex predator. Florida is also the entry point for nearly three-fourths of all plants imported in the US and many are taking over intricately-balanced ecosystems developed over thousands of years. () Stretching over 147,000 acres, the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge protects the northernmost remnant of the historic Everglades ecosystem. It's a haven for rare and endangered native species, as well as flocks of migrating birds. But the refuge is battling an overwhelming threat from invasive plants, including one which could destroy critical parts of this habitat. Rebekah, the average person probably can't recognize that there is an invasive exotic that's pretty bad on the list that's right here behind us. Can you tell us what it is? Behind us you can see the lime green vine that tends to stand out. It's a slightly different color from the rest of the vegetation, is a plant called lygodium, or old world climbing fern. And it's really causing a lot of ecological damage here in the refuge. How did old world climbing ferns get here in south Florida in the first place? Lygodium arrived in south Florida through the nursery industry. And it was sold for landscaping purposes to homeowners who really liked it, because it was fast-growing, it was very hardy, difficult to kill and it looks very beautiful trellising up in your yard, on your house. This fern is very good at surviving and spreading itself around. It's spread by spores. And they can get into the wind currents and spread up to 40 miles, even more during a big storm, like a hurricane. How pervasive is the old world climbing fern in the refuge? Unfortunately, we have nearly 102,000 acres of, almost 142,000 acres that are impacted by lygodium. We actually have to canvass the entire refuge, looking for the fern to kill it before it takes over.

CHARLES

So how do you get rid of this? What do you do to eradicate this vine? It's very difficult to fight. We still haven't found a chemical that will actually kill it. We can knock it back by manually cutting and spraying with herbicides. The problem is that it just knocks it back. It doesn't kill the rhizomes. So we have to be back out in six months or a year retreating the regrowth or otherwise we'll be in the exact same position we were before we treated it. Why don't we go out and check out some of this lygodium? () So, this stuff kind of stinks. Yeah, there's-- It definitely has its own unique smell. And there's so much of it, it can be overwhelming. But you can see that this plant can grow both down on the ground, and then, all the way up into the canopy of the trees. And that is really one of the reasons that it's so damaging. Because you can see how densely it grows here-- Wow.

REBEKAH

Preventing access to the tree island from any wildlife. Eventually, it can cover all the native vegetation. You can see it's trying to start out, crowd out some of the native ferns here. Ultimately, all of the native vegetation would die. And you would just be left with thick mats of lygodium. Here in this tree behind us, you can see both live and dead, the brown lygodium. Basically creating a ladder into the top of that tree. So naturally the fire would not get into the tops of the trees. But the lygodium has now provided fuel all the way to the crown of the trees, which can actually kill the trees during a natural fire. So once the lygodium kills a tree island, what does that mean for the refuge? Well, in Loxahatchee, it means a lot. There's a lot of ecological implications. One thing is that the habitat here in Lox, we have the highest density of tree islands throughout the entire Everglades. So losing our tree islands changes the fundamental structure of this refuge. And then, from a wildlife perspective, the wildlife in the Everglades depend really heavily on the tree islands, because it is the only upland area in,

you know-- CHARLES

That they can forage--

REBEKAH

...vast acres of water. And so the deer are dependent upon them. Alligators nest on them. You know, wading birds roost and nest on them as well. So without the tree islands, we would see a collapse in our wildlife population, because they depend so heavily upon these islands. The lygodium renders them basically useless for our wildlife. Yeah.

NARRATOR

A short airboat ride soon reveals other invasive plants wreaking environmental havoc. Fighting this battle requires an army of government and non-profit agencies working together. Biologist Kristina Serbesoff-King of The Nature Conservancy specializes in invasive species, including the melaleuca tree, an import from Australia. The seed capsules look nothing like that. They're so like maybe fewer of them. Right. Originally imported as a decorative tree, it's enormous capacity for absorbing water was once considered a way to dry out the Everglades. The one gentleman got a lot of seeds. It was a nursery here in Davie, Florida, and actually went up in the 1930s, flew over the Everglades, and sprinkled seeds out of his plane. So that's one of the biggest introductions, which is probably what caused you know, a larger number of seeds to be out close to each, and allowed these plants to really wildly reproduce. Today, melaleuca has spread all the way north to Orlando. Dense stands of trees have choked wide open marshes, making it harder for birds to find food. Scientists are harnessing many tools to fight back.

KRISTINA

A lot of what we do, in invasive plant control or weed control across the world, is called "Integrated Pest Management". So we're trying to find a whole bunch of different ways. So we'll cut 'em, we treat em' with herbicides, we try to find natural predators like the insects, biological controls that we can release on 'em. Thinking that all of those pressures together can help us reduce the population. So Kris, I have a personal experience with the melaleuca. Back in my twenties, I was a member of the Everglades Restoration Movement. And we were just tired of the talk, and talk, and talk about the restoring the Everglades. And we decided that all we wanted was action. We weren't going to lobby, we weren't going to raise funds. On the weekends, because we were you know, weekend warriors. We were cutting tens of thousands melaleuca from plucking them out of the you know, the ground the little-- to cutting trees that were this big around, you know. After 10 years, we saw some very dramatic things. We saw, the sponge-like affect. We saw waters actually returning as the trees dropped, water tables rose and the glades took on its normal look.

NARRATOR

Wetlands aren't the only places reshaped by invasive plants. Drier landscapes can be infested by Brazilian pepper. Imported for its bright red berries, these fast-spreading, dense trees crowd out native species. It creates a dense monoculture, which means when it grows, it grows so tightly that the only plant found in the entire area is Brazilian pepper. So there's no diversity, there's no other plants that are growing underneath it or amongst it and so-- you know, that creates a lot of different things, it shades out our native plants but also our wildlife, you know aren't quite-- It's not the food they necessarily need or want. And so we've really changed that whole system to something that's not as desirable. Once considered a way to beautify Florida, invasive plants now pose a never-ending threat. Only constant vigilance and on-going funding will keep them under control. Old world climbing ferns, melaleuca, quin-- quinaria, you know, Brazilian pepper these problems are gonna be with us for a long time aren't they? Yes. You know, it's not all dismal though, we've got a quite a great group of people out here working on it. We have tools that we can employ, there's additional science and research going on. But they will be with us for a long time. I mean, they're gonna be with us forever. And we have to think of them that way, that even when we get 'em to low levels, we need continued funding and we're gonna have to be out here, you know, keeping that maintenance, keeping 'em at a low level, so that the wildlife can thrive. So which one do you fear the most? Right, good question. So of those three? None of 'em, it's the next one. Every one of those came in for some purposeful introduction which kinda gives an insight if we could really look at the next one to prevent and there's good science or predictive science on how a plant becomes invasive, what characteristics make it invasive. We could predict the next one and keep it from having to battle that one the next time. I guess our fight continues. Yeah. () Florida's tropical waters have also become home to invasive fish species, now threatening delicate marine environments. The lionfish, native to South Pacific and Indian oceans, is a vicious predator of native reef fish. These invaders target local fish species which graze on algae. Losing these important grazers may cause algae to overgrow coral reefs and reduce habitat for corals and sponges. So far, only a few lionfish have appeared in the protected waters of Florida Bay. Scientists are carefully monitoring and removing lionfish from the park waters. Snorkel and diving enthusiasts have also been encouraged to hunt lionfish by netting or spearing. () The Everglade's intricate web of unique ecosystems has given rise to an irreplaceable diversity of plants and animals. Now, it's increasingly under pressure by invasive intruders. But what can be done? While dozens of government and non-profit agencies are battling invasives,

environmental experts recommend these helpful steps

Don't release unwanted exotic pets into the wild, turn them in to agencies like the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Check boat trailer, hulls, and propellers, or hiking boots for invasive intruders. Replace invasive yard plants with native species. And report invasive plants and animals at ivegot1.org. There's even a free app for smartphones.

CHARLES

Original Florida, native Florida was blessed with incredible biodiversity and breathtaking beauty. But invasive exotic plants and animals have started to cost us that heritage. We need to act quickly and need to act aggressively. If not, we stand to lose all of this. () () ()