When will they be sustainable? What’s their main food source? How is that food source more efficient than grain/grass?
Don’t get me wrong, current factory farming is a broken exploitive system. But I don’t think Pythons or any predator are going to be more efficient and thus sustainable.
Edit: after reading more on this, pythons are often raised in addition to other farm animals. So this wouldn’t replace current animals, would increase the risk of more feral snakes, and have a neutral impact on meat yeilds as a whole. We’re already using waste animals (terrible fucking concept) like male chicks and failed births as protein for dog and cat foods. This reads like a professor or department looking for easy publication to justify funding their department.
After studying more than 4,600 Burmese and reticulated pythons on commercial farms in Vietnam and Thailand, they found the snakes had a more efficient food conversion ratio than salmon, pigs, cows, chicken and crickets. The snakes went long periods without eating but did not lose much of their body mass as a result; they also required very little water. On top of all that, they ate food that would not have been used otherwise, known as waste meat, such as wild-caught rodents and stillborn pigs.
says more in article like that. and yet:
Scientists also say more research needs to be conducted on the nutritional content of snake meat, as well as the broader environmental implications—and potential ripple effects—of commercial python farms.
Pythons are a problem in Florida, I’m not arguing against that. Building a profit motive around them is counter productive to lessening their ecological impact.
At this point they are a widely spread invasive species in the southern US. There are an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 pythons in the Everglades alone. They commonly eat raccoon, opossum, rabbit, fox, bobcat, and other mid-size mammalian species. I think the idea is less to farm them and more to cull them from the wild where they grow unchecked and damage the native ecosystem.
Tuna and tons of other fish are food sources and we don’t breed them. They just grow natively in sufficient numbers. Often invasive species don’t have a natural predator in the new ecosystem, so their population grows unchecked.
Why use CRISPR, birth control, nest culling or other methods which cost resources instead of eating them which is a net gain in resources?
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When will they be sustainable? What’s their main food source? How is that food source more efficient than grain/grass?
Don’t get me wrong, current factory farming is a broken exploitive system. But I don’t think Pythons or any predator are going to be more efficient and thus sustainable.
Edit: after reading more on this, pythons are often raised in addition to other farm animals. So this wouldn’t replace current animals, would increase the risk of more feral snakes, and have a neutral impact on meat yeilds as a whole. We’re already using waste animals (terrible fucking concept) like male chicks and failed births as protein for dog and cat foods. This reads like a professor or department looking for easy publication to justify funding their department.
article:
says more in article like that. and yet:
is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Pythons are a problem in Florida, I’m not arguing against that. Building a profit motive around them is counter productive to lessening their ecological impact.
At this point they are a widely spread invasive species in the southern US. There are an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 pythons in the Everglades alone. They commonly eat raccoon, opossum, rabbit, fox, bobcat, and other mid-size mammalian species. I think the idea is less to farm them and more to cull them from the wild where they grow unchecked and damage the native ecosystem.
That doesn’t make them a food source. Also making them a food source would incentivize some one to breed or increase the extent population.
If we want to control the Python population we need to do so with CRISPR, or birth control, or nest culling.
Injecting a profit motive into controlling invasive species often does not work out. Look to wild boars, pigeons or lampreys for proof.
Tuna and tons of other fish are food sources and we don’t breed them. They just grow natively in sufficient numbers. Often invasive species don’t have a natural predator in the new ecosystem, so their population grows unchecked.
Why use CRISPR, birth control, nest culling or other methods which cost resources instead of eating them which is a net gain in resources?
Commerical fishing at the current scale is not sustainable
All the more reason to pursue food sources from existing invasive species like pythons.