July 9, 2009, 4:09 pm
From Chinese mitten crabs in Chesapeake Bay to the Coqui tree frog in Hawaii, exotic creatures have overrun America from sea to shining sea.
But no state faces a bigger, scarier threat than Florida -- a point made abundantly clear during a Senate hearing Wednesday on the nation's losing battle to slow the spread of invasive species.
Florida Sen. Bill Nelson delivered a vivid show-and-tell to lawmakers, unrolling the skin of a Burmese python killed in Everglades National Park, all 17 feet of it. Then he explained in graphic detail how a pet python half that size strangled a toddler in her crib last week in a town northwest of Orlando.
''It's just a matter of time before one of these snakes gets to a visitor in the Florida Everglades,'' Nelson told a Senate panel examining an invasive surge that poses increasingly expensive threats to native wildlife, crops, livestock and people.
Gregory Ruiz, a senior scientist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, estimated that exotics already have cost the United States $100 billion a year. He called current efforts to control and eradicate exotic creatures ''a patchwork'' in need of a major overhaul. It was a view echoed repeatedly during the two-hour hearing in Washington, D.C.
