In recent months we’ve been hearing a lot about snakes here in Florida, specifically the Burmese python population that’s threatening to burst out of the Everglades and consume all small children south of Gainesville. I’ve written about it a couple times, if indirectly.

At the beginning of February the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conversation Commission called for a special six week hunt for the pythons supposed to be infesting the Everglades. So how many pythons did the hunters find?

Zero.

I don’t want to minimize the environmental danger of invasive species like Burmese pythons, they certainly can be a problem. But so much of what we’ve been hearing about these pythons in the local media, and even on national shows like MonsterQuest, has been irrational and not really based on the facts. There’s really no reasonable scenario where these snakes become dangerous to humans.

It reminds me of when I was a kid, I was so worried about killer bees. I saw shows and read in magazines that killer bees were coming, that they were going to be everywhere in the U.S. by 1990, that they’d be killing hundreds of people a year. It never happened. The threat of killer bees loomed large in my psyche for a long time, until I finally read something that explained why africanized honey bees aren’t that much of a problem, and that’s where we are today.