In Florida, the key to taming one invasive species could lie in robotic rabbits.
The Sunshine State has long grappled with the growing population of invasive Burmese pythons, prompting state and local officials to launch efforts to detect and remove the snakes, ranging from hiring bounty hunters to hosting contests that encourage community members to catch the reptiles.
Burmese pythons are not native to Florida, said Mike Kirkland, lead invasive animal biologist at the South Florida Water Management District. They’ve been brought to the state through the exotic pet trade and have escaped their enclosures or been released by their owners mostly in the Everglades region of South Florida.
The exact number of Burmese pythons in Florida is unknown, as the snakes are well-camouflaged and hard to find among the dense vegetation and watery undergrowth of the wetland environment of the Everglades, Kirkland explained. Conservative estimates pinpoint the number in the tens of thousands, according to the National Wildlife Federation.
This summer, the South Florida Water Management District has added robot bunnies to the state’s toolbox for managing the invasive snakes. The mechanical rabbits were developed by researchers at the University of Florida and were designed to mimic live animals to draw pythons out from their hiding spots, Kirkland said.
Researchers retrofitted 40 toy rabbits that are already programmed to move with heat packs to lure pythons out to more accessible areas where people can capture and humanely euthanize them.
The solar-powered and waterproof rabbits were deployed across the Everglades area in July in a test phase of the project, Kirkland said. Officials hope to have preliminary results by next summer.
The next step is to fix the devices with diffusers that emit the smell of rabbits to entice more live rabbits, and, ultimately, more pythons to the sites, Kirkland said. Cameras around the fake rabbits’ enclosures will leverage artificial intelligence to detect an approaching python.
The AI is still being trained to recognize the difference between a Burmese python and, for instance, a native snake species, he said. Once the AI is ready and able to identify pythons, the system will send an alert via text or phone call to authorities like Kirkland.
“Then I’ll get a hold of one of our contractors, and we should have that Python removed within probably an hour of detection,” he said. Previous efforts involved the use of live rabbits in enclosures, which, while effective, demanded considerable staff, time and resource capacity.
Plus, it could take up to 10 hours to find one python for removal previously, Kirkland said. In 2023, the contractors removed more than 11,000 pythons, equating to hundreds of thousands of survey hours.
The pythons have wrecked havoc on the Everglades ecosystem for decades, reducing the population of fur-bearing animals by up to 95% and displacing native wildlife, he explained. The robot rabbits could help state officials address the threat of pythons more efficiently, and, more broadly, prioritize the maintenance and conservation of local environments.
For agencies that are responsible for environmental restoration efforts like the South Florida Water Management District, the pythons’ impact on the local wildlife and ecology pose a threat to that progress, Kirkland said.
The SFWMD partners with other state and federal agencies, like the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service “to restore habitat and hydrology back to the natural state as close as possible,” he said.
“All that taxpayer investment is going to be wasted,” Kirkland said, “if we allow an invasive species like a Burmese python to just move in unchecked.”